ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the role of grassroots water justice movements in Catalan water policy, setting the scene for an investigation of why the Catalan government considered citizen participation between 2006 and 2010 to be such an important tool for enhancing Catalan sovereignty and for overcoming the so-called 'Spanish hydraulic structuralism' approach in water management. The case of the EU Water Framework Directive implementation process shows how citizen participation is disappearing as a result of state governance morphing into non-state governance, which one may call 'private'. If a kind of global citizenship is in the making at the beginning of the 21st century, the decisive question seems to be whether that citizenship is the product of a state-governed legal determination, or of a non-state citizenship which is based on self-organization of communities in order to overcome the capture of the state by other interests than society's well-being.
