Cambridge Studies in Law and Society: Water on Tap: Rights and Regulation in the Transnational Governance of Urban Water Services

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.

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.