Nothing to Lose but Our Mains

Thames Water, the private utility providing water and sanitation services for a quarter of the UK’s population, is floundering. Nearly £23 billion in debt, with a pipe network leaking a concerning amount of sewage, outdated but lacking funds for modernization, the company, in the words of the Financial Times, is “the poster-child for the failures of England’s experiment with privatizing formerly public regional water companies.” To make up its shortfalls, the utility recently petitioned to increase water bills beyond the regulator Ofwat’s stipulations, further incensing customers, while hovering over the company is the continued threat of either insolvency or the emergency takeover of the utility by the state: the British government recently began planning for a special administrative regime to manage the company in the event that a last-ditch rescue plan by its creditors fails and the utility collapses; while an earlier £4 billion deal with private equity firm KKR which would have allowed it to escape insolvency has since fallen through.

Poster child though it may be, Thames Water is no only child. Like other utilities in England and Wales, its current form took shape during the sell-off of public water and wastewater services to the private sector in the late 1980s and early 1990s. This privatization was supposed to encourage water conservation through the greater use of price signals—in some cases, alongside markets for allocation of water to its highest-value uses—and to make operations more efficient through the streamlining of corporate management practices, thus expanding provision to hard-to-reach populations. Instead, water provision has plateaued.

The questions that this raises—about who has access to water and how, and about the nature of the water being accessed—have been made starker by the climate crisis. The large-scale threats the crisis poses—punishing floods brought on by supercharged storms; the prolonged droughts that threaten to to permanently change life in arid areas—come readily to mind. But the effects of climate change will be felt throughout the system of water provision, refracting through the institutions that manage and distribute water, and exacerbating the difficulties of water governance by changing both when and where water is available. Surface water shortages will lead to over-extraction from groundwater systems, racing toward their depletion; “flash droughts” will hit normally water-rich areas; water quality will suffer when algae blooms in warmer water. Woe to those charged with ensuring that these ruptured hydrological systems are smoothly abstracted and incorporated into the societies depending on them. As several groups of critical water researchers recently argued, in the Global North as well as Global South, climate change, decomposing infrastructure and institutional inertia mean we may have already passed “peak water security.” Paraphrasing Stuart Hall, for many, water will be the modality through which the climate crisis is lived.

What has gone wrong? The work of Karen Bakker, a Canadian geographer who died in 2023, offers a useful genealogy. Bakker arrived in the UK, moving to Oxford in the 1990s to pursue her doctorate, fresh on the heels of the UK’s privatization of its water utilities and in an ascendant moment for market environmentalism on the world stage, and her work would come to articulate a political ecology that combined attention to the non-human world with Marxian political economy. Her approach was marked by a laser-like empirical focus on institutions, sustained by her steely eye for the material: her critique of the “human right to water” as compatible with market-based provision has proven seminal in the field. Alongside this, she wrote widely on both neoliberal and post-neoliberal natures, Indigenous water governance, and—later on—digital technology’s effects on socio-environmental interactions, while, as Karen Le Billon, she penned two books on children’s eating, French Kids Eat Everything and Getting to YUM.

It is, however, Bakker’s work on water that stands as her most important contribution, and which offers something of a skeleton key for understanding the water conjuncture, both British and global. Her work offers a fine-toothed historical examination of institutional questions about ownership and provision of this most essential resource, with the insight—both illuminating and frustrating—that, amid the global neoliberal turn, public and private ownership are less binary than they seem at first blush.

From commercialization to privatization

As Bakker recalls in her 2004 book, An Uncooperative Commodity, the nationalized and publicly managed water regime that private utilities would replace in the UK emerged only recently. Before that, in the mid-nineteenth century, in-home piped water connections were the province of wealthy urbanites served by private companies. Fewer than one in ten households in England and Wales enjoyed such access, with other city dwellers depending on community standpipes or being forced to buy water from street vendors—even begging or stealing. What forced a change to this system was rapid urbanization amid industrialization, which provoked the development of new sanitation services in order to remove human waste from population centres, previously used as fertilizer, or “nightsoil” as it was often known. Greater density enabled new economies of scale, encouraging the corporate abstraction and distribution of water, a process initially undertaken primarily by private interests.

Control of water was in these years complex and contested, thanks both to the yoking of water rights to riverside land rights and to the importance of waterpower to industrial production.[1] When, in 1847, parliament passed the Waterworks Clauses Act, the first national legislation regarding water, it was in recognition of the shortcomings of the previous laissez-faire approach. The Act, including its amendments in 1852 and 1863, capped the charges and dividends of private water companies, and called for universal provision of “pure and wholesome water sufficient for the domestic use of all inhabitants,” so long as they could pay. In the latter half of the century, pressure from a motley assortment of political constituencies, including public health reformers and the “gas and water socialists” of the Fabian Society, helped to build support for new legislation that promoted the municipalization of water services. By 1914, more than 75 per cent of England and Wales had water supplied to their household, with two-thirds of that provided by municipal suppliers. Municipalities regarded water and sewerage services as their civic duty and began taking on debt to subsidize both.

The archipelago of water networks that resulted constituted a major expansion of piped water for domestic and commercial purposes, in urban and, later, rural areas across England and Wales. But the patchwork of water undertakings introduced administrative complexity, and even after the Second World War, 30 per cent of rural residents lacked piped water. Even as the war expanded public expectations of citizenship, lending further impetus to the quest for universal coverage, the moral exigency of providing water led to a cap on earnings for water purveyors, unique to the sector among England and Wales’s utilities at the time. Rates were often, Bakker writes, “insufficient to cover capital maintenance as well as operating costs” of either public or private utilities, such that “the resulting underinvestment had a significant, negative impact on river-water quality.”

 In the years after 1945, Parliament increasingly attempted to rationalize water utilities, and tightening control led to nationalization in 1974,[2] after which water and sewerage services were overseen by ten Regional Water Authorities, charged with incorporating both functions of supplying water and managing effluence. This rationalization and nationalization consolidated what Bakker terms the “state hydraulic” paradigm of water provision, aiming toward universal access via command-and-control say-so and an expansion of supply, understood to be necessary to economic growth. Access to a sufficient supply of water was treated in this era as a basic guarantee of citizenship and legitimation of the state.

This basic bargain began to change in the early 1980s. The stipulation that Regional Water Authorities recover their costs triggered cost-cutting under both Labour and Tory governments; while attempts to balance budgets meant an inability to complete needed infrastructural outlays. The chronic underinvestment that followed led to ongoing failures to address sewage, as well as a displacement of costs from the utilities into the waterways themselves. In the early 1980s, Britain dumped more untreated sludge into the ocean than any country on earth, earning the label of “dirty man of Europe”; the British government found itself subject to repeated prosecution by the European Court of Justice for failure to comply with agreed-upon water standards.

Nor could the cash-hungry and heavily indebted sector raise fees sufficiently to cover its expenses. With water quality declining, and the blooming Thatcherite political consensus imposing strict fiscal discipline, Parliament passed the Water Act of 1983, introducing cost-benefit analysis and new efficiency measures. Now, utilities would be encouraged to behave like businesses. This process Bakker calls “commercialization”, and it initiated many of the patterns often attributed to the later process of privatization. When privatization did come, in 1989, with the sale of the water infrastructure assets of England and Wales, along with the contracts to operate them, it merely consolidated a movement already well underway. Since the 1970s, Bakker wrote, the “business of domestic water supply, like other utilities, has been gradually evolving from the supply of a service to citizens at subsidized rates, towards the sale of a commodity to consumers on a full cost-recovery basis.”

Neither commercialization, nor privatization, were completely accomplished, however. Practical difficulties in coaxing water into obeisance to market principles abounded, such as the high cost of installing domestic meters to price water according to use rather than via taxable property values. There were also political difficulties: water bills increased above inflation throughout the 1990s, with the proportional spending of low-income families on water and sanitation rising more quickly than that of high-income families; two million households defaulted on accrued water debts in 1994 alone, and tens of thousands of households were disconnected from water supplies—all while newly private water utilities outperformed the stock market and enjoyed profits beyond expectations. During a drought in Yorkshire in 1995, and amid the threat of total failure of water provision for three million residents, the provider, Yorkshire Water Services, gained record profits and a plum share price.[3]

 The anger at utilities that these failures led to in the years after privatization were incorporated into Labour’s platform in 1997, and soon after they won that year’s general election, they held a water summit in which they announced a “Windfall Tax” to recoup what were widely understood to be ill-gotten gains. What emerged was a project of what Bakker calls “re-regulation,” which established new forms of state interaction with the private sector that would allow for both a sufficiently capitalized system of water administration and a politically palatable settlement for those who depended on it. These now privatized utilities had their prices capped in their core water businesses by the government’s water regulator, Ofwat, forcing them to work creatively to search for greater returns. They did this by merging with utilities in other sectors and spinning off subdivisions they could then sub-contract. They also increasingly turned their gaze across the seas: supported by the government’s Department of Trade and Industry and Department for International Development, in the early 2000s the private water utilities of England and Wales sought to increase their participation in water systems across the Global South and in contexts—like the US—where water was still largely publicly managed. 

The case of Thames Water is instructive. This utility, “with no debts, cash-rich, and with previous experience of overseas work,” Bakker wrote, was well placed to move into the international market. Despite faltering early attempts—its international ventures lost £33 million in 1994, and in the following two years it sold off holdings in Germany, the US, Egypt and Australia—by the end of the 1990s, the international arm was turning a profit. In turn, in 2000, Thames Water was bought out by German multinational RWE, which then formed the world’s third largest water utility.

The momentum toward private sector participation in water management was, at the time of Bakker’s writing, ascendant, though still no sure thing: “If you can privatise the water industry,” wrote the Economist, “you can privatise anything. The government reckons it can.”

Market Failures

In 2010’s Privatizing Water, Bakker would sharpen the point. Essential to life, imbued everywhere with cultural and spiritual import, water is, she writes, “a final frontier for capitalism.” That work built on her earlier examination of England and Wales by looking at privatization and its discontents in the Global South; at the time she was writing, close to a fifth of the world’s urban population had their water supplied by the private sector. Much of that growth had occurred in the two decades prior, as an evolving discourse of “state failure”—with the blame for lacking water services on sclerotic and laid on poorly funded bureaucracies—became embedded in global lending institutions like the World Bank. Thus did the earlier “state hydraulic” paradigm come to be eclipsed by “market environmentalism”, in which water is treated as an economic good and priced at levels that allow for full cost recovery. In turn, subsidies from higher-income to lower-income areas are eliminated, and commercialization and privatization are encouraged. The regime that Bakker traced the evolution of in her first book had matured.

Yet, as Bakker narrates, the resulting participation of private actors in water systems encountered its own suite of problems—what critics dubbed “market failure.” Nor were the shortcomings of this model always so distinct from those of the state-led paradigm, especially in unequal provision which excluded poorer, informal or peripheral urbanites and a failure to incorporate environmental externalities. Aiming to synthesize the critiques of both state and market provision—critiques she worried were often too baldly doctrinaire—Bakker proposed that urban water supply is beset by what she called “governance failure.” Governance, for Bakker, is the “process of decision making that is structured by institutions (laws, rules, norms and customs) and shaped by ideological preferences.” It fails, she wrote, “when there is a mismatch in decision making between citizenship and associated political rights, on the one hand, and institutional and cultural practices on the other.” Governance failure, then, bedevils state and private systems of water provision because peripheral urban populations are materially cut off and politically unable to make efficacious claims on formal provisioning systems. Typically, this produces a two-tiered regime of public, subsidized provision for wealthier formal urban residents, and smaller-scale, informal supply mechanisms for the poor. 

A case study of Jakarta’s water system, a chapter co-authored with Bakker’s former student Michelle Kooy, demonstrates the point. As elsewhere in the Global South, in Jakarta, “inequitable access is often literally hardwired into water supply networks,” with the city’s pipage built upon a colonial foundation that cleaved public, subsidized water provision for a small European elite from the vast zones of exclusion in which native Indonesians lived, bathed and drew water. Residents of these kampung areas relied instead on smaller-scale water service where they could get it: surface canals, wells and water vendors whose volumetric prices were far above those of the public supply network. The situation continued after Dutch departure, thanks to the physical durability of the colonial pipe network, the invisibility of gains in water access to a government interested in shinier public works, and the decision in the 1970s by the public water utility, PAM Jaya, to demand full recovery of costs from customers in the neighbourhoods to which it built.

By 1990, the water system delivered only 40 per cent of the city’s available treated water and extended to only one quarter of the city’s residents. With the Washington Consensus ascendant, the government reached an agreement with two of the largest private water-services companies in the world to manage and expand Jakarta’s provision—one of those being Thames Water. Yet that plan was overtaken by other events: after a steep devaluation of the Indonesian Rupiah in 1997-8, PAM Jaya’s dollar debts to the private operators ballooned. In an effort to pay off those debts, PAM Jaya focused on creating new hook-ups for more remunerative middle-class households, whose fees were set higher than those of poorer residents. The poorest in the city, lacking legal land-tenure, were by policy unable to receive water connections. Thames Water, facing increasingly strained relations with the city, sold its interest in 2006 to a local consortium.

And what of those informal provisioning systems that provide for the poor residents of Jakarta and so many other cities across the Global South? Neither public in the sense of state-provided nor private in the sense of corporate-controlled, these networks are grouped by Bakker under the category of “community” systems. In rural areas, such systems often take the form of commons, in which water users collectively share in the management and administration of their own water resources, if unevenly. Such systems have found a romantic current of support for their communitarian ethos and autonomist streak, and indeed their alterity.[4] But such forms can be difficult, Bakker cautions, to transpose into urban contexts marked by informality, exclusion and reliance on often polluted sources of water. The wells, vendors, distribution networks and sharing agreements by which marginal urbanites live are key for the survival of many millions, and ought to be understood as such. But Bakker argues that overly valorizing them risks institutionalizing the two-tiered provisioning systems that deliver water cheaply and cleanly to wealthy urban residents and leave the rest to sort themselves out.

 Paradigm Lost

If only it were as simple as de-privatization. States and corporate actors alike depend on a modernist, humanist conception of water, one which “defines water as a resource, to be put to instrumental use by humans, via centralized, standardized hydraulic technology,” which produces water as a commodity, and which maximizes either supply or profits. The twin facets of global water crisis—an inability to extend water systems to the world’s poor and a degradation of environmental water quality—emerge from this conception, Bakker argues. In contrast, he prescriptions depend on the foregrounding of social and ecological relationships in water governance: communities ought to “be viewed as the ultimate locus of legitimacy in decision making, giving them radically democratic, collective control over infrastructure networks and the ecosystems in which they are embedded.” Scarcity, in this conception, becomes not a biophysical fact but a “a symptom of imbalance between different socionatures.” Against that, nested, multi-scalar systems of communal governance would allow for movement beyond privatization and “enough water for everyone’s needs (but not everyone’s greed).” 

These prescriptions are hazier than are Bakker’s diagnoses. Then again, the riddles of water supply are structural. As Alyssa Battistoni has argued recently, capitalist society is unable to account for “free gifts” of nature upon which human society materially depends, as these are constitutively absent from the wage and exchange relations that govern social interchange. Nature, unwaged, is metabolized by human labour into the necessary materials for capitalist social relations, but itself does not participate in those relations, and is thus made subservient to human needs. This structural anthropocentrism of capitalist relations makes recent arguments for viewing waterways as themselves living things worthy of protection difficult to put into practice under current modes of organizing society, though attention to how such practices might be achieved is surely worthwhile. In the meantime, to address the world’s urban water crisis will almost certainly depend on large capital outlays. Private utilities will only make such investments with expectations of profit, and the neoliberal turn traced in Bakker’s work has created an understanding that even public utilities are to behave like commercial entities in their management goals and practices.

The capture of water by commercial logics is often maddening. There is a perversity to its very existence as an economic good: water falls from the sky, for free, and its daily availability is crucial to human survival, yet it is everywhere subject to the convolutions of political economy and institutionality that Bakker traces in her work. In this way, the social life of water reveals the contradictions of capitalist natures with a special bluntness. This simultaneous existence in multiple registers—object of spiritual reverence, key industrial and agricultural input, source of human and other life—makes water a rich subject of study, theory and contest. Bakker is right that many of the difficulties in extending water provision and sanitation are downstream of water’s industrial production for instrumental human use. Yet here we are, living in cities of millions sustained by massive and intricate infrastructural works transporting water across vast distances. Governing these hydraulic systems effectively, and ensuring their broad social benefit, demands converting the political boldness that flows from the recognition that water is life into ways to supersede the strictures of the profit motive, embedded in both private and now also public utilities in the neoliberal era. The emotive force of providing water for all must find imaginative institutional expression. As Bakker’s history shows, it has before.

There are promising contemporary models as well. Porto Alegre, for instance, emerges in Bakker’s work as something of a best-case scenario: in that Brazilian city, a public water utility provides near-universal coverage and maintains low fees within a polity defined by deep practices of deliberative democracy. The utility contracts out for certain specialized services to the private sector, but owns its assets and water, and is marked by a high degree of participatory planning.

Could such a system find purchase elsewhere? It would likely depend on social movements capable of expanding the political sphere to enable claims from marginalized water users, and then of managing the difficult move from opposing the worst depredations of privatized water toward a positive program of public management.[5] And why not? The largest private utility in the UK is staring at collapse; Ofwat itself is slated to be scrapped and replaced with a new utilities regulator. The international consensus supporting the private sector’s protagonism in water supply betokened by these flailing institutions is likewise fizzling out, with no new paradigm yet ready to replace it. And water, like nature, abhors a vacuum.

1. As Andreas Malm has argued, industrialization provided an early example of water’s uncooperativeness as a commodity: the switch from water-based industrial processes to steam in the early 1800s occurred not because of steam’s advantage in generating power—steam displaced waterwheels before such technological parity was reached—but because water exists stickily in place. Thus, whereas industrialists could generate steam power from coal where and when they liked, and bring a disciplined labour force to their preferred production sites, water was stubborn, generating power along its own preferred routes and according to its own hard-to-control temporalities.
2. Decades later than other nationalized utilities, like rail, electricity, coal and steel.
3. During the drought, Yorkshire Water Services encouraged its consumers to slash usage by avoiding baths, while their managing director publicly claimed not to have taken one for three months. The revelation that he had been bathing frequently in nearby homes of family member and while on holiday in Spain became a scandal.
4. Including by this author.
5. Even the Cochabamba Water War, perhaps the most famous successful anti-privatization battle, offers a note of caution. After massive mobilizations booted out the international consortium that was to manage privatization, Cochabambinos were unable to translate the momentum into socialized control of the water utility, and coverage hovered around 50 per cent in the years after the battle.

Sammy Feldblum is a PhD candidate in geography at UCLA, focusing on the political ecology of water.