Water Portal

Welcome to the Water Portal on Powerbase
NB please note this portal has been archived as most of its related pages have not been updated since Powerbase's water project ended in 2010. 
 
Welcome to the Water Portal on Powerbase—your guide to networks of power, lobbying and deceptive PR within the water industry. 
Our water portal tracks and profiles global and regional governing institutions, lobby associations, policy planning organisations, think tanks and agents involved in the water industry. It includes those of a pro-privatisatisation persuasion but also those who are promoting an alternative vision orientated towards publicly owned and participatory systems.
Powerbase has a policy of strict referencing and is overseen by a managing editor and a Sysop and several Associate Portal editors. If you are interested in becoming a contributor on this issue please contact melissa.jones AT powerbase.info
Priority pages on Water
*International Water Association
*Water UK
*International Chamber of Commerce
*European Services Forum
*Margaret Catley-Carlson
*DFID
*European Bank for Reconstruction and Development
*Scottish CBI
*Regulatory Policy Institute
*GATS
*Coca-Cola
(This is a list of pages that need work)
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The Water Debate
Water is vital to life. It is the essential component in all aspects and activities related to our well-being and existence – including food and energy production and manufacturing in general. It’s clear that if our water supply continues to dwindle, and/or, if water became unaffordable, our lives would be detrimentally transformed. Billions of people are already experiencing and suffering from the mismanagement and unequal allocation of water. Between 1.1 and 1.5 billion people in the world lack access to safe drinking water and 2.6 billion people lack access to basic sanitation. 2.2 million people die each year due to low quality drinking water and/or lack of sanitation – that is 42,000 people per week, 90 percent of whom are children (WHO/UNICET:2005). Exclusion to socially necessary goods and services such as fresh water has horrific consequences that are catastrophic, yet entirely preventable. 
The struggle over fresh water goods and services has taken the form of a conflict over increasing commercialisation, privatisation and liberalisation. This struggle takes place in an era of economic globalisation where neoliberal policies transform all forms of social reproduction so that all goods and services that were once held in common (things such as fresh water, education and healthcare etc.) are increasingly exposed to the free market and in many cases transformed into a form of private property. 
This regulatory shift – from public to private – is by no means inevitable. The processes that facilitate this shift are a direct result of political and corporate elites exercising their power and will, through an organised network of connections, in order to achieve the free market conditions that are necessary to expand the reach of capital. 
The Water Portal of Powerbase intends to expose and document the links between the political and corporate water elites. Contributions will ultimately reveal the elite social structure within which these elites operate, thus exposing the global water industry accordingly.
Issues
* Economic globalisation and the increasing commercialisation of fresh water goods and services: deregulation, commodification, privatisation and liberalisation
* Public versus private provision of fresh water goods and services
* Water scarcity: a real crisis or an imbalance between production, distribution and consumption in the context of global capitalism? 
* Transnational water corporations and the enclosure of the fresh water commons
* The water lobby
* Global governance of the local commons
* Water and human rights
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Powerbase history
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Contributors are now working on articles.
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===References===
category:Water