Water on Tap: Rights and Regulation in the Transnational Governance of Urban Water Services (Cambridge Studies in Law and Society) Paperback by Bronwen Morgan

Author:Bronwen Morgan
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: International business enterprises– Law and legislation, Privatization–Law and legislation, Right to water, Water utilities–Law and legislation
ISBN: 9781107411838
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2012-12-12T18:30:00+00:00

Cambridge Books Online

http://ebooks.cambridge.org/

Water on Tap

Rights and Regulation in the Transnational Governance of Urban Water S

ervices

Bronwen Morgan

Book DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511974823

Online ISBN: 9780511974823

Hardback ISBN: 9781107008946

Paperback ISBN: 9781107411838

Chapter

5 - Moonlight plumbers in comparative perspective: electoral v. consti

tutional politics of access to water in South Africa and New Zealand p

p. 146-171

Chapter DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511974823.006

Cambridge University Press

5

Moonlight plumbers in comparative perspective:

electoral v. constitutional politics of access to water

in South Africa and New Zealand

5.1 Introduction

New Zealand and South Africa, may, at fi rst sight, appear an incongruous

pair of case studies for close juxtaposition. But they share a key feature

distinguishing them from the previous pair of case studies (Argentina

and Chile): neither country created an independent regulatory agency to

supervise access to water. Relatedly, both countries delegate the provision

of drinking water services to local municipalities. As we saw in Chapters

3 and 4 , the design and intended practice (though not always the oper-

ational reality) of independent regulatory agencies tended to refl ect the

infl uence of the managed liberalisation model. Th

ese two case studies,

then, both demonstrate an absence of centralised technocratic control

over the provision of access to water, and, as such, a public participatory

model of provision should have more space to develop.

Th

e chapter argues that a tempered public participatory model subsists

in both case studies, though not in any ‘pure’ form, at least partly because

both countries experienced pressures to adopt a managed liberalisation

model. South Africa has developed a well-known indigenous and pro-

gressive model of governance that is nonetheless constrained by other

contradictory aspects of the country’s broader political economy com-

mitments. Th

e South African model is also much more powerful on paper

in policy and legislation than at the operational level of implementation.

New Zealand has retained a model based on public provision, embedded

in small-scale local government, but some restructuring in Auckland has

nonetheless taken place along modifi ed managed liberalisation lines .

Put like this, these case studies may seem to resemble milder versions

of the outcome in Bolivia ( Chapter 3 ). But the absence of a centralised

regulatory agency, the related prominence of local government delivery,

and the relatively narrower scope of foreign private sector participation

distinguish them from Bolivia. At the heart of disputing in these two case

146

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. Introduction

147

studies was a tension between socio-economic rights on the one hand,

and contract and market rights on the other, a tension underpinning the

terms of exchange controlling access to water. Although this tension was

central to the Bolivian case, it plays out here in a very diff erent political

context: one of predominantly municipal governance and relatively less

transnational imposition of managed liberalisation. In Bolivia, the pri-

mary focus of the struggle was on property rights, articulated in mass

direct action inspired by a conception of ‘water as territory’. By contrast,

the main tensions in these two case studies were between diff erent aspects

of ‘water as service’ .

A focus on ‘water as service’ was also a shared facet of the struggles

chronicled in Chapter 4 , in Argentina and Chile. But whereas the two

Latin American cases focused on ‘regulator

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