A Vital Frontier

Front matter

f VITAL a F ANDREA . è MUEHLEBACH R oO i N T | i Water E Insurgencies R in

A VITAL FRONTIER

ANDREA MUEHLEBACH

Contents

Preface ix

Introduction A Vital Frontier 1 1 You Cannot Sell to Us What We Already Possess! 35 2 No More Blood from These Stones! 67 3 We Berliners Want Our Water Back! 103 4 Just Price 135 Epilogue 167

Notes 179 References 213 Index 239

Preface

I write this book in the midst of an endless pandemic, the beginning of which I spent (among many other things) wondering how the global water industry would respond to a planetary crisis where the consistent washing of hands we were asked to perform makes water seem more precious than ever before. By May 2020 I had attended a virtual Corporate Water Leaders Panel organized by Global Water Intelligence (GW1), a self-described “unchallenged leader in high-value business information for the water industry.” It was moderated by Debra Coy, who was introduced by the GWI representative as the “queen of Wall Street” and the “queen of water technology.” Coy is an executive in residence at XPV Water Partners, the largest water-focused growth equity fund in North America. For decades Coy has provided strategic advisory services for municipal utilities, investors, and companies from a capital markets perspective, and, worldwide, she is considered one of the most experienced consultants covering the water sector. The meeting also featured corporate executives Hara Prasad

Nanda from DuPont Water Solutions, Cath Schefer from Stantec, Rafael Perez Feito from Aqualia, Alejandro Jimenez from Acciona, and Ana Giros from Suez, all of whom implicitly agreed over the course of their conversation that they should never let a good crisis like the pandemic go to waste. The atmosphere of the panel was one of optimism about the accelerating opportunities for innovation and growth that the pandemic offered to the water industry. Unlike the 2008 financial crisis, which had hit all sectors of the global economy more uniformly, the pandemic’s effects would be uneven and sector specific. The participants mused that the industry’s profile seemed to have been raised in that the world now recognized that the private water sector has a “critical role in maintaining public health.” The group noted that this was a potentially transformative moment, as companies had within the first months of the pandemic already demonstrated to governments that they could efficiently and swiftly implement best practices across whole regions under pandemic conditions. They had “built trust” that could be potentiated by pushing the boundaries of environmental performance and by investing more in the digitization and automation of water payments (many of which were lagging, the executives noted, as the pandemic wore on). Most importantly, the water executives also noted that the pandemic was an opportunity since it would create new budgetary constraints for public institutions needing investments for water infrastructures. These needs could be met by private investment because a huge amount of capital was sitting idle and looking for opportunities for long-term stable revenue.

These ambitious visions of increased private capital expansion into water utilities came right at a moment when several United Nations special rapporteurs published a dramatic op-ed in the Guardian, arguing that the pandemic vividly exposed “the catastrophic impact of privatizing vital services” like water and sanitation. The rapporteurs argued that states should “no longer cede control as they have done” and that they should cease delegating core goods and services to private companies and the market on terms that will “effectively undermine the rights and livelihoods of many people” (Farha et al. 2020; MacDonald and Spronk 2021). Seemingly oblivious to these warnings, executives on the Corporate Water Leaders Panel insisted that “as a sector, we should try to get all that capital,” with Coy concluding that the focus would soon shift from the management of pandemic risk to postpandemic growth and to “getting more attention, more public awareness, more dollars.”

This book could easily be a tale told about the ravages of global capital expansion into water utilities; a tale of dispossession and of more and

X PREFACE more dollars accumulated under the guise of efficiency, innovation, environmental performance, and public health. It could easily be told as a tale about a terrain “overdetermined by logics of capital in our present historical conjuncture” (Sunder Rajan 2012, 21) and about financial markets that are “monstrous beyond doubt” (Langley 2012) and in dire need of major regulation (Farha 2021). But my commitment is to pry open the spaces where this financial terrain itself is made unstable by insurgent life—by water insurgencies that refuse to frame infrastructures as opportunities for capital accumulation and that insist instead on the inviolability of water as right, vital resource, and life. Inso doing, water movements craftimaginative projects around questions of property and the commons; democracy and just price; and about law, justice, and collective fiscal and infrastructural responsibility. It is these frontiers of the political imagination that I seek to honor with this book. Water movements hold many keys in their hands, and it is my hope that we know to use them.

This book emerged out of the varied routes I took beginning in 2014. My interest in European water insurgencies was first peaked by the Italians and the astonishing political and legal work they performed in the lead-up to a national referendum in 2011. But it was a first conversation with Saki Bailey in Turin about the Italian referendum and the Berlin Water Table and its striking achievements that led me to live in Berlin in 2015-2016 to conduct research in both Italy and Germany. While there, Dorothea Harlin from the Berlin Water Table took me to a meeting of the European water movement in Brussels, where David Sanchez Carpio from Food and Water Watch urged me to go to Ireland because the mass insurgency against metering was still ongoing and because “water there is not priced.” Claus Kittsteiner from the Berlin Water Table had also been involved in a water referendum that was held in 2014 in Thessaloniki, Greece, which is why I visited there, too. That trip was short but involved among other things, an epic motorcycle ride and lots of good food with the unforgettable Yiorgos Archontopoulos. I also conducted a month-long visit to France during the summer of 2017, where I relied especially on the knowledge and generosity of Thierry Uso in Montpellier and a number of others in Paris. The result is a story that circulates as much as the members of these diverse water movements circulate—across varied hydrological, political, economic, and cultural terrains that are always in resonance with each other as people share epochal problems and common obstacles (Mezzadra 2015, 222). What follows are not case studies that allow for symmetrical comparison. Nor am I able to capture national, regional, or local water struggles in their

PREFACE xi fullness. Rather, these are ethnographic accounts, not of bounded community struggles but of the shifting and always vibrant political and legal fault lines opened up by processes of financialization.

I trace how these water insurgencies ebb and flow, sometimes in conversation with each other, but often also separately since distances could not always be traversed and languages were not always mutually understood. Methodologically, this meant tracking movements via ethnographic techniques like participant observation and interviewing in what were sometimes very long and sometimes very short research trips. All in all, I attended the Berlin Water Table’s meetings and followed their ongoing campaigns during my year-long stay in Berlin. I also spent a month in Ireland, where I moved between Dublin and Cork to interview people and also sat in meetings and attended demonstrations and, on one occasion, a court case. I further spent a total of three months in Campania, where I was initially fascinated by the remunicipalized Neapolitan water utility, Napoli Acqua Bene Comune (Naples Water as Commons; ABC), but soon got drawn into the ongoing and no less dramatic struggles faced by people in the region’s smaller rural towns and villages. Throughout, I traveled to these towns and villages and sat in on meetings and also engaged sources ranging from government reports, laws, and online accounts including those available on social media—both as communicative devices and as visual archives of protest and lively fora of debate. Taken together, the chapters that follow can be read individually, but their message will be enhanced through juxtaposition as readers detect resonances across the stories I tell. Much of this book thus aims to capture the rich heterogeneity of situated struggle. But it also seeks to grasp the often stifling political and legal parameters against which this heterogeneity must assert itself.

Sometimes, I came late to water struggles and sought to document them retroactively. I saw that water struggles had moved on to other political terrains, such as when I was invited to meet Irish water activists as they were demonstrating for the right to housing for those rendered homeless by the housing crisis. Some struggles documented in this book continue unabated until today, even if they are more dispersed or weakened by the exhaustion of activists. In many cases, my interlocutors were left with a sense that their victories were fragile achievements that could easily be overturned. They were experienced enough to know that their political work—even if it ended in successful remunicipalization—would have to be constantly renewed because the forces intent on extracting financial value from their most precious resource were constantly renewing and xii PREFACE rebuilding themselves as well. Many thus practiced a constant vigilance in a world where no successfully won battle for water as a commons would be the last, and where battles would have to be fought over and over again, by them and by generations to come. This was a politics that was perhaps not best captured by Marx’s decidedly terrestrial metaphor—that of the old mole burrowing around in the underground only to then suddenly appear as revolution—but by the hydrological metaphor of the water cycle as a politics and poetics of constant returns and recursions. Just as water is a constantly shapeshifting substance, moving from its solid into liquid and then vaporous states, so too are the politics of water insurgencies marked by acontinuous, constantly transmuting cycle of renewal that has no beginning and no end, and that will likely have to repeat itself, over and over again over time. And yet, everything I document in this book points to the conclusion that water movements are offering the world an insurgent gift—that of posing radical questions about wealth, value, and inappropriability and of working in common to continue to pose these questions.

If I were to trace the routes that my own thinking took over the years, I would start with a sparkling conversation I had with my dear friend Gavin Smith in Toronto on Edward Palmer Thompson. But there were other moments of clarity that I was gifted by friends and colleagues and that make this book the fruit of thinking in common: Firat Bozcali, who coined the term “infrastructures of financialization” for me; Sardar Saadi, who reminded me that the question of democracy was crucial and that I needed to foreground it analytically in the introduction; Naor Ben-Yehoyada on the Strathernian question on indivisibility; Tania Li on financial frontiers and the possibilities of that concept; Andrea Ballestero on pushing back at that concept; Hannah Appel on how weirdly interesting contracts are when studied ethnographically; Francesca Coin on genealogies of vitalism and the defense of life; Theodoros Rakopoulos for a question on usufruct; Enzo Alliegro on the importance of the biocidio movement and the terrifying specters of aquifer contamination; and especially Kelly Gillespie and Leigh-Ann Naidoo on insurgent questions and the insurgent practices that flow from such questions. The group that convened over a volume on financial frontiers also refined my thinking infinitely as we met across impossible time zones, distances, and life challenges during a pandemic: I salute and thank Hannah Appel, Geoffrey Aung, Julia Elyachar, Karen Ho, Jorge Nuñez, Horacio Ortiz, Gloria Pérez-Rivera, and Michael Ralph. Andrea Ballestero, again, was always luminous and illuminating; I am thankful for our friendship. Others who have accompanied me along the

PREFACE xiii way and whose companionship, intellectual and otherwise, I will always treasure are Gretchen Bakke, Mike Balkwill, Joshua Barker, Francis Cody, Catherine Fennell, Jessica Greenberg, Sarah Hillewaert, Bonnie McElhinny, Amira Mittermaier, Noelle Molé Liston, Shiho Satsuka, Jesook Song, Carlota McAllister, Valentina Napolitano, Alejandro Paz, Bhavani Rhaman, Todd Sanders, Anwen Tormey, and, especially, Naisargi Dave. Then there are those brave souls who read the whole manuscript with care and generosity: Andrea Ballestero, Andreas Bieler, Firat Bozcali, Tania Li, Andrew Gilbert, and, especially, Hannah Appel (I don’t know how you do it all). Please let me do the same for you when the time comes.

But most of all, this story is buoyed by the water insurgents I had the joy of meeting over the last few years. In Italy, I thank Marco Bersani, Costanza Boccardi, Carlo Borriello, Renato Briganti, Paolo Carsetti, Ida Dello Ioio, Raffaele Nunzio De Mauro, Renato Di Nicola, Tommaso Fattori, Valentina Gambarella, Enzo Guadagno, Giuseppe Grauso, Alberto Lucarelli, Ugo Mattei, Giuseppe Micciarelli, Maurizio Montalto, Stefano Risso, Enzo Ruggiero, Consiglia Salvo, Simona Savini, Francesco Sessa, Enzo Tosti, Gerardo Vitale, Padre Alex Zanotelli, and Ernesto Zona. I thank Giulia Romano from the University of Pisa for prompt and clarifying emails; Francesco Fusco, who made initial fieldwork in Naples pleasurable through his humor and generosity; Sergio Marotta, who shared his wisdom in a three-hour conversation and numerous clarifying emails; and Mario Visone, who delighted me by whisking me off to hang out with a Super Mario during what seemed like a very long and adventurous night in the Campanian countryside. I also want to express my debts to Bonnuccio Gatti and Ciro Annunziata— may they both rest in power. They look back on lives well lived. In Berlin, I thank Thomas Blanchet, Michael Efler, Johanna Erdmann, Christa Hecht, Carsten Herzberg, Ulrike Kolver, Shahrooz Mohajeri, Timothy Moss, Hermann Roloff, Gerlinde Schermer, Gerhard Seyfarth, Ulrike von Wiesenau, and Herrmann Wollner. I’m particularly thankful to Claus Kittsteiner, who welcomed me into his apartment, which was really the archive of the Berlin Water Table, stuffed from floor to ceiling with papers; Mathias Behnis, who sat with me for hours sifting through and talking about this archive; Carl Wafmuth, a man who knows numbers and holds a deep well of patience; and Dorothea Harlin and Heidi Kosche, both of whom have become dear friends.

In Ireland, I thank the indefatigable Lynn Boylan, Patrick Bresnihan, Karen Collins, Ann Farrelly, David Gibney, Brian Gould, Gavin Harold, John Lonergan, Anne McShane, Noreen Murphy, Maggie Ni Caoimh, Diarmuir O’Flynn, Donal O’Sullivan, Ted Tynan, and the unforxiv PREFACE gettable Balleyphehan/South Parish Says No group. I will also not forget sitting in a Dublin McDonald's with eyes wide open when I realized that the tall and burly red-haired man I was having a great old laugh with was a water fairy. Though he and others I spoke to will remain anonymous, they were some of the most raucously witty water insurgents to talk to. I also thank Karen Doyle for an incredibly illuminating conversation and Noreen Murphy for her indomitable spirit, humor, and political wisdom. As she and many others in Ireland taught me, the struggle for public water is serious, but it can also be filled with laughter. In Paris, I thank Armelle Bernard, Henri Coing, Martine Depuy, Marc Laimee, Matthieu Marquaille, Jean-Claude Oliva, Jean-Luc Ouly, and Graciela Schneier Madanes; while in Montpellier I remain indebted to Thierry Uso, Jean Baron, and Grégory Vallée. I also thank my students, who know this manuscript and all of its various ins and outs intimately. Thank you, Tessa Bonduelle and Salvatore Giusto, for being outstanding fieldwork companions along the way. Thank you, Jacob Bessen, Xiaoling Chen, Ferda Nur Demirci, Bronwyn Frey, Gina- Marie Grawe, Justin Langille, and Sandy Hyunjoo Oh, for your intellectual friendship and your willingness to work on details in such thoughtful ways.

I have also shared many iterations of this work at different institutions, members of which were gracious enough to host me and to think in common through ideas. I think of myself as having cocreated parts of the story I tell here with these audiences—and especially students—at El Colegio de México and the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, the University of Chicago, Manchester University, the University of Sussex, the Freie Universitat Berlin, the Graduate Institute in Geneva, St. Andrew’s University, Cambridge University, the University of Bergen, McMaster University, Columbia University, Simon Fraser University, and at the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture; as well as the Departments of Anthropology at Columbia University, the University College London, Harvard University, Princeton University, the University of Ziirich, the THESys Institute at Humboldt University, the University of Oslo, the NYU School of Law, the University of San Diego, Yale University, the University of Edinburgh, the University of Basel, the University of Warwick, Ludwig Maximilian Universitat, the Universitat Hamburg, and CUNY Graduate Center. Thank you. I was very honored by your presence and thoughtful engagement. The incredible team at Duke University Press—with Elizabeth Ault leading the way, with Benjamin Kossak helping me get my act together, and with Mattson Gallagher, Maria Katsantones, Lis] Hampton, and especially Bird Williams crafting this project into

PREFACE XV shape—has been a life raft as I tried to finish a book with children at home and manage my departure from the University of Toronto to the University of Bremen, where I am thrilled to hold a professorship dedicated to maritime anthropology and cultures of water.

Finally, it takes time and money to indulge in the writing of books. I could not have done it without funding from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, a grant from the Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst, a grant from the Dean’s Faculty Research Funding at the University of Toronto at Mississauga, and a University of Toronto Faculty Research and Scholarly Activity Fund. A Jackman Humanities Institute Faculty Fellowship at the University of Toronto and a half-year sabbatical granted by the University of Toronto at Mississauga provided the magical time I needed to pound the last few bits of this book out.

Words cannot express my indebtedness to my parents, Ingeborg Gerngrofs Muhlebach and Hans Mihlebach, as well as to my in-laws, Judy Gilbert and Robert Gilbert, for love and childcare. So much labor went into allowing me to conduct research for and to write this book; I especially thank my Californian mother-in-law for continuously braving absurdly cold Toronto winters. My profoundest indebtedness goes to my partner, Andrew Gilbert, whom I referred to as my rock in my last book’s acknowledgements. He is still that same rock (as befits rocks), and I am deeply grateful.

xvi PREFACE