Stemming the Tide: Human Rights and Water Policy in a Neoliberal World by Madeline Baer

Abstract

Reviewed by: Stemming the Tide: Human Rights and Water Policy in a Neoliberal World by Madeline Baer Christopher C. Robinson* (bio) Madeline Baer, Stemming the Tide: Human Rights and Water Policy in a Neoliberal World (Oxford University Press, 2017), ISBN 978-0-19-069315-2, 205 pages. Too often, studies of neoliberalism take on an elitist policy focus and corresponding abstractness that obscures the view to those victimized most by its policies: the poor and vulnerable. Water policy is an excellent window into the dehumanizing effects of neoliberalism if you study the formation of oppositional movements that express the idea that access to clean water and sanitation are human rights. From the perspective of the elites responsible for policy choices, however, the totalitarian and anti-democratic character of neoliberalism is depoliticized and reduced to claims about privatization or deregulation as efficient, if amoral ways to ensure clean water with the proviso that some democracy is possible if the state wills it. In Stemming the Tide, Madeline Baer attempts to escape and challenge the narrative of elites that seek to justify the efficacy of market forces as an able alternative to public administration, but while she gestures toward the counter narratives offered by oppositional movements, she focuses mostly on the way state power can preemptively blunting [End Page 484] neoliberalism or modify privatization through regulation.1 My two interrelated criticisms of Baer's study are that she offers an overly circumscribed perspective on neoliberalism that tends to equate it with privatization; and her observations on grassroots opposition to privatizing water and sanitation systems are not developed enough to give a sense of how activists see and are affected by the structures of neoliberal governance they oppose. Rather than wish aloud for a different book that studies the formation of political beliefs and strategies of water warriors, I want to examine the strengths and limits of Baer's analysis and her contribution to our understanding of the politics and legal framework of the Human Right to Water and Sanitation (HRtWS). The strengths of Baer's analysis lie in its contribution to our understanding of the challenges that economic, social and cultural rights, framed as human rights, face in various national contexts and forms of state governance (authoritarian and representative). This work is dedicated to water and sanitation as sites of resistance to the neoliberal commodification of such basic human requirements for sustaining life. Readers alert to the struggle of indigenous water protectors throughout the Western Hemisphere, and the range of environmental justice issues exemplified by protests at Standing Rock and the exposure of children to elevated lead levels in the drinking water in Flint, Michigan, will not require much convincing regarding the centrality of access to clean water as a vital issue of human rights. As Baer notes, "[o]ver 1.1 billion people currently lack access to clean water, and 2.6 billion lack adequate sanitation. "The burden of water-related disease," she continues, "is heavy in the developing world, where 1.8 million children die each year from preventable diseases caused by dirty water."2 Thus the goal of universal access to clean water and sanitation is situated well in human rights discourse and worthy of ongoing political struggle. Disagreement arises, however, over whether this public good is defended best by state intervention or local and indigenous movement politics. The thrust of Baer's argument is in opposition to the application of market forces to the creation and maintenance of a clean water infrastructure. Still, she gives privatization a fair and scholarly hearing in her case studies of Chile and Bolivia. These cases also provide concrete contexts for analyzing the status of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which are viewed correctly as weak and difficult to enforce in comparison to and in isolation from the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Indeed, it is not clear why potable water and sanitation are framed in the discourse on human rights as an economic right rather than, say, a political right. This strikes me as a brand of or predecessor to neoliberal thinking—the equation of cost/benefit analysis with rationality and its expansion into what were...