Bronwen Morgan - Water on Tap. Rights and Regulation in the Transnational Governance of Urban Water Services [2011][A]

Book Description
Publication Date: May 4, 2011
In the 1990s and mid 2000s, turbulent political and social protests surrounded the issue of private sector involvement in providing urban water services in both the developed and developing world. Water on Tap explores examples of such conflicts in six national settings (France, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, South Africa and New Zealand), focusing on a central question: how were rights and regulation mobilised to address the demands of redistribution and recognition? Two modes of governance emerged: managed liberalisation and participatory democracy, often in hybrid forms that complicated simple oppositions between public and private, commodity and human right. The case studies examine the effects of transnational and domestic regulatory frameworks shaping the provision of urban water services, bilateral investment treaties and the contributions of non-state actors such as transnational corporations, civil society organisations and social movement activists. The conceptual framework developed can be applied to a wide range of transnational governance contexts.

Book Description II
Focused on the turbulent upheavals of the 1990s and mid-2000s, this socio-legal exploration of the politics of urban water services assesses two modes of governance - managed liberalization and participatory democracy - that reflect tensions between water viewed as a scarce commodity and as an essential public good.

About the Author
Bronwen Morgan is Professor of Socio-Legal Studies in the School of Law at the Faculty of Social Sciences and Law, University of Bristol, and an Associate Research Fellow of the Centre for Socio-legal Studies, University of Oxford. Her research focuses on the political economy of regulatory reform, the intersection between regulation and social and economic human rights, and global governance.