New Water Policy and Practice Volume 1, Number 1 - Fall 2014 | Page 7

New Water Policy and Practice

societal objectives are clear and some basic
political mechanisms are in place to consider and decide on appropriate collective
responses. While there is often argument
about the details, it is unusual to find much
dispute about the priority of providing basic water supplies for human consumption,
about allowing downstream countries a
reasonable proportion of a shared river’s
flow, or about the need to prevent pollution
that will impact on communities downstream; the practical achievement of the
goals is usually the larger challenge.

However, without sufficient consensus about approaches to resolve contentious
issues, or effective hegemonies through
which approaches can be imposed, there is
a risk of dysfunction. Since the timeframes
for experiencing, understanding, and intervening in response to the vagaries of water usually extend over many years, the disruption of the processes of innovation and
adaptation can impose serious constraints
on the functioning of a society. This is aggravated when those with the power to affect decisions have limited accountability
to those whose lives they impact upon, as
is often the case in what have been broadly characterized as “north-south relations”
(see, for instance Doty 1996.)

In this paper, I offer a few examples from areas in which skewed scholarship, mobilized in support of activist campaigns with apparently deliberate disregard
for available evidence, has demonstrably
harmed large communities. And I suggest
that this is becoming more rather than less
prevalent. The cases presented illustrate
how specific campaigns, driven by various
coalitions of actors with a range of related
interests, are supported by scholarship that
is not just polemic but often inaccurate. It
is entirely appropriate for policy and advocacy positions to be supported by research.
What the examples also show, however, is

that weak scholarship has also been associated with negative outcomes for the subject
communities.

Example 1: The Right To Water, Privatisation and Commoditisation

O

ne example is the presentation of
the privatization of water services
as part of what is described as the
commodification of water. The mere use of
the terms often identifies the perspectives of
the authors but that is not the issue at hand.
There is undoubtedly a need to consider the
nature of current economic and institutional systems for the provision of essential services and to seek more effective alternatives.
And an examination of water, as a renewable, often fugitive and unpredictable, natural resource with a wide range of often competing uses can provide interesting insights
into many broader issues relevant to other
public services and natural resources. The
limited question is whether and how such
analyses affect real people in the real world.
The debate in South Africa about what has
been characterized as the neoliberal commodification of domestic water supplies offers a useful cautionary tale.

The issue of commodification (see
Lohmann 2012 for a broader discussion
of the concept) of water arose when, after
much heat had been generated, it was pointed out that, contrary to the substantial literature on the subject, there was little privatization of municipal water supply and it
was not really a major policy issue in South
Africa (Muller 2007). Despite concerted efforts by French and British enterprises in the
mid-1990s, supply was privatized in only
parts of five of South Africa’s 280 municipalities (of which over 150 are authorized water
services authorities) and only one of those
(Nelspruit) was a town of any significance.
The failure of privatization to gain traction

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