BOOK REVIEW

diseases and hygiene, led to a municipalisation of these systems. Governments estab lished utilities which used public funds to extend coverage, and cross-subsidised tariffs for the poor. Bakker thus historicises the process through which municipal ownership and management of water supplies came to be the dominant pattern in both developed and developing countries for most of the 20th century.

The book sets itself the task of clarifying concepts and terminologies that have been deployed in debates over water privatisation, many of them adopted as battle slogans. Dismissing categories of “public” and “private” as incapable of adequately characterising the complex arrangements that typically constitute urban water s ystems, it offers alternate analytic concepts that encompass the political, technological and institutional dimensions of water governance. The “municipal hydrau lic paradigm”, dominant from the mid-19th to the late 20th century, was a supply-led approach oriented towards harnessing large volumes of water to service urban growth and modernisation and to fulfil municipal commitments for social equity and universal provision. It was materialised through integrated engineered networks built on economies of scale, usually owned and run by governments.

‘Market Environmentalism’

These networks, however, tended to remain partial and incomplete, particularly in postcolonial cities, where they embodied the exclusions and classifications of colonial rule as well as the classic constraints (financial, technical, and political) of piped water networks. By the late 20th century, this paradigm had come u nder severe attack owing to its internal failure to sustain its financial and social commitments, as well as to external concerns about water scarcity and to the ascendance of neo-liberalism and the Washington Consensus. The municipal hydraulic paradigm was replaced by the 1990s with what Bakker terms “market environmentalism”, a paradigm that prioritises economic efficiency and financial sustainability over distributional equity. The paradigm applies market mechanisms to address environmental problems such as water scarcity and deploys strategies such as full-cost pricing, commercialisation and privatisation of water management, property rights and tradable markets in water, to transform water into an “economic good”.

Market environmentalism was actively driven by institutions like the World Bank. Bakker provides a historical explanation for the emergence of the water privatisation agenda in the 1990s in the World Bank. Although the Bank had moved into lending for water supply only in the 1970s, it powerfully influenced policies in the sector, initially promoting the spread of the municipal hydraulic model around the world as a key strategy of its “poverty agenda” as well as a rich source of bankable projects. By the 1980s, however, a web of problems besetting the Bank’s water projects around the world – poor performance, low cost-recovery, lack of community participation, negative environmental impacts, and inability to extend services to the poor – were identified in internal reviews, leading to a major policy shift away from the municipal hydraulic paradigm towards market-led models. The book, thus, offers an account of the rise of neoliberal policies that goes beyond purely ideological explanations.

Bakker goes on to examine a range of concepts that have emerged as alternatives to the privatisation agenda, such as the “human right to water”, community-managed water systems, and the “water commons”. Drawing on contemporary developments in South Africa, Jakarta, and post water-war Cochabamba, she explores the political-discursive effects as well as the practical implications attendant on the deployment of these concepts. The book makes a useful attempt to disentangle the knotty strands of argumentation and debate that constitute contemporary water politics, and to render them intellectually and politically comprehensible through systematically examining their lineages, affiliations and implications. For example, while Bakker explores diverse meanings attached to the terms “private” and “privatisation”, she also insists that privatisation should not be reduced to technical or managerial definitions but must be seen in its larger political/ideological aspect, as a process of market expansion creating new property relations and new society-nature relations.

But this book is not just a conceptual treatise, it puts forward a strong argument. Sidestepping polarised positions of state versus private provision, Bakker argues that dominant models of “industrialised” water supply, in other words, centralised capital-intensive infrastructure networks, are subject to the simultaneous effects of “state failure”, “market failure” and “governance failure”. If state failure refers to the inefficiencies and unresponsiveness of large hierarchical bureaucracies, market models suffer from exchange failures due to the “naturally” monopolistic character of integrated networks. The book points to similarities in the failure records of government-run and private utilities, particularly in their inability to incorporate externalities and to extend coverage to the poor. State failure and market failure have thus fed on each other and mutually contributed to the poor state of water services in most cities.

The problem, Bakker argues, is not one of states or markets, but of dominant paradigms of governance that have failed to take community and ecological dimensions of water into serious account. The book forges towards an alternative conceptualisation of water governance that encompasses questions of ecological sustainability and collective (community) trusteeship. Here, however, the book turns fussy, sacrificing the strong empirical and analytic treatment found in earlier sections for vague and tentative propositions that leave the reader unconvinced. The book makes for tedious reading in parts, owing to a rather repetitious structure and a style that sometimes tends towards the verbose. All in all, however, this book makes a very important contribution to the ongoing battles over water governance across the world.

Karen Coelho (karenc@mids.ac.in) teaches at the Madras Institute of Development Studies, Chennai.

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