Chapter 6 examines efforts to reclaim the commons of water, and how grassroots movements drive the struggle and demand the prioritization of democracy, transparency, and human rights over corporate profits in public policy. As feminist scholars have pointed out, the “standpoint” offered by marginalized actors offers important insights into the operation of systems of power and the strategies of resistance. Transnational social movement scholars have too often reinforced the idea that knowledge flows from the Global North to the Global South. This chapter builds on scholarship that has examined the importance of Global South to Global North social movement connections by bringing together all of the book’s empirical case studies. The book argues that these three cases actually reflect a single case of a translocal movement for the right to water, with the National Summit on the Human Right to Water, Nigeria’s Water Emergency: From Resistance to Real Solutions Against Corporate Control held in Abuja, Nigeria, in 2019 (referred to from here forward as the Summit), as one specific convergence space of translocal organizing for the human right to water. The fight against water grabbing in all its forms, and the struggle to build a new world, is connected to a larger counter-hegemonic movement, and is an ongoing and non-linear process.
This chapter provides background context for how water privatization fits into a broader economic project. Through examining water-based social movements, Global solidarities against water grabbing explores how individual movements are frequently a part of larger movement communities. Thus, they are examples of translocal movements, in which people (citizens, residents, activists, and movement actors) engage with each other, the state, and the market and fight for community-driven partnerships, communal ideas of property rights versus private property rights, and for participatory, democratic, and horizontal governance structures. Imagining a world structured differently than the one we have is challenging because hegemony works by controlling knowledge systems and socialization systems. This first chapter offers a dialogue between global environmental justice, resource conflicts, political economy, feminist and anti-colonial research methods, and social movement studies. The author connects on-the-ground organizing with broader theoretical debates and pulls areas of study, typically studied as discrete parts, together into a whole. This book makes three key assertions: 1) it shows how global communications and organizing are occurring around the public’s right to water; 2) it argues that movements in the Global North are engaging with and learning from the Global South with Global South movements playing a more prominent and innovative role than previous scholarship demonstrates; and 3) it shows how the struggle for water as a right, a public good, and a commons, rather than a commodity, is connected to a broader anti-systemic fight for livelihood that spans well beyond water.
Conflicts over water – and even its scarcity – are human-caused events that have socio-political and economic roots. The idea of water as a right, a public good, and a commons – versus a commodity, which is privately controlled and sold at high prices – is at the center of this debate. This book examines how movements are communicating and organizing around water and other fundamental rights. It also explores how movements engage with and learn from each other. The arguments in this book are built on three case studies, carried out between 2016 and 2022. The first one was conducted with the Our Water Campaign (OWC), a coalition based in Pittsburgh, PA, USA. The second is with Brazil’s Movimento dos Atingidos por Barragens (MAB), a national, autonomous popular social movement. Nigeria’s Our Water, Our Right (OWOR) is a third example that bridges the two primary cases. The book uses ethnographic, autoethnographic, comparative, and world-historical methods to show how global communications and organizing are occurring around water, and how Global North movements are engaging with and learning from the Global South and vice versa. Global solidarities against water grabbing explores how capitalist exploitation and appropriation are being contested, how movements are proposing alternatives beyond capitalism, and the multi-scalar (translocal) dimensions of social movements and campaigns fighting against water privatization as part of a larger project of contesting capitalism. This book contributes to ongoing methodological and theoretical discussions about knowledge production and anti-colonial research methodologies.
Chapter 3 examines the social movement struggle for the right to (safe and accessible) water in the United States focusing on this Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, based coalition: the Our Water Campaign (OWC). The case of the OWC illustrates how privatization posed real and direct threats to people's health and living costs. Organizing pressure prevented another public-private partnership, and resident/activist pressure shaped this process of public water governance. As such, the OWC serves as a counterexample to what previous research has found to be true in the United States context. The Pittsburgh case illustrates how privatization posed real and direct threats to people's health and living costs. The solution that emerged was to keep the water a public good managed by (local) government and to fight against corporate predation. This relates to how right to water movements are about more than water and are examples of challenging hegemonic thinking. Just as transnational corporations work globally, movements resisting privatization do the same: their struggles are locally focused, and organizing occurs at the local level, but these struggles are also linked to more extensive national and global processes. Translocal activism is about people engaging with the state and markets and fighting for participatory, democratic, and more horizontal governance structures, as well as the ideas of more communal notions of property rights, rights to livelihood, and social justice.
As much as it is about resistance to water grabbing, Global solidarities against water grabbing is about resistance to capitalism, imagining new social relations, understanding how power works and operates, and the role of education and organization in building counter-hegemonic movements. In this sense, this book also becomes a portal to understanding how all these struggles are interconnected. The conclusion further explores the fruitfulness of the concept of translocal activism and learning networks. It advances the idea that activists understand that corporations operate across (or without) state borders. In turn, this relates to how under the present form of capitalism (neoliberalism, speculative finance, and the financialization of water) geographic and state boundaries are in some cases dissolved. The author notes that while nation-states do still matter, corporate power transcends these borders. And so too does people power. What the term translocal captures is that people understand that their struggle might be local, with a local target like the mayor, while at the same time understanding that the pressure creating the need for the fight is coming from corporate power that is seeking exploit communities around the globe, albeit in varying forms. Translocal resistance thus allows for local autonomy and specificity while also creating learning networks that allow for movements to come together with others to build solidarity.
Chapter 4 examines how Brazil’s Movimento dos Atingidos por Barragens (MAB) offers crucial insights into the operations of systems of power and strategies of resistance. Purely technocratic approaches to solving water problems are destined to fail if they do not account for both the lived and theoretical knowledge produced and articulated by the people most impacted. Further, underlying systemic realities that cause struggles around water must be acknowledged by all – the problem is not solely one of scarcity versus abundance. MAB centers its struggle around the idea of water (and energy and education) as a commons, rather than a commodity. MAB’s counter-hegemonic work is also about knowledge and imagination – a different world from the one in which we currently live cannot be realized if we do not understand the processes that shape the current one, nor if we cannot even imagine a different one. This includes considering the role of class, race, gender, and sexuality in organizing anti-systemic struggles, and centering the voices of people historically excluded from leadership and decision-making processes. This is one of the ways in which, the author argues, knowledge flows from the South to the North. As MAB argues, solidarity between movements and across national borders is increasingly important. A critical component of this, the chapter contends, is to learn about, from, and with Global South-led movements, who are producing theory and living it out in praxis.
This chapter discusses the broader landscape of resistance to water grabbing, especially in the United States and Brazil. The hegemonic dominance of capitalism as “the” economic system is powerful in the United States, a nation-state built on the idea of the “free market.” Everything is or could be a commodity – including “resources” such as land, water, rivers, and oceans. Water, like air, is necessary for life. And in today’s capitalist, everything-is-a commodity world, the last “frontier” of sorts is water. Many scholars differentiate between capitalism before and after the 1990s, which saw a worldwide rise of a specific type of capitalism, neoliberalism, that further weakened the working class. Yet, from the analysis of the movements discussed in this book, the root of the problem is capitalism as a socio-political-economic system that is driving water privatization. Water grabbing – whether in the context of a hydro dam, drinking water, or the other various forms – and the resistance against it is a conflict between two logics: the logic that capitalists must be able to control and profit from resources versus the logic that resources must be in control of the people and used to support and sustain life for all. The book advances the idea that the fight against water grabbing is not relegated to the Global South or Europe, but is active and growing in the United States in response to the failures of decades of neoliberal reforms and private sector “solutions.”
The 1981 deputy leadership election is now recognised as the high water mark of Bennism but at the time it was viewed by many as another step to a more left-wing party. Few would have predicted that Benn would be out of parliament and thus unable to contest the leadership only two years later. Indeed, his nomination for the deputy leadership was viewed as the forerunner of a challenge for the leadership. The deputy leadership vote was the first use of the Electoral College, and it produced for Healey a victory which would have been denied him had the College been segmented into thirds. The 1981 contest was Benn's last chance of high office (he lost his Shadow Cabinet place in November) and led to the Tribune–Campaign Group split. For the traditional right, it demonstrated (and rewarded) their organisational effectiveness (which had been lacking in the late 1970s).
The first use of the Electoral College to choose the party leader – where the unions would cast 40 per cent of the votes – was triggered, within 48 hours of the 9 June 1983 general election, by the unions, which then effectively decided the outcome within weeks. Most notably, many of the St Ermins Group unions – which had worked closely with Roy Hattersley's Solidarity – delivered their votes for left-wing Neil Kinnock. This chapter looks at how they did this, and at their reasons for supporting him. It has been assumed that Kinnock's near absence from parliament in 1982, in favour of visiting constituencies and unions, was part of his build-up to a leadership bid. Outside of parliament, Roy Hattersley was not seen as fighting against the left and many on the right recalled that he had never joined Campaign for Labour Victory when the going was tough.
This chapter uses the specific case of Antarctica to think more broadly about how the treatment of animals can reveal colonial attitudes and logics, but also whether, in the absence of an Indigenous human population, animals have been (or can be) mobilised as subjects of human domination in a manner with parallels to colonialism. After a discussion of the relationships among imperialism, colonialism and capitalism, the chapter asks what wider structures facilitated the exploitation of animals by visitors to Antarctica, and contrasts the view of animals as objects for exploitation with the occasional invocation of penguins as Antarctic ‘citizens’. The chapter considers Greenpeace’s use of penguins in its 1980s campaigns for an Antarctic World Park as an example of how animals could be mobilised as representatives of the Antarctic environment, which proved an effective tactic even if it raised questions about who spoke for Antarctica and its animals. The chapter concludes that while it is problematic to cast Antarctic animals as colonial subjects, the underlying logics and attitudes of colonialism can be regarded as having potentially shaped actions in Antarctica towards animals.