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Taking its point of departure from the debate on 'water as commodity' versus 'water as commons', the article compares recent changes in the water governance of two rural communities in the Peruvian Andes. It draws on the anthropological tradition of controlled comparison to examine the different ways that the state and other external agents have accelerated the commodification of water in these communities and challenged their notions of water rights and water accountability. The article suggests that water is commodified through three kinds of transaction: as tribute-for-usage, which is used to manage water as a common good; as tax/tariff-for-right, which is used to manage water as a public good; and as ticket-for-product, which is used to manage water as a private good. It argues that Peru’s water users, rather than considering these three types of transactions to be conflicting forms of accountability, view them as complementary relations of exchange with the agents that control the water flow in their communities and regulate their water supply. It also proposes that, rather than being a one-way process that moves from communal control towards commercialisation and privatisation, the commodification of water is inherent in the water management of Peru’s highland communities. The article concludes that in a time of climate change and growing water scarcity the communities are keeping as many options open as possible. Managing water as at the same time a common, public and private good, and accounting for their water use to not one but several water providers, is therefore an important priority for these communities.

Thinking in terms of ethics and Human Rights raises issues of power and justice. It can be argued that there are indisputable human rights, e.g. when the construction of dams is considered, while 'commodification' of water and the 'market mentality' may suggest that everything can be traded.

Heavily featured over the last few years in global research and policy agreements, Nature-Based Solutions (NBS) remain however exposed to much debate over the ways their current design and ability to achieve both environmental goals and social needs. As they become mainstream climate mitigation and adaptation options, their capacity to deliver expected benefits, especially when contemplating equity and justice, is at least uncertain. Through a critical review of existing debates and perspectives on NBS, this paper questions their uptake and points at the frequent embeddedness of NBS in speculative and elite-based development paths in both urban and rural areas. We present an alternative, justice-oriented approach to NBS so that projects can avoid nature-enable dispossession and instead build nature-inspired justice that prioritizes the needs, identities, and livelihoods of the most ecologically and socially vulnerable residents.

Policy makers will increasingly have to turn to water demand management in the future to respond to greater water scarcity. Water markets have long been promoted as one of the most efficient ways to reallocate water by economists, but have also been subject to much criticism due to their possible social, economic and environmental impacts. We engage with common critical perceptions of water markets by presenting first-hand evidence of their effects in the Murray-Darling Basin (MDB), Australia. Water markets in the MDB, as developed within an appropriate institutional framework and coupled with comprehensive water planning, have: (1) helped deliver improved environmental outcomes; (2) assisted irrigators’ adaptation responses to climate risks, such as drought; (3) increased the gross valued added of farming; and (4) been regulated in ways to meet social goals. If water markets are embedded within fair and effective meta-governance and property right structures, the potential exists for marketisation to increase efficiency, promote fairness in terms of initial water allocations, and to improve environmental outcomes.

The development of markets in water quality, biodiversity and carbon sequestration signals a new intensification and financialisation in the encounter between nature and late capitalism. Following Neil Smith's observations on this transformation, I argue that the commodification of such 'ecosystem services' is not merely an expansion of capital toward the acquisition or industrialisation of new resources, but the making of a new social world comparable to the transformation by which individual human labours became social labour under capitalism. Technologies of measurement developed by ecosystem scientists describe nature as exchange values, as something always already encountered in the commodity form. Examining these developments through specific cases in US water policy, I propose that examining this transformation can provide political ecology and the study of 'neoliberal natures' with a thematic unity that has been absent. I understand capital's encounter with nature as a process of creating socially-necessary abstractions that are adequate to bear value in capitalist circulation. Such an argument supersedes the issue of nature's materiality and points toward a common language for the analysis of both humans and nature as two participants in the labour process. Political ecologists struggling with the commodification of nature have tended to overlook the social constitution of nature's value in favour of explicit or implicit physical theories of value, often as more-or-less latent realisms. I suggest that critical approaches to nature must retain and elaborate a critical value theory, to understand both the imperatives and the silences in the current campaign to define the world as an immense collection of service commodities.

To meet an increasing industrial and urban demand for water in a context of water scarcity in Peru, the state has invested heavily in hydraulic megaprojects to ensure water supply to citizens and corporations. The Majes Siguas Special Project (PEMS) in the Arequipa Region is an example of such a water infrastructure project. While the first stage of PEMS, built in the 1980s, was financed and run by the Peruvian government, the second stage that is currently underway is being co-financed and built by a private transnational consortium that will run the infrastructure for 20 years. This can be understood as a process of temporary commodification of the water infrastructure and places the hydraulic megaproject at the heart of tensions between seeing water infrastructure as public utility and seeing it as private provision. This article asks how this tension between public and private is played out in practice within the hydraulic bureaucracy and examines ethnographically how the Majes Siguas Special Project is made over time by way of the everyday practices of experts. The study finds that these experts anticipate the potential political effects of temporary commodification of water infrastructures to be both a risk and a distinct possibility. The article argues that building, maintaining and managing hydraulic megaprojects are far from straightforward processes, but should instead be understood as open-ended experimental reconfigurations that the hydrocracy deals with through contingent practices of knowledge.

The 1989 privatization of the water supply sector in England and Wales is a much-cited model of market environmentalism-the introduction of market institutions to natural resource management as a means of reconciling goals of efficiency and environmental conservation. Yet, more than a decade after privatization, the application of market mechanisms to water supply management is much more limited than had been expected. Drawing on recent geographical research on commodities, this article analyzes the reasons for this retrenchment of the market environmentalist project. I make three related claims: resource commodification is a contested, partial, and transient process; commodification is distinct from privatization; and fresh water is a particularly uncooperative commodity. To illustrate these claims, I explore how water's geography underpinned the failure of commodification initiatives in England and Wales. I focus specifically on contradictions faced by industry regulators, water companies, and the government when attempting to implement direct competition, universal metering, and full-cost pricing of water supply. The failure to resolve these contradictions was a critical driver in the reregulation of the water supply industry and in the overall trend toward improvement in environmental and drinking water quality, a finding that underpins my closing argument-that neoliberalization is implicated in processes of reregulation that rescript the entitlements of both humans and nonhumans, with outcomes that are not necessarily negative for what we conventionally delimit as the environment.

This article examines how the continuing drought and water crisis in Cape Town in 2017 and 2018 created the conditions for the increasing visibility and public awareness of water and its infrastructures. Following Susan Leigh Star's famous observation that infrastructure is typically invisible until it breaks down, this article shows how the threat of the total collapse of the water and sanitation system during the drought contributed to rendering water and its infrastructures politically legible. It also contributed to making infrastructural disparities more visible. For instance, while anti-privatisation activists established the Water Crisis Coalition (WCC) to challenge increased water tariffs and 'defend the commons' (that is, by calling for wider public access to the city's dozens of springs), many middle-class residents in the historically white suburbs sought to go 'off the grid' by purchasing water tanks, boreholes and using their swimming pools as water reservoirs. At the same time, new 'water facts' surfaced, revealing that while residents in impoverished informal settlements used only 4.7 per cent of the city's water, middle class Capetonians in the suburbs used over 70 per cent. Yet, as a result of increased tariffs and social and moral pressure, the latter drew on a variety of water conservation methods and technologies to reduce their consumption dramatically. This article examines these expressions of 'hydraulic citizenship', forms of civic activism that drew on the production and circulation of 'water facts' and moral and political claims to water, which were often contested by differentially situated citizens, activists, journalists, scientists and City of Cape Town officials. This contributed to a contentious politics of water and its infrastructures.

This essay explores the multiple ways in which the nexuses between water scarcity and climate change are socially and historically grounded in ordinary people’s lived experiences and are embedded in specific fields of power. Here we specifically delineate four critical dimensions in which the water crises confronting the African continent in an age of climate change are clearly expressed: the increasing scarcity, privatization, and commodification of water in urban centers; the impact of large dams on the countryside; the health consequences of water shortages and how they, in turn, affect other aspects of people’s experiences, sociopolitical dynamics, and well-being, broadly conceived; and water governance and the politics of water at the local, national, and transnational levels. These overarching themes form the collective basis for the host of essays in this volume that provide rich accounts of conflicts and struggles over water use and how these tensions have been mitigated.

In this article, I illustrate two ways in which Zionist settlers appropriated water in Mandate Palestine. The first way was through the imposition of a new kind of property regime, one that measured and defined water rights in terms of volume. This differed from customary Palestinian practice, which distributed water in time-based shares. I argue that volume-based measures made water more easily bought and sold and, by extension, more like a commodity. The second method of appropriation I detail is the granting of concessions to generate hydroelectricity to the Palestine Electric Corporation. These concessions gave the company control over three of Palestine’s major rivers, which it then turned into an object of investment for foreign shareholders. As a result, water use cannot be understood separately from electricity during the Mandate. While these two processes might appear unrelated, I argue that they were both legalized methods of exclusion that, when taken together, reveal a larger process of gradual, albeit incomplete, dispossession of water resources. While Zionist settler colonialism legitimated itself by claiming to efficiently use natural resources, such as water, in actuality, it sustained itself by imposing exclusive property rights.