Water on Tap: Rights and Regulation in the Transnational Governance of Urban Water Services

by Bronwen Morgan

Overview

In the 1990s and mid-2000s, turbulent political and social protests surrounded the issue of private sector involvement in providing urban water services in both the developed and developing world. Water on Tap explores examples of such conflicts in six national settings (France, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, South Africa and New Zealand), focusing on a central question: how were rights and regulation mobilized to address the demands of redistribution and recognition? Two modes of governance emerged: managed liberalization and participatory democracy, often in hybrid forms that complicated simple oppositions between public and private, commodity and human right. The case studies examine the effects of transnational and domestic regulatory frameworks shaping the provision of urban water services, bilateral investment treaties and the contributions of non-state actors such as transnational corporations, civil society organisations and social movement activists. The conceptual framework developed can be applied to a wide range of transnational governance contexts.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781139064149
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	04/21/2011
Series:	Cambridge Studies in Law and Society
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	901 KB

About the Author

Bronwen Morgan is Professor of Socio-Legal Studies in the School of Law at the Faculty of Social Sciences and Law, University of Bristol, and an Associate Research Fellow of the Centre for Socio-legal Studies, University of Oxford. Her research focuses on the political economy of regulatory reform, the intersection between regulation and social and economic human rights, and global governance.

Table of Contents

Introduction: the field of global water policy: struggles over redistribution and recognition; 1. Rights, regulation and disputing: a conflict-centred approach to transnational governance; 2. Managed liberalisation and the dual faces of French water services provision; 3. 'Another world is possible': Bolivia and the emergence of a participatory public provision model for access to urban water services; 4. Regulatory arbitrage and popcorn politics: contrasting disputing pathways in Argentina and Chile; 5. Moonlight plumbers in comparative perspective: electoral vs constitutional politics of access to water in South Africa and New Zealand; 6. Law's work: legality and identity in transnational spaces; Epilogue: closing words.