ABSTRACT
From the 1980s, economic and market logic, and the reduction of the role of the state, were advocated to improve efficiency and access in the water sector. These processes of “neoliberalisation” entailed reworking institutional and governance arrangements to render water a site of capital accumulation. While early analyses focused on the logic and implications of neoliberalisation, emphasising the tensions between water as a commodity and a (human) right, more recent accounts have explored how these processes relate to political and economic power.
In this chapter, we examine how neoliberalisation has come to sustain, and become sustained by, capital accumulation. Through the examples of financialisation and marketisation, we show how these processes reconfigure how and by whom water is allocated, used, and regulated to enable private sector actors to extract new forms of rent at the expense of users. These new forms of rent then become contingent upon maintaining the processes of neoliberalisation that enabled them. We thus argue that the neoliberalisation of water has come to encompass broader strategies of the restructuring of the water sector that foster new opportunities for capital accumulation while reconfiguring water–society relations in ways that further consolidate the economic and political power that underpins these.
