Water Services, Private Companies, and International Organizations: Constructing and Contesting Privatization as a Global Model

• In Event: 255 - Section on Economic Sociology Paper Session. Market Processes and Economic Lives in the Era of Neoliberalism

Abstract

By the late twentieth century, the World Bank actively promoted water privatization policies, with substantial consequences for privatization experiments worldwide, even though just decades earlier it wanted to have nothing to do with water utility projects. I examine how this shift took place, considering the Bank in the context of the broader field of international organizations involved in water and sanitation. I argue that the increasing attention paid to water as a global problem starting in the 1980s, especially by the development assistance and human rights communities, led the Bank to become more involved in the water and sanitation sector, providing an opening to shape the discussion about which policy paradigms were the most legitimate approaches to the sector—namely, reorganizing public sector provision and involving private multinational companies. The World Bank was not only the locus of “Washington consensus” policies, but also served as a conduit between parts of the international community: its connections to organizations like the WHO and the UNDP pushed the Bank to become involved in the water and sanitation sector, while its institutional goals and connections to organizations promoting international trade and market-oriented policies led it to develop an increasingly narrow commitment to privatization, which it then promoted until a series of implementation failures led to a reevaluation of privatization models and a discursive shift toward renewed emphasis on building state capacity, a more circumscribed role for private companies in the form of “public-private partnerships,” and a call for civil society and community involvement.

Author

• Maria M. Akchurin, Northwestern University