Abstract
Water is the source of all life on earth, as well as a crucial, indispensable and irreplaceable natural resource for socio-economic development. In recent decades, however, rapid population growth, urbanization and climate change have made a great impact on limited water resources and water environment. Faced with the global water crisis, governments and international financial institutions advocated a Washington Consensus solution: the privatization and commodification of water. Therefore, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund requested that many inefficient and poor-performing public water utilities to be privatized. In 1999, the Bolivian government, under pressure from the World Bank, decided to privatize Cochabamba’s public water company, SEMAPA (Municipal Water and Sewage Service). But the utilization and distribution of water resources in the Cochabamba region has always been a very sensitive issue. The privatization of SEMAPA not only failed to improve the quality of the public water service, it even ignored the traditional rights to water of the local people, and furthermore it exacerbated the inequitable distribution situation of water the region, that later led to a series of intense mass protests. This thesis is to study the causes and the development of the Cochabamba Water War in 2000, to give a better understanding of the meaning behind this event and its impacts.
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