The Power in the Partnership - Investigating the Trans-scalar Politics of Desalination

• In Event: 2251 - Section on Environmental Sociology Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 18. Political Economy of Environmental Regulation

Abstract

The twentieth century witnessed the proliferation of infrastructure and technology to manage water resources. By the 1980’s, the “big dam era” ended, yet scholars are now observing a “return to infrastructure.” High volume ocean-water desalination has emerged as a surprising supply-side solution to water scarcity built on the back of a risk/power sharing Public Private Partnership (PPP) paradigm. Desalination plants are time consuming to build and criticized for negative environmental impacts. Using archival and ethnographic data, this paper addresses desalination by examining processes revolving around the completion of the Claude “Bud” Lewis desalination plant near San Diego, CA. The paper shows that the neoliberal U.S. context of water management (state devolution, financing issues, and public services privatization) gave rise to desalination as a viable solution through PPPs, whereby initial costs are shifted to private sector firms and the facility can be purchased decades later by the public agency. The transnational dimension of these projects is important because they are trans-scalar, crossing multiple levels of social and political action forming the foundation for the contestation of the infrastructure. The analysis adds a ripple to the notion of ecological modernization - that society would transition to a situation wherein nature’s position in capitalist society would be strengthened, although the economic order would remain largely intact. Desalination is not so much the next installment in a modernization project, but rather the U.S. context shows these PPPs are recuperative. It represents an effort to deal with the risks of problems that modernity has produced.

Author

• Brian Francis O'Neill, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign