Water Struggles and Substantive Democracy

This chapter focuses on global processes of social resistance against neoprivatist water politics and their potential role in contributing to the emergence, consolidation, and development of more humane, just, and substantially democratic social orders. It addresses the resistances experienced by water privatization in England and Wales, the birthplace of neoprivatist water politics since the late 1980s, and their significance. Then, it explores resistances triggered by the implementation of these politics worldwide, with emphasis on Latin America, which became the experimental field for testing and expanding the neoprivatist political project since the 1990s. It also examines the development of regional and transnational networks to resist these politics, looking at examples from the Americas, Europe, and other regions. The chapter discusses how these struggles and resistances are grounded on principles and practices that belong to the very long-term legacies of the human species that consider water to be the basis of life on the planet, a common natural element, whose access to survival and satisfying essential human needs must be universally guaranteed. Explicitly avoiding uncritically romanticizing social struggles, it argues that the worldwide resistances against the neoprivatist political project are inextricably interwoven with broader, global struggles for the defence of life on the planet and for the substantive democratization of human societies.