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15 - Neoliberal Water Governmentalities, Virtual Water Trade, and Contestations

from Part IV - Governmentality, Discourses and Struggles over Imaginaries and Water Knowledge

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 February 2018

By
Jeroen Vos  and
Rutgerd Boelens
Edited by
Rutgerd Boelens ,
Tom Perreault  and
Jeroen Vos
Rutgerd Boelens
Affiliation:
Wageningen Universiteit, The Netherlands
Tom Perreault
Affiliation:
Syracuse University, New York
Jeroen Vos
Affiliation:
Wageningen Universiteit, The Netherlands
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Summary

Global virtual water trade has increased enormously during the past decades. Agricultural, mining and hydrocarbon exports are promoted and increasingly governed by international financing, free trade agreements, and water stewardship policies. Increased water extraction, consumption and pollution by agribusiness and extractive industries affect many local communities directly, depleting fragile water balances, re-patterning local water flows and livelihoods, and altering the local-national-global structure of costs and benefits associated with water use. Moreover, governance restructuring is accompanied by emerging global water stewardship discourses that have profound effects on local water user communities’ ideas about water governance and justice. Global extractive industry and agrifood chains endeavor to re-pattern not only hydro-social territories’ material and hydrological foundations but they strategize to also spread and overlay a new water justice imaginary and discourse. However, these new corporate water justice discourses are increasingly contested. The chapter concludes with several examples of “movements against the current”.
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Information
Water Justice , pp. 283 - 301
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2018

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