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Item type:Publication, How the European Citizens’ Initiative ‘Water and Sanitation is a Human Right!’ Changed EU Discourse on Water Services Provision(Utrecht University Library Open Access Journals (Publishing Services), 2020-01-01)In 2010 the United Nations General Assembly recognized the human right to water and sanitation in what is seen as a historical vote by water activists. Implementation of the right to water is imperative to achieve sustainable development. In 2011 the regulation for a European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI) entered into force in the European Union. With such an initiative it is possible to propose an issue for European legislation by collecting one million signatures from citizens in at least seven Member States. The European federation of trade unions in the public services sector (EPSU) decided to take up the challenge to organise such an ECI and formed a diverse coalition of organisations and water activists that became known as ‘Right2Water.’ Their proposal was ‘to implement the human right to water and sanitation in European law.’ Although it was successful in achieving the required number of supporters, the European Commission answered that implementation of the human right to water was to be left to Member States and that there was no need to change existing legislation. The Right2Water movement aimed not as much to change legislation but more to challenge EU neoliberal policies and shift them from a ‘market approach’ to a ‘rights-based approach.’ This chapter looks at the factors that contributed to the success of ‘Right2Water,’ how the ideological debate around the human right to water took place during the campaign and the impact it had on EU discourse as well as on EU water policy. - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Publication, Water justice and Europe’s Right2Water movement(Taylor & Francis, 2021-05-06)In 2013 the European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI) ‘Right2Water’ collected 1.9 million signatures across Europe against water privatization. It became the first ever successful ECI and has built a Europe-wide movement. Right2Water sought for Europe’s legal enforcement of the Human Right to Water and Sanitation (HRWS) as a strategic political tool to challenge European Union market policies. The paper examines the ECI from a social movement perspective. Although the European Commission subscribed that ‘water is a public good, not a commodity’, its implementation is subject to continuing politics and socio-political struggle, with growing urgency in times of the Covid-19 pandemic crisis. - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Publication, Interview article: water movements’ defense of the right to water. From the European arena to the Dutch exception(Taylor and Francis Ltd., 2021-01-01)In 2012 public service trade unions and water activists started a European Citizens’ Initiative to get the human right to water implemented in European law. It became the start of the “Right2Water” movement that successfully defended drinking water supply in the European Union against European Commission plans for liberalisation, marketisation and the subsequent threat of privatisation. In countries with a good functioning public water system, resistance against privatisation of water was high, especially in Germany, Austria and Belgium, but surprisingly this level of resistance was absent in the Netherlands, which has a similarly good and well-known public water supply system. In this article we interview two persons that have both experience in European as well as in the Netherlands’ water policies and legislation, and in water services provision. We investigate how the right to water is defined, legally decreed and socially interpreted and defended at different levels. We also investigate the apparent paradox with regards to water in the Netherlands, where people seemed very committed to and proud of their public water management, but did not stand up against a privatisation threat, whereas around the globe water privatisation plans are met with great resistance. - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Publication, Social Movements in Defense of Public Water Services: The Case of Spain(Frontiers Media SA, 2023-01-01)In several cities and regions in Spain there has been a fight against privatization of water supply in the past decade. Some cities have decided to re-municipalise water supply and debates about implementing the human right to water and sanitation have been held in many parts of Spain, following the success of the Right2Water European Citizens' Initiative. This paper examines how the European “Right2Water” movement influenced struggles for access to and control over water in Spain from a political ecology perspective. It explores how “Right2Water” fuelled the debate on privatization and remunicipalization of water services and what heritage it has left in Spain. We unfold relationships with and between water movements in Spain—like the Red Agua Publica—and relationships with other networks—like the indignados movement and subsequently how water protests converged with austerity protests. In different places these struggles took different shapes. By deploying five case studies (Madrid, Valladolid, Terrassa, Barcelona, and Andalucía), we look at how the human right to water and sanitation framework served as a tool for social and water justice movements. Struggles for water justice in Spain are ongoing and we seek to identify the temporarily outcomes of these struggles, and whether power balances in Spain's water services provision have shifted in the past decade. - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Publication, Gas Extraction Governmentality: The Depoliticization of Groningen’s Extractive Territorialization(Elsevier BV, 2023-12-02)The Dutch Northeastern province of Groningen has attracted national and international attention for being situated on top of Europe's biggest gas field. Decades of gas extraction have caused human-made gasquakes that have become highly politicized as they have resulted in the damage of thousands of houses, messy compensation policies, unsafe living situations, an intense situation of social and psychological desperation, and deep political distrust. An issue that has, however, been mostly absent from political debates is the fact that the gas extraction has also caused land subsidence with major implications for the area's water systems. In this article, we investigate the depoliticizing governmentality techniques of Groningen's extractive territorialization. In doing so, we differentiate how the same governmentality techniques have mostly depoliticized gas extraction-land subsidence while they have failed to depoliticize the gasquakes. We nuance the complex power dynamics (i.e., simultaneous de- and re-politicization), socio-material transformation processes (i.e., land subsidence and gasquakes), and institutional dynamics (i.e., public water management and private compensation organizations) evoked by extractive transformations. We argue that the extractive alliance's land subsidence-governmentalities reflect a subtle re-ordering of territorial control. Yet, we also highlight the limits, contestations, and contingency of extractive governmentalization. We unravel how an understanding of power as simultaneously unintentional and intentional informs our analysis. We show how the extractive alliance benefits from the interplay of power strategies, yet not without being strongly contested by local inhabitants and social movements.