This thesis is about the tensions faced by communitarian water service providers in peri-urban Cochabamba, Bolivia, in their continued dependence on private water vending businesses, despite efforts to socialize service delivery. Based on fieldwork conducted in Cochabamba from May-July, 2013, this thesis argues that due in part to a lack of government intervention and regulation, many communitarian water associations in Cochabamba are being held captive by private water vendors who exploit the city's unequal distribution of water resources for profit. It makes this argument by exploring two main points: that communitarian water associations leverage progressive forms of organization to improve service delivery, but are hindered by barriers which lie outside their control; and that small-scale water businesses are able to exploit the failures of the formal state/public and informal communitarian systems by positioning themselves as a necessary operation, in a way which limits the state's ability to regulate their activities.

This book examines water remunicipalization in Cochabamba since the Water War, offering innovative methodological and theoretical conceptualizations of what it means to be "public," helping to move debates on water services beyond the paralyzing binary of public versus private with a focus on the contested terrain of community engagement around water services. The Cochabamba Water War of 2000 brought together city residents of all stripes to mobilize against water privatization and gain back public control of the city’s water utility. This event catapulted anti-privatization movements around the world, but two decades later, the water movement’s vision of democratic water provision remains largely unfulfilled and the city suffers from a protracted water crisis. Building a typology of participation, this book explores the difficulty in rebuilding a strong public water service in Cochabamba by analyzing the different, and often incompatible, understandings and interpretations of social control and public participation. Applying this framework to the Bolivian context, and more specifically to the water and sanitation sector in Cochabamba, the book uncovers whose interests are served, and which groups are included or excluded from decision-making and access to water. This exercise illustrates how, in their implementation, participatory practices are not linear and can be distorted or appropriated towards different ends. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of water governance, natural resource management, public policy, social movements and Latin American studies.

How do we provide effective public services in a deeply neoliberal world? In the wake of the widespread failure of privatisation efforts, societies in the global south are increasingly seeking progressive ways of recreating the public sector. With contributors ranging from cutting-edge scholars to activists working in health, water, and energy provision, and with case studies covering a broad spectrum of localities and actors, Making Public in a Privatized World uncovers the radically different ways in which public services are being reshaped from the grassroots up. From communities holding the state accountable for public health in rural Guatemala, to waste pickers in India and decentralized solar electricity initiatives in Africa, the essays in this collection offer probing insights into the complex ways in which people are building genuine alternatives to privatization, while also illustrating the challenges which communities face in creating public services which are not subordinated to the logic of the market, or to the monolithic state entities of the past.

Scholarship on the right to water has proliferated in interesting and unexpected ways in recent years. This book broadens existing discussions on the right to water in order to shed critical light on the pathways, pitfalls, prospects, and constraints that exist in achieving global goals, as well as advancing debates around water governance and water justice. The book shows how both discourses and struggles around the right to water have opened new perspectives, and possibilities in water governance, fostering new collective and moral claims for water justice, while effecting changes in laws and policies around the world. In light of the 2010 UN ratification on the human right to water and sanitation, shifts have taken place in policy, legal frameworks, local implementation, as well as in national dialogues. Chapters in the book illustrate the novel ways in which the right to water has been taken up in locations drawn globally, highlighting the material politics that are enabled and negotiated through this framework in order to address ongoing water insecurities. This book reflects the urgent need to take stock of debates in light of new concerns around post-neoliberal political developments, the challenges of the Anthropocene and climate change, the transition from the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), as well as the mobilizations around the right to water in the global North. This book is essential reading for scholars and students of water governance, environmental policy, politics, geography, and law. It will be of great interest to policymakers and practitioners working in water governance, as well as the human right to water and sanitation.