Liquid gold or the source of life? Understanding water commodification as a contradictory and contested political project

Abstract

ABSTRACT The global water crisis is framed as a problem of global scarcity. However, struggles over water are over more than access or availability, they are struggling over what water is, which captures contradictions inherent to capitalist accumulation in neoliberal capitalism. Using an incorporated comparison, I bring into relation the Irish anti-water charges protests and struggles against the unconventional gas industry in Australia. In each case, the boundaries between nature, social reproduction, and production systems were reconfigured, re-defining who or what can survive, and in what form. Each struggle unpicked the political project behind the commodification of water, and as social relations and logics once taken as given became denaturalized, water as the embodiment of these socio-power relations also came to figure differently. What became clear was that it was not water that was in crisis but rather the social relations and processes that reduced it to a commodity.