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Contested Water: The Struggle Against Water Privatization in the United States and Canada

Water privatization has been with us at least since the 1980s, when the debt crisis in the Global South and the rise of Reagan/Thatcherism in the United States and United Kingdom created openings for radical shifts away from state-owned enterprises in public goods sectors. Corporations and international financial institutions led the charge, extolling the virtues of business efficiency while obscuring the shift in power that accompanied increased private control over public assets and precious resources. A great web of actors—economists, corporate leaders, investors, and ministers—worked together to promote the alluring ideology of marketled development, at times uncontested. But in the water sector, the rumblings of discontent were earliest and strongest, and have remained the most strident to the current day. There’s just something about water. That ‘‘something’’ is the starting point for Joanna Robinson’s analysis in Contested Water: The Struggle Against Water Privatization in the United States and Canada. The book outlines two water privatization resistance movements in places one might not expect to find social upheaval: Stockton, California and Vancouver, British Colombia. Robinson documents how these struggles emerged from a similar motivation to protect water as a public good, but diverged in activists’ tactics and strategies, as well as in outcomes. In Stockton, a city council vote to privatize preempted an anti-privatization ballot initiative, but was subsequently nullified in court. In Vancouver, citizens convinced representatives to abandon privatization before any such costly battles unfolded. Robinson seeks to explain these different trajectories utilizing comparative case studies based on interviews with anti-privatization activists, media reports, and activist materials. Her theoretical concerns emerge from the social-movements literature and include rethinking the role of ideology, frames, opportunities, and networks in influencing processes and outcomes of resistance in a field (water) that is simultaneously global and local. The characteristics that Robinson deems important for influencing outcomes in Stockton are, in brief, a political context where a popular conservative mayor, a largely conservative city council, and a long-standing conflict between conservatives and liberals created blockages to citizen voice; shallow and fragmented movement networks, with few resources, little experience, and a lukewarm attitude toward coalition-building; and politically inexperienced leaders who made tactical errors, were reluctant to engage with ‘‘radical’’ forms of resistance, and failed to seize global frames to create new openings for solidarity and political opportunities. In particular, Robinson faults the anti-privatization coalition for framing the problem as one of democracy and political corruption, rather than as a common threat from global corporate power, a framing that ostensibly would have allowed activists and politicians to build solidarity and a shared understanding of the issues at stake. This also meant that they were constrained by the already-existing opportunity structures, which were limited. In Vancouver, on the other hand, the political context included a more receptive city council, a more accessible politicalinstitutional structure, and a more globally aware population; its preexisting movement networks were broader, better resourced, and more densely interconnected; and its leaders were more politically astute and enthusiastic about strengthening coalitions, as well as utilizing a range of strategies, both traditional and creative, to influence politicians and public opinion. Robinson credits the ability of activists to harness global discourses about corporate power to shape local framing strategies and create new opportunities for political leverage. The author illustrates the power of a wellconceived social-movement unionism campaign, as utilized by BCPSEU, as well as the importance of a ‘‘bridge’’ (in this case CAL) between different actors and frames to create movement solidarity. Indeed, it is intriguing Reviews 243