Abstract
Few scholars are as well placed as Karen Bakker to be able to survey the evolution of water governance in the world’s urban centres. Bringing together a remarkable conceptual rigour with over a decade’s experience of researching water privatization and governance, Privatizing Water is a wonderful testament to the quality of – and interest within – Bakker’s work. In some respects the book builds on an earlier monograph (Bakker, 2004); but, whereas the latter focused largely on privatization in England and Wales, the most recent is far more global in focus. It is also more wide-ranging in its theoretical influences. Importantly, it is also more accessible: both in its style and tone but also, mercifully, in its cost and layout – it remains a huge frustration that two of the most important monographs on water by geographers in the last decade (Bakker, 2004; Swyngedouw, 2004) are priced so absurdly that they are still inaccessible for many.
Privatizing Water is divided into two parts. The first disrupts the neat categories through which the ‘public’ and ‘private’ have been falsely theorized in privatization debates. Here, characteristically, Bakker demolishes ‘imprecise definitions’, seeking both clarity and nuance. Through a variety of examples she shows how everyday practices of provisioning a household with water defy any simplistic separation: complex networks of overlapping suppliers blur such binaries. Our conceptual frameworks need to recognize this complexity. Nevertheless, Bakker charts a shift as the ‘municipal hydraulic paradigm’ is challenged by market environmentalism in the 1990s. This is superb, providing a detailed typology of governance systems and a sense of the historical and geographical variations within water provision. In seeking to explain the World Bank’s role in promoting market environmentalism in the 1990s, Bakker demonstrates how privatization might be seen as both a response to the Bank’s failures in the municipal hydraulic paradigm as well as shifting ideological concerns. She then substantiates the claims in the first part of the book with a detailed case study of Jakarta, written in collaboration with Michelle Kooy.
The second part elaborates on ‘alternatives’ to privatization. Here, Bakker provides a sensitive critique of struggles for the human right to water and community water-supply management, before calling for work that brings politics into ecological governance. This penultimate chapter feels more open than much of the book: because of this it provides numerous possibilities for further conceptual development. The book concludes with a call to move beyond privatization debates and to shift debates onto the terrain of ‘political society’, thereby building on the ecological questions posed in the previous chapter.
Privatizing Water is at once an exceptional compilation of Bakker’s work over the last decade (and, in this regard, several sections will feel familiar to readers who know her work well) and also an attempt to think through where this work takes us. A wonderful resource for students and academics, the book will be referenced and read even more widely than the mini-classic An Uncooperative Commodity. The typologies and periodizations brought to water governance arrangements provide a conceptual map that is unavailable elsewhere. If I find myself frustrated on occasions, it is, nevertheless, sometimes because of the structured approach within this conceptual mapping. Struggles over water are often far messier than the book allows for. But they can also be generative, and I worry that the constitutive role of struggle is given too little attention. This comes out in the discussion of the human right to water, which Bakker describes on several occasions as being more useful as a ‘tactic’ than a goal. But, within that tactic, poor communities have also been able to forge new identities and shifted power more radically in their favour. Individuals have transformed understandings of their relations with the world that go well beyond simply thinking about an alternative form of service delivery. I think this is related to a broader frustration that the book limits itself to a focus on service delivery. In this sense neither the call for the human right to water nor more radical forms of community management – such as the Cochabamba or Porto Alegre examples cited in the text – are strictly ‘alternatives’ to privatization. Rather they are attempts to forge quite different socio-ecologies (indeed quite different worlds), of which water provision is simply one aspect. Bakker recognizes this, and yet the book is often hamstrung by a narrow focus on service delivery and governance arrangements. In this regard, it is telling that, in spite of her brilliant disruption of ‘public’ and ‘private’, the state is left unquestioned throughout the text, frequently being reified as a (sometime) provider of services. Indeed, Bakker goes so far as to argue that ‘[r]ecourse to the state is necessary if we are to supply urban water on an equitable and universal basis to all’ (p. 188). Rather than a social relation or a condensation of social forces, the state becomes a fixed entity within the choreographies of service provision. Here, I think the number of theoretical sources touched upon (from Foucault to Marx and Chatterjee) does not help, nor does the speed through which they are covered. The same rigour given to mapping out governance arrangements is not always applied to developing a broader theoretical position.
Nit-picking such as this will always arise when confronted with a book so ambitious in its scope. And none of these points will diminish what is sure to become the key text on the privatization of water, one that provides genuine possibilities for moving beyond the disabling debates of the last two decades.