Wasser als Ware: Die Privatisierung der Wasserversorgung in Großbritannien

In: Prokla: Zeitschrift für kritische Sozialwissenschaft, Band 26, Heft 1/102: Zur politischen Ökonomie des Wassers, S. 37-61

Abstract

Privatisation of British water services has dramatically reconfigured both production and consumption interests. While critics such as John Ernst decry a growing service inequity, Peter Saunders and Colin Harris celebrate enhanced consumer benefits. Closer investigation of new styles of utility network management reveal spatially complex patterns of social, economic and environmental change. While worries over the social and public health implications of water poverty grow, the environmental dividends of privatised water supply become clearer. The paper identifies two recently emerging logics of networks management; the first prioritises the shaping of demand over the expansion of supply capacity; the second prioritises the recovery of water charges over the social and health needs of low income households. These logics highlight powerful resonances and dissonances between the economic and environmental benefits of the commodification process and the social and health costs associated with a sharpening polarisation in access to basic water services. (Prokla / FUB)