Abstract
Water insecurity in developing country contexts has frequently led individuals and entire communities to shift their consumptive patterns towards bottled water. Bottled water is sometimes touted as a mechanism to enact the human right to water through distribution across drought-stricken or infrastructure-compromised communities. However, the global bottled water industry is a multi-billion dollar major business. How did we reach a point where the commodification of a human right became not only commonly accepted but even promoted? In this paper, I argue that a discussion of the politics of bottled water necessitates a re-theorization of what constitutes “the political” and how politics affects policy decisions regarding the governance of bottled water. In this article I examine bottled water as a political phenomenon that occurs not in a vacuum but in a poorly regulated context. I explore the role of weakened regulatory regimes and regulatory capture in the emergence, consolidation and, ultimately, supremacy of bottled water over network-distributed, delivered-by-a-public utility tap water. My argument uses a combined framework that interweaves notions of “the political”, ideas on regulatory capture, the concept of “the public”, branding, and regulation theory to retheorize how we conceptualize the politics of bottled water.
Highlights
Water insecurity in developing country contexts has frequently led individuals and entire communities to shift their consumptive patterns towards bottled water
If we examine the combined politics of strong branding, poorly-maintained infrastructure, powerful marketing campaigns and weak regulatory regimes we can assess how this specific combination of factors influences the creation, emergence and sustenance of new bottled water markets
Ensuring that the human right to water can be enacted at the subnational level involves highly complex political maneuvering across different levels of government, and multiple sectors
Summary
Water insecurity in developing country contexts has frequently led individuals and entire communities to shift their consumptive patterns towards bottled water. Governmental failures to provide safe drinking water through local water utilities [10], poor networked infrastructure for water delivery throughout urban centers, rural and peri-urban areas [11], powerful marketing campaigns [12,13], regulatory failures and capture of local governments on the part of multinational corporations [14], a taste for healthy hydration through highly portable liquids [15,16], and a shift in norms where consuming bottled water has become somewhat of a cultural norm despite its negative environmental effects [17] are all factors that have contributed to the emergence and sustained growth of the global bottled water industries. In the conclusion I explain how a re-examination of the “what is politics” question and an inquiry on to the various concepts of “the political” helps us re-theorize the politics of bottled water in a novel way
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
