What happens when water is commodified? Case study Mexico: dominant movements and alternative discourses in the access to water landscape

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Thesis

Reference

What happens when water is commodified? Case study Mexico:

dominant movements and alternative discourses in the access to water landscape

GREENE, Joshua

Abstract

This thesis examines the “bottled water paradigm,” where a market version of access to water replaces the traditional state-to-citizen water relationship. This is the case in Mexico, where safe drinking water is primarily provided by bottled water companies. Tracing the history of the bottled water industry in Mexico, this thesis examines the impact this commodified water has on working poor households in five regions of Mexico. Utilizing an economic survey and ethnographic case studies, this thesis interrogates this growing global trend under the lens of an expanded Social Reproduction Theory. Additionally, thesis shows how neoliberal water policies have converged with neoliberal housing and welfare policies to create the demand for this phenomenon. Specifically, this thesis finds that unregulated social housing policies relocating millions of Mexicans to vulnerable peripheral conditions lacking water infrastructure, and social welfare policies substituting state services with cash transfers, have combined to indirectly subsidize this industry.

GREENE, Joshua. What happens when water is commodified? Case study Mexico:

dominant movements and alternative discourses in the access to water landscape . Thèse de doctorat : Univ. Genève, 2021, no. SdS 161

DOI : 10.13097/archive-ouverte/unige:154585 URN : urn:nbn:ch:unige-1545850

Available at:

http://archive-ouverte.unige.ch/unige:154585

Disclaimer: layout of this document may differ from the published version.

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WHAT HAPPENS WHEN WATER IS COMMODIFIED?

Case Study Mexico: Dominant movements and alternative discourses in the access to water landscape.

Dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of Geneva in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor in Philosophy in Socioéconomie in the Geneva

School of Social Sciences

THÈSE

présentée à la Faculté des sciences de la société de l’Université de Genève par

Joshua Cullen Greene

sous la direction de Solène Morvant-Roux

pour l’obtention du grade de Docteur en sciences de la société mention socioéconomie

Membres du jury de thèse:

Prof. Jean-Michel Bonvin, President of the Jury, University of Geneva Prof. Armelle Choplin, Reviewer, University Geneva

Prof. Jaime Hoogesteger, Reviewer, Wageningen University (NL) Prof. Solène Morvant-Roux, Director of Thesis, University of Geneva

THÈSE NO 161

GENÈVE, 10 FÉVRIER 2021

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La Faculté des sciences de la société, sur préavis du jury, a autorisé l’impression de la présente thèse, sans entendre, par-là, émettre aucune opinion sur les propositions qui s’y trouvent énoncées et qui n’engagent

que la responsabilité de leur auteur.

Genève, le 10 février 2021 Le doyen

Bernard DEBARBIEUX

Impression d’après le manuscrit de l’auteur

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WHAT HAPPENS WHEN WATER IS COMMODIFIED?

Case Study Mexico: Dominant movements and alternative discourses in the access to water landscape.

This research was financed by the Swiss national Science Foundation (SNF)

Grant # PP00P1_163774

Directed by Dr. Solène Morvant-Roux

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RÉSUMÉ

Cette thèse met en évidence la manière dont les politiques sociales néolibérales de l’eau, piègent des millions de Mexicains, dans des conditions de vie marquées par des ressources en eau inadéquates. Nous montrons que cette situation conduit à accroitre la dépendance au marché et, in fine, à accentuer la pauvreté de ces franges des zones urbaines périphériques.

La recherche s’intéresse en premier lieu à l’identification de configurations hétérogènes d’espaces territoriaux et sociaux en réponse au paradigme de l’eau embouteillée (Greene, 2014, Greene, 2018, Greene et Morvant-Roux, 2020, Greene et Peixoto-Charles, TBP). Ce paradigme est défini comme la situation dans laquelle l’État renonce à la responsabilité de fournir de l’eau potable aux citoyens et facilite, voire subventionne la commercialisation et la marchandisation de cet espace. Après une étude 2013-2014 (Greene, 2014, 2018) portant sur les origines de l’industrie de l’eau embouteillée au Mexique, la thèse prolonge ce travail en interrogeant l’impact de cette évolution sur les ménages et les particuliers au Mexique.

Ce faisant, le travail éclaire le rôle des politiques de logement social comme principal moteur de cette situation. De 2000 à 2012, la diffusion de l’accès à la dette soutenue activement par le gouvernement et le développement de logements privés subventionnés ont poussé environ 20 millions de travailleurs mexicains pauvres (sous-prolétariat urbain) dans des espaces périphériques souvent caractérisés par de forts niveaux de pollution et par la pénurie d’eau qui en résulte. A cela s’ajoute la violence extrême; une pénurie de services publics et d’infrastructures contribuant à produire des conditions de vie très précaires et difficiles.

Sur le plan méthodologique, le travail combine différents outils de collecte d’information dans cinq localités différentes du Mexique: études de cas ethnographiques (15), une enquête sur les petites entreprises de l’eau (N: 78) et une enquête plus large sur l’économie et l’utilisation de l’eau auprès des ménages (n : 1000). A partir d’une approche située et ancrée dans la trajectoire longue, cette thèse retrace le déploiement du néolibéralisme au Mexique, en particulier dans le domaine du logement social, de la financiarisation, et de l’accès à l’eau.

Enfin, en utilisant et en développant la théorie de la reproduction sociale, cette thèse montre la manière dont la marchandisation et le néolibéralisme interagissent avec les dimensions monétaires comme les salaires, la dette ou avec les facteurs sociaux de la communauté, les services publics et les protections sociales ou l’environnement. En analysant les pratiques et le vécu des ménages face à des services publics mal gérés et marchandisés, les études de cas de cette thèse montrent 1) l’importance de la communauté et de l’environnement en tant que soutiens absolus de la qualité de vie; 2) la manière spécifique dont l’approvisionnement du marché en biens essentiels contribue à reproduire inégalités et à accentuer les dynamiques d’appauvrissement des populations très vulnérables; et 3) les difficultés que ce paradigme de l’eau embouteillée pour les ménages qui vivent de ressources monétaires limitées. Cette thèse renforce donc les travaux de Mosse (2004, 2010) montrant que la pauvreté est un fait relationnel, causé par les relations prédatrices entre les humains et les humains envers la nature. Le chapitre 7 portant sur les politiques néolibérales du logement au Mexique montre clairement que les politiques de logement social du Mexique ont créé de vastes opportunités pour mettre les populations vulnérables dans une situation de proies de

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promoteurs et d’agents sans scrupules. Il est également démontré que l’État, par le biais de subventions sociales, subventionne indirectement le paradigme de l’eau embouteillée, cela fait écho au travail de Lavinas (2017). De cette manière, cette thèse montre clairement l’État à la fois comme le promoteur et la force de soutien à ces marchés soi-disant libres, et comme l’architecte de cette crise.

Au total, cette thèse examine spécifiquement comment et à quel coût le paradigme de l’eau embouteillée du service de l’eau au Mexique (Greene, 2014; 2018) est incorporé dans le la reproduction sociale de la vie quotidienne des travailleurs, y compris la façon dont «les anecdotes inintéressantes et sans importance de la vie quotidienne […] de l’activité sociale mondaine, sont profondément impliquées dans la reproduction à long terme (et à grande échelle) des institutions »(Giddens, 1987: 44), en particulier le capitalisme. La forme élargie de la théorie de la reproduction sociale soutient que l’environnement est un facteur clé dans la détermination de la qualité de vie des ménages et des individus. Cette thèse se termine par l’examen des opportunités de changement présentées par ce paradigme.

L’une des forces de cette thèse réside dans sa capacité à comparer et à opposer les régions du Mexique où l’eau en bouteille compense les lacunes de l’approvisionnement public de l’eau.

Elle est néanmoins limitée dans sa capacité à illustrer le cas du Mexique de façon plus générale, mais ses conclusions sont révélatrices pour ce qu’elles donnent à voir et les résultats suggèrent de nombreuses lignes de recherche pour le futur. En comparant deux territoires de population similaire où l’eau en bouteille est largement consommée comme eau potable (par 100% et 91% de la population), et trois autres communautés indigènes, cette thèse montre ce qui se passe lorsque cette solution de marché est hors de portée (économiquement ou géographiquement, ou normativement interdite) pour la majorité de la population locale. Ces études de cas montrent clairement que la solution du marché n’est pas du tout une solution pour les communautés appauvries. L’observation finale est prédictive - suggérant que la situation illustre une crise de la reproduction sociale et donc que de nouvelles opportunités de reconfiguration sociale ne sont pas seulement possibles, mais qu’elles sont la seule option à venir.

Sur le plan théorique, cette thèse explore l’impact sur le ménage en suivant le deuxième produit de la circulation (Lebowitz, 1992), la création du travailleur : la source de travail, et donc, la production à la fois du travailleur et du système social dans lequel il est intégré. Pour ce faire, les résultats de cette thèse sont analysés à travers la théorie de la reproduction sociale (SRT) (Bhattacharya, 2017 ; McGregor, 2018, Fraser, 2017, Ferguson, 2017), montrant les charges accrues que les ressources vitales commercialisées imposent sur la capacité des personnes à mener leur vie, à réaliser leurs rêves ou même à atteindre la stabilité.

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ABSTRACT

This thesis examines the impact of commodified access to drinking water on household economies in contexts in Mexico where bottled water is the primary source of drinking water.

Utilizing an integrated Social Reproduction Theory framework, the research highlights the interaction between all non-wage forms of survival, such as debt, community and the environment. The analysis demonstrates how Mexico’s unregulated industrialization and social housing policies have pushed populations into dangerous peripheries and have created new forms of poverty and market dependency. This thesis relies on a comprehensive literature review and extensive fieldwork carried out in five communities and two regions of Mexico. In El Salto, Jalisco, one of Mexico’s industrial peripheries, this research shows how vulnerable populations become trapped, in this case on the banks of the Río Santiago, one of Mexico’s most contaminated rivers. This region is compared with circumstances in a growing tourism center in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas. Parallel developments of manufacturing and the tourism industry, along with federal housing policies contextualize the conditions unfolding throughout Mexico where populations are relocated to areas without adequate water and where drinking water is supplied by bottled water companies.

The inclusion of three poor farming communities in the study shows this solution leaves the poor to fend for themselves. This contribution highlights why an expanded SRT framework is valuable for understanding the relationship between ecological dispossession and the forced reliance on markets and debt.

Image 1: Market provision of drinking water in El Salto, Mexico, depends on independent actors: 80% of sales come from the informal sector.

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DEDICATION

This work is dedicated to my wonderful Ana, our inspiring daughter Juliana, and our great families. To all our relations.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:

This work is dedicated to my great mentors who have shared their hearts with me and taught me so much. Thank you first of all to Dr. Solène Morvant-Roux for bringing me on to her team and providing me the guidance and space needed to accomplish so much. Thank you as well to the National Science Foundation which financed this research and provided me the opportunity to study in Geneva, Switzerland, truly an amazing opportunity. Special thanks to Dr. Maria Eugenia Santana Echeagaray and family for hosting me in Chiapas. Thank you to the many mentors I have made along this journey, specifically Dr. Norman Long, Dr. Alberto Arce, Dr. David Eaton, Dr. Bryan Roberts, Dr. Gabriel Torres, Dr. Magdalena Villarreal and Dr. Morvant-Roux. Your generosity towards me sets a high standard which I will attempt to emulate. Thank you as well to the members of my committee for their excellent insight, Dr. Jean-Michel Bonvin; Dr. Armelle Choplin; Dr. Jaime Hoogesteger.

Additionally, to my great friends who have supported me on my way: Corky Kershner, Ian Carmody, John Rote, Pablo de la Peña, Robert Hamlin and Dr. Francesco Laruffa who keep it real and have pushed me, each in their own way.

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PART I.

GENERAL INTRODUCTION TO A BOTTLED WATER WORLD

“The lesson of history is that in the tumultuous adjustment that surely lies ahead, those societies that find the most innovative responses to the crisis are most likely to come out as winners while the others fall behind.” (Solomon, 2010, p. 5)

This thesis shows the impact of commodified water on the sphere of social reproduction. In its absence, water is everything. As the market provision of water in the form of bottled and packaged water increasingly replaces publicly available tap water, specifically for drinking water in rapidly urbanizing regions in Latin America (Pacheco-Vega, 2019), Asia (Kooy &

Walter, 2019) and Africa (Semey et. al, 2020), this thesis offers important insight into the specific iterations of this development at the household level in Mexico. Through the use of an expanded Social Reproduction Theory (SRT), as promoted by Bhattacharya (2017), expanded to include the environment, this thesis shows the interaction of life supporting factors, including, but going beyond, wages and financial debt, to consider the centrality of social protections, public services, the community, and the environment. Utilizing surveys and ethnographic case studies in Mexico, where bottled water is the primary source of drinking water for the entire population (World Health Organization [WHO]

& The United Nations Children’s Fund [UNICEF], 2017; IDB, 2011), SRT brings our focus to the obligation of this development as experienced at the household level. Utilizing historically and politically contextualized ethnographic case studies this thesis reveals how neoliberal policies aimed at helping the poor have instead stabilized and subsidized markets.

Important drivers of the bottled water paradigm in Mexico have been the neoliberal social housing policies pushing and locking millions of Mexicans into peripheral conditions where water scarcity and extreme contamination are common simultaneously stabilizing secondary securitized markets (Marosi, 2017; Soederberg, 2014); and neoliberal welfare policies giving minimal cash support for previously decommodified services (Lavinas, Image 2: Water shops throughout El Salto, Mexico, buy water, filter it, and then sell it to vendors and residents.

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2017). Evidence presented here shows that cash welfare payments in Mexico directly subsidize bottled water consumption at levels far greater than the Mexican state invests in providing high quality drinking water to the population.

What happens to the living conditions of everyday citizens when access to water is commodified? One would assume market access to a scarce resource necessary for survival would result in rationing within households limiting the amount of water that they consume.

If this were true, and preliminary evidence shows that this is indeed the case, this will remain a fruitful direction for continued research as all indicators point to increasing scarcity in the coming decades (Veolia & IFPRI, 2015, UNEP, 2016, WWF, 2018, UNESCO World Water Assessment Program, 2018; 2019; 2020). While they approach the topic from a different direction both Pacheco-Vega (2019) and Kooy and Walter (2019) problematize the bottled water paradigm as being depoliticized, arising outside of the realm of democratic policy making, despite the fact that it is deeply political. This accentuates Mosse’s (2010, p. 1157) observation that “exploitation and injustice persist because of the effects of power within the wider political system that render them invisible, and which organize the interests of the poorest out of politics.” As capital continues penetrating into previously uncommodified space (Jaffee & Newman, 2013), this research results in three key findings: 1) The turn to the market for provision of water does not resolve the question of how to provide access to water for the poor; 2) By linking two distinct surveys of both water consumers and providers this research shows the importance of the mass emergence of water providers, small businesses dedicated to selling water to the working poor; 3) By tracing expenses and income of actual households, this thesis shows the degree to which the federal government is indirectly subsidizing this model of water provision through means tested, and conditional cash, transfers. This shows again that neoliberal governance does not represent the withdrawal of the state as popularly conceptualized, but instead involves massive actions by the state, reorganizing society along the needs of capital, markets, and distant transnational actors.

This thesis shows that despite abandoning the responsibility of providing safe drinking water to all, the state has abrogated the roll to the market, all the while creating the conditions that enable it through, defacto industrial deregulation (McCulligh, 2017) and debt based social housing policies that pushed the working poor into peripheral conditions characterized by scarcity and contamination (Marosi, 2017; Chen, 2018; Reyes Ruiz del Cueto, 2018), normalizing bottled water through the recommendations of state doctors who recommend sick patients buy more expensive and thus “safer” water, all the while indirectly subsidizing its purchase to a higher degree than it directly subsidizes the provision and management of water for the entire nation.

This is a particularly relevant subject given recent debates over the capitalocene (Moore, 2016). Concerns about the planet’s waters represent five of the nine planetary boundaries.¹ These are thresholds beyond which we begin to encounter significant risks to human

1 Ocean acidification, geochemical nitrogen and phosphorus, global freshwater use, biodiversity loss, and chemical pollution all involve water; the other four are climate change, stratospheric ozone, land system change, and atmospheric aerosol loading.

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civilization (Rockström et al., 2009; Steffen, 2015). While it is commonly agreed that there is still time (but it is running out) to prevent the worst outcome of crossing these thresholds on a global level, many regions throughout the world have already crossed over, wastelanded (the “discursive practice that justifies the waste dumping in the hydro-social landscape”

(Leifsen, 2017, p. 346)) as development discourse continues to insist the economy is more necessary than the environment or communities. Even though the costs are becoming harder and harder to justify, as the “increasing demand for natural resources and ecosystem services,” grows in tandem with the ecological burdens that go with it: from extraction, manufacturing and waste creation. “For the past twenty years, we have continued to accelerate quite knowingly, destroying the Earth system at an ever faster pace,” (Servigne &

Stevens, 2020, p. 12).

Globally, water resources are widely recognized to be in crisis (2030 World Resource Group [WRG], 2009; Bank of America [BOA] & Meryll Lynch, 2011, p. 1; Addams et al., 2009; Veolia and International Food Policy Research Institute [IFRI], 2015; United Nations Environment Program UNEP, 2016; World Wildlife Foundation [WWF], 2018;

2020; United Nations Educational, Scientif and Cultural Organization [UNESCO], 2020).

Overall global demand for water is growing while widespread contamination is limiting available resources (BOA & Merrill Lynch, 2011; UNEP, 2016; WWF, 2020). While it has been recognized that market failures have created this situation – the failure of free markets to price in the real social and ecological costs of development (Daly, 1993) – governments have continued their turn to the market to solve the water crisis (Roberts, 2008). This is the setting in which the bottled water paradigm is becoming a primary source of drinking water around the globe, in contexts where public drinking water has never been universal (Kooy & Walter, 2019, p. 31) or, as in Mexico, where it has been unable to keep up with the densification of the periphery (Greene & Morvant-Roux, 2020).

This thesis takes on conditions in Mexico, where environmental water quality issues have reached anthropocenic/capitalocenic (Kolbert, 2014; Moore, 2016) intensities and where markets have become primary modes of accessing safe drinking water. In Mexico, while the ecological damage has been ongoing for several decades (Kate, 1993), the crisis has grown as social housing policies have moved millions into these peripheral urban regions where water resources are insufficient (Marosi, 2017).

This thesis contributes to the literature on several levels. First it applies an expanded version of social reproduction theory to ethnographic case studies, illustrating the analytical value of the development of the theory by Bhattacharya (2017), along with many others (Katz, 2004, Ferguson, 2017; McNally, 2017; Fine, 2017; Fraser, 2013; 2016; 2017; McGregor, 2018).

Social Reproduction Theory allows us to tease out the non-wage factors that contribute to household well-being. The theory is in direct relation to Marxist labor theory, but instead of looking at the importance of labor to the creation of capital, it begins by asking how labor is produced. Through the elaboration of social reproduction factors, first presented in Greene and Morvant-Roux (2020), the application of this theory in case studies allows a vision of how factors interact, how they are manipulated and incorporated into specific assemblages of

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strategies for survival at the household level. SRT, coming from Marxist feminist literature, has been mostly defined through global visions of how labor is exploited in relation to the realization of production into capital by the household (Harvey, 2014; 2018), and through the unpaid activities of the family and community. These theorists all keep the analysis at the global, abstract level and this thesis builds on their work while bringing the analysis to the ground level of households and individuals.

Fraser (2013, p. 7) describes the squeeze put on households through financialization of debt and the commodification of services as “the evisceration of democracy and assault on social reproduction” which she sees these as “struggles over needs.”

One tendency with theorists of Social Reproduction Theory has been to quantify the value of the unpaid care work that goes into sustaining the family at the household level.

These studies have shown changes in the sphere of unpaid labor over time as represented by Moos (2019), or as the result of policy (Rai et al., 2014). A more complicated version, Fine (2017) divines a function of the social reproduction sphere as an inverse function to the wage (as wages decrease unpaid labor increases). Harvey (2018) declares this an ontological error. Wherein, for him, value is something created through the marketplace, through socially necessary labor, the marketplace is a social arrangement where exploitation and extraction from value is the law. He calls these spheres of non-wage contributions to the household “anti-capital,” and rather than risk them to the logic of markets, he suggests shielding them from markets and focusing instead on the construction of non- capitalistic spheres of exchange.

This thesis adopts Harvey’s position, but while Harvey only hints at the importance of these anti-capital spheres, this thesis examines these spheres in the lives of families and shows the importance of the environment and community, not as economically valued assets, but as life providing resources. Simultaneously, there is growing recognition of debt as a central factor of social reproduction in our era (Graeber, 2011; Soederberg, 2014; Federici, 2016;

Lavinas, 2018). The centrality of financial debt to the growth paradigm and its reliance on debt finance is recognized as representing an existential threat to humanity and other living systems (Servigne and Stevens, 2020, p. 82).

Secondly, this thesis joins the access to water literature in both understanding the neoliberal water management paradox, as well rapidly unfolding bottled water paradigm.

The neoliberal paradox, at least as it has unfolded in Latin America, has been the increase of direct cash support for previously decommodified services (Lavinas, 2017). The bottled water paradigm (Greene, 2018) is the growing global phenomenon of bottled water as a primary source for clean drinking water (Jaffee & Newman, 2013; WHO & UNICEF, 2017; Kooy &Walter, 2019).

The water literature has widely focused on the move towards privatizing government services (Hawkins, 2017; Greene, 2018), and specifically the idea of water, independent of its provision, as a right, or as Bakker (2010) would say, an emblem of citizenship. In the last three years new

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literature attempting to grapple with the bottled water paradigm has emerged, but much of it continues to wrestle with Wilks’ (2006) analysis of bottled water as a consumer choice issue (Pacheco-Vega, 2019; Kooy & Walter, 2019; Hawkins, 2017). In Greene (2014) I elaborated on why this line of reasoning is not apt for context such as Mexico’s where tap water is widely perceived as dangerous. In case studies provided, specifically during long periods without tap water, bottled water becomes the only available water.

In the literature which takes this phenomenon seriously, there is a tendency to come at the issue from a top down approach, looking at global or national statistics, interviewing water leaders, directors of service operations, and from an analysis of policy trends (Wilks, 2006; Gleick, 2007; 2010; 2012; Pacheco-Vega, 2019). This leaves room for contributions on the ground level examining how households experience this crisis. By showing the actual mechanisms which bring increasing numbers of Mexican citizens into conditions lacking adequate water through financial inclusion and debt, this thesis bring urgent attention to the fact that cash-poor households are experiencing degrees of water rationing. In light of the context encountered in the field, with diminishing public (funding) support for household supplies of safe drinking water, we can interpret Pacheco-Vega’s analysis as signaling the inevitable growth of the industry, concluding (2019, p. 25): “Bottled water is an effect and a cause for water insecurity. Poorly maintained infrastructure, weak regulatory regimes, powerful branding and strong marketing campaigns and poorly regulated industries can sustain and strengthen their market dominance.” This thesis clearly builds on Pacheco- Vega’s work, but from an ethnographic stance, showing the way this scarcity is produced at the household level. While this thesis does not answer all of the questions raised by the rise and inevitability of this model of water distribution, it is a strong contribution by establishing references that can be built upon by further research.

Montero-Contreras (2015; 2017) also has produced important studies looking at the growth of bottled water and specifically the roll of local small water providers operating in the shadows of the transnational bottled water market. This thesis builds on Montero- Contreras’ work and allows for comparability between similar peripheral regions. It must be stated that both Montero-Contreras (2015) and Pacheco-Vega (2017; 2019) work from a perspective that assumes citizens do not know the quality of their water, and they suggest that in fact the water quality throughout municipalities in Mexico is higher than households assume it is. This perspective leads to the conclusion that the problem is the lack of information for consumers to make decisions whether to drink tap water or bottled water, not the lack of clean water. While this is an important aspect of poor water management in Mexico, the five study regions examined in this thesis represent counter arguments showing that at least in the two bigger regions and two of the three small regions, water quality is a true concern and the real driver of the market. By bringing the lens of focus to the level of human practice this thesis concretizes and brings out nuances in the policy level analysis to the concrete.

The third contribution of this thesis lies in bringing the ethnographic lens to the study of life in the capitalocene (Moore, 2016). As planetary thresholds have already been crossed

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(Steffen et. al. 2015), it is essential that we know what is happening at the frontier, where toxic chemical exposure, untreated wastewater, water scarcity and dispossessing capital are all interacting (Leifsen, 2017; Greene & Morvant-Roux, 2020).

One of the strengths of this thesis is in its ability to compare and contrast regions of Mexico where bottled water compensates for the short-comings of public water service. There are limitations in its inability to represent the general case of Mexico, but its findings are revelatory for what they show and the results provide direct for lines of profitable investigation. The focus in this thesis compares two similarly populated territories where bottled water is widely consumed for drinking water (by 100% and 91% of the population). Additionally, three indigenous communities are included to show what happens when this market solution is out of reach (economically or geographically or both), or normatively forbidden, for the majority of the local population. These case studies show clearly that the market solution is no solution at all for impoverished communities. The final observation is predictive – suggesting that the situation has arrived at a crisis in social reproduction and thus new opportunities for social reconfiguration are not only possible, but they are the only option.

This thesis is divided into three parts. The first part consists of an introduction to the research questions, the methodology and the theoretical positioning of this research. This section provides an introduction to the global water crisis showing that the true costs of modernity are hidden by the invisibilization of peripheral conditions. Population growth in urban peripheries in the developing world is the fastest growing geographic trend and continued forecasts of water scarcity represents a growing concern for these regions.

Methodologically, this research is represented by a fusion of qualitative and quantitative methods, based on a territorial survey of water providers (N: 77); a comparative consumer survey carried out in five locations (N: 1000); ethnographic case studies carried out in four of the five locations, key informant interviews with local, regional and national and international experts, activists, and authorities. This is followed by a literature review of social reproduction theory and the building of an analytical framework that allows the theory to be applied. Arguing for an expanded synthesis of Social Reproduction Theory, the work is framed in a way that allows us to visualize what Fraser (2012, p. 5) identifies as the three intertwined crises of our time, the ecological crisis, the financialization crisis, and the social reproduction crisis. Part two of this thesis contextualizes the research, showing first how the pro-poor discourses around water aligned powerful interests around the need to manage water by treating it as an economic good. This is followed by the elaboration of the context in which this discourse was being enunciated, neoliberalism. The subject of neoliberalism is central to the theme of access to water as civilization has historically been organized around water access, distribution and management (Solomon, 2010). As Roberts writes (2008, p. 545): “That the neoliberal transformations taking place in the water sector constitute acts of dispossession, or primitive accumulation, is clear—as they have led to the transfer of publicly owned resources and/or services to the private sector, to the removal of questions of distribution from public debate, to the reduction or elimination of subsidies for the poorest users, and in many cases, to an increase in rates and to service cut-offs— and has been well noted in both the literature on water and on primitive accumulation.” This

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part concludes with a look at the specific expression of neoliberalism in the water sector in Mexico. The third part presents the thesis’ five study regions, results from an exhaustive survey among small water providers, and 15 case studies. As this thesis was produced as part of a team the quantitative results from the large household consumer survey are elaborated in detail in the forthcoming work of Peixoto-Charles, this thesis presents the most pertinent results showing the survey sample representivity, sample size and relevant findings regarding bottled water consumption and rationing. Part Three is divided into studies of regions.

This research began asking questions in the industrial periphery of Guadalajara, in Western Mexico, while the other regions, San Cristobal de Las Casas, Zinacantán, Amatenango del Valle, and Chanal, were included for comparative purposes. Each case study is presented utilizing SRT showing how access to water is experienced at the household level. This thesis travels through two regions and five localities in Mexico where the neoliberalization of water has resulted in diverse social configurations exhibiting degrees of water commodification and access to markets. These locations are extreme encounters in the interface between unfolding versions of modernity, where contamination, violence and poverty contextualize current peripheral conditions in this current era of mass extinction (Kolbert, 2014). It is argued in this thesis that because these conditions are both expanding and accelerating that these extremes must be grappled with (UNEP, 2016; Servigne and Stevens, 2020). While this thesis portrays an ominous trend, an unfolding reality where water is purchased from vendors who charge “what the market will bear,” the intention is to not to reproduce this as an inevitable universal realty, but instead to provide a clear view of how it is unfolding, tracing both the origins and consequences of this development. The third part concludes with an analysis of the way this development interacts in the sphere of social reproduction showing that cash strapped working poor are forced to reprioritize their expenses in order to afford water. The thesis concludes with a discussion on the actions at the local level that are reorganizing this social reproduction sphere, specifically by fighting for the environment and building community.

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CHAPTER 1. ACCESS TO WATER IN THE PERIPHERY

This chapter introduces humanity at a crossroads, a human-nature crisis, that may, depending on which road is taken, define the future of civilization.

The chapter begins by pointing out the human dimension to the global water crisis that is happening, increasingly, on the periphery, and how our discourse of growth and a linear view of progress invisibilizes these struggles, these spaces, and these people. The mass population movements to peri-urban areas continue to bring people to where the conditions are the most severe (UN Habitat, 2010; 2016). This lived household water crisis is evidenced by the fact that growing numbers of regions face “water starvation,” characterized by an insufficient supply of water, and less than continuous flow of household water (Totsuka et al., 2004). This is followed by an introduction to the rise of the bottled water paradigm, which

provides market access to drinking water but which extracts wealth from nation. This brief introduction to the global bottled water context shows that this paradigm is growing rapidly, re-establishing citizen-state relationships, but which responds to the needs of capital to expand in a limited worse. In this sense the growth of the bottled water paradigm traverses social reproduction spheres, going from a state managed and God-given resource to one with a price per liter. The chapter then presents an introduction and justification for bringing the focus of the study to Mexico and the story of bottled water in Mexico. Mexico represents the perfect storm of neoliberalism with unregulated industry contaminating available water supplies, financial inclusion policies pushing the working poor population into dangerous peripheral conditions, and the bottled water industry tapping into it all.

The final section states the importance of coming to grips with this phenomena as two conflicting paradigms. On the one hand, the dwindling availability of water resources for actual human consumption; and on the other, the movement of capital into the sector with its own set of needs and requirements.

Poverty and inequality are embedded in social structures that define, in so many ways, what it means to be modern (Pilling, 2018). It is frequently suggested that modernity has brought improvements in the human condition, that we have more material comforts, and that we live

Image 3: this neighborhood water shop offers free water to children as they pass

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longer than 100 years ago (Straubhaar, 2003; Krugman et al., 2016; Roser, 2019; Banerjee &

Duflo, 2020). However, as this study shows, averages only distort our understanding of the reality at hand, not to mention its scale. The sheer scale of the depravations of modernity, the invisiblized, the dispossessed, the mass migrations, the refugees, the malnourished, the over- indebted, the desperate, the exposed, and the thirsty, are intimately related to the sheer scale of the accumulation of capital – which is a specific and central characteristic of modernity (Berman, 1981; Douglas, 2007; Bracking, 2009; Shiva, 2002; Sassen, 2014; Harvey, 2018).

The distance between those who indeed have never had it better and the masses of low-paid producers at the tail end of the commodity chain is tremendous (Krugman et al., 2016;

Hickel, 2020). The invisibilization of these people and these places happens where the riskiest, dirtiest and most destructive of modern human’s productive capacities are carried out. Furthermore, the desperate poverty of these regions creates a tension between the need for jobs and environmental protections (Martinez-Alier, 2002; Hickel, 2018). We can think of these as purposefully hidden from view, hidden from the story of who we moderns are, but we can also think of it as the negation of these populations in the story of our time, a process Spivak (1988) sees as an act of “obliteration.”

Densely populated, these landscapes are central to the production needs of the modern core. The inequalities in pay and working conditions between the core and these peripheral areas are so divergent that ironically, labor in these areas is alienated even from consumption of the goods they produce. Workers in one of the study regions, El Salto, Jalisco, Mexico, earn in the range of $75-$150 USD per week (Survey 2018) working six days per week in transnational and Mexican manufacturing firms making chemicals, plastics, vehicle parts, tools and computer chips that they can never afford. In the other urban study area, 60% of workers in San Cristobal de Las Casas, primarily employed in the tourism industry, earn less than $50 USD per week, serving meals they could never afford to eat and tending hotel rooms they could never afford to stay in (Trujillo-Rincon, 2015). These periphery environments exist in all industrialized contexts but its expression is starkest in states where neoliberalism has weakened social protections and public services, and where weak and corrupt governance regimes have dominated (Biswas et al., 2012; Chen et al., 2018).

The geography and sociology literature refer to the contested idea of the periphery as a global manifestation of gross relationships between producers and owners, labor and capital, supply and demand, rich and poor (Wallerstein, 1987). Other theories tease out the explicit character of these relationships spotlighting issues of power (Varoufakis, 2016), finance (Tooze, 2019), military dominance (Findlay & O’Rourke, 2009; Kennedy, 1987), hegemony (Chomsky, 2003), and discourse and agency (Boelens, 1998; Long, 2001; Fraser, 2013). But only through empirical research can we come to understand that these relationships are not just global in nature but also actively (and heterogeneously) reproduced on the local level (Cancian, 1992; Vernooy, 2001; Long, 2000, p. 189; Arce & Long, 2005, p. 377; Çalışkan

& Callon, 2009; Van der Ploeg, 2011, p. 168). While the tale of urbanization has been widely told and proclaimed as a shift from traditional to modernity, from civic exclusion to inclusion, from the bucolic to high-tech, each of these versions of our story, becomes a mythical representation of the change at hand, epically misleading and contributing to the invisibilization of these people, a huge portion of humanity (Berman, 1981).

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The general story of the developing world getting wealthier through economic growth appears to overlook how this growth simultaneously creates difficult living conditions. The shift in population in recent decades, throughout the globe, has been to these peri-urban environments. These environments are defined by the lack of access to the benefits that urbanization presupposes.

The global forces ‘pushing’ people from the countryside – mechanization of agriculture in Java and India, food imports in Mexico, Haiti, and Kenya, civil war and drought throughout Africa, and everywhere the consolidation of small holdings into large ones and the competition of industrial-scale agribusiness – seem to sustain urbanization even when the “pull” of the city is drastically weakened by debt and economic depression. As a result, rapid urban growth in the context of structural adjustment, currency devaluation, and state retrenchment has been an inevitable recipe for the mass production of slums. —Davis (2006, p. 17) These rapidly emerging and expanding semi-urban contexts are isolating, alienating, and dangerous. The UN estimates that 1 billion humans now live in these peri-urban environments, lacking access to key rights, protections and public services (UN Habitat, 2016). Globally it is also estimated that 1 billion people completely lack access even to the pipes, with or without water. Then, in what some call a “pipe dream,” despite having pipes, another 2 billion people currently lack daily water flow (Totsuk et al., 2004; Vairavamoorthy, 2018). In India, for example, service averages 3 hours per day – and this is for the 49% of the 1339 million people who have access (Dahasahasra, 2018). This is a concrete example of a phenomenon that is recognized as increasing throughout the developing world “under water starving conditions” (Totsuka et al., 2004; Vairavamoorthy, 2018). Additionally, even when there is water, “at least” 2 billion are thought to consume water contaminated by fecal matter (WHO & UNICEF, 2019). These categories are not exclusive but regardless, the numbers are impressive: 10% of the world completely lacks access; 25% drinks dirty water; 25%

lacks continuous service, 25% lack sanitation services (UNEP, 2016). Furthermore, these regions are heavily polluted and it is estimated that globally one in four live in conditions that put their personal health at risk (UN Habitat, 2016). This physical reality is a clash of development paradigms, as urbanization is taking place in peripheral spaces, but these are the exact same spaces that former development models favored pushing these problematic (polluting) productive activities to – on the fringes of the urban core. This is compounded by the fact that environmental movements of the 1970s pushed the dirtiest of these industries out of the developed world and into these so-called peripheral-nations. “The result today is a world in which every nook and cranny bears the impress of capital’s toxification,” writes Moore (2015, p. 271). Porter (1999) says it is the most vulnerable who suffer, because they are powerless. “The poor living in and around major industrial concentrations, who are the main victims of industrial pollution in these countries, have not gained sufficient political power to offset the clout of the socioeconomic and political forces arrayed against their interests,” (1999, p. 142). Exposure to dangerous living conditions without basic services and protections is an expression of vulnerability and a definition of poverty, and this thesis explores exactly that. This exposure has consequences: worldwide about “4 billion cases

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of diarrhea are caused by the ingestion of contaminated water” (UNEP, 2016; Onda et al., 2012, p. 17).

These industries pollute not just the air, but the water as well. The UNEP (2016) currently estimates that the world’s water resources are under direct threat from the globalized consumption and production system. “The quality of surface waters used for household water supply in many parts of the developing world continues to deteriorate,” (2016, p.

89). Pollution, both from increased agricultural intensity and industrial output, and at points of extraction and production all the way through to consumption and disposal/

return to the environment is increasing. The UN’s most recent Snapshot of the World’s Water Quality (2016) directly attributes this contamination to the practices of humans (such as agrochemical food production), the lack of wastewater treatment for domestic and industrial discharges, and increasingly from the decomposing leachate material waste of our garbage (UNEP, 2016).²

While we tout the version of modernity and generalized progress, it’s important to keep these numbers in mind – especially when we consider the evidence that shows improving conditions since 1900, when in 1900, there were fewer than two billion people on the planet.

Despite progress bringing access to larger numbers of people, simultaneously more people lack water today than ever before. The consequences of modernity are not just felt by the poor, increasingly exposed to contamination, but by the environment in general. Species of plants and animals and aquatic life are in a state of “catastrophic decline” (WWF, 2018, p. 5) and the situation is general, confirmed by the telling of the 6th Extinction (Kolbert, 2014) and the debates therein of the Anthropocene or Capitalocene (Moore, 2016). As we weigh the progress and potentials that modernity has brought, not to mention the risks (Giddens, 1994) it is important that we do not lose sight of these costs.

In his analogy of Faust and the Faustian bargain as a window through which to understand the logic of capitalism and modern development, Berman (1981) writes that while we admire the great accomplishments of civilization we must never turn our gaze away from those who pay the price. It is not just the lack of urban water services that create this condition where so many lack water, but the increasing production of goods and the mismanagement of waste.

To ignore this would be to continue to invisibilize (Herzog, 2018) and thus historically and presently, obliterate (Spivak, 1988), a huge swath of humanity. “The vicious circle of physical invisibilization and silencing seems to seriously exacerbate the suffering of those marginalized groups who have entered the public sphere and the decision-making process, making it a question of fundamental justice to shatter those very processes of silencing and invisibilization” (Herzog, 2018, p. 13-14).

In this thesis the concept of inequality and water poverty are interrogated as not only constructs, because they are not, but as constructions (consequences) of a paradigm that

2 The report states that in Latin America about one quarter of all rivers are severely contaminated: a fifth to a quarter of all of Africa’s and a third to a half of those in Asia.

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portrays itself as the ongoing linear, ahistorical march towards progress. The thesis locates the most basic form of poverty, that of vulnerabilities (Moser, 2009, p. 19), and brings this lack of access to clean water and the inability to protect oneself from exposure to dangerous contamination, into the heterogeneous literature of how to assess and understand poverty.

The issue of contamination and scarcity go hand in hand, and in the two main study areas that this thesis tackles, communities facing water scarcity have a seriously contaminated river flowing through their territory – water that is no longer fit for human consumption. In the background, and explored in this thesis, is the context in which global institutions are recognizing commodified water as a possible solution to this large-scale governance problem (WHO & UNICEF, 2017; Greene, 2018).

Despite empirical evidence to the contrary, the main discourse about access to water has been dominated by the narrative that the situation is improving. This is clear in the way international development goals are scored. The Millennium Development Goals appear to have been achieved. In the case of Mexico, the entire population appears to enjoy access to safe drinking water. In the case of the MDGs, the metric assessed whether households have access to pipes and plumbing regardless of whether there is water. In this sense the metrics employed by the development discourse can obscure this growing reality (Godinez-Madrigal et al., 2018; Godinez-Madrigal et al., 2020; Clasen, 2012).³ The inclusion of bottled water as a form of access for achieving the Sustainable Development Goal (SDGs) 6.1: Universal Access to Safe Drinking Water is a further example of this (WHO & UNICEF, 2017, p. 12).

These metrics, appearing neutral in the foreground, can be deconstructed to show how the epistemologies, from which they flow, either reproduce or challenge power (Boelens, 2015).

Exploring the issue of water as an economic good, this thesis deconstructs the way these discourses are inseparable from the neoliberal context they are embedded in.

In the same moment that the discourse is hijacked by an economic logic embedded in rationalism but not in empiricism (i.e. in the same moment that the world plays with the numbers and brings pipes instead of water to the poor without either) both the scale and scope of the problem grows. Increasing proportions of national and urban populations are living in these deteriorating peri-urban environments. In Mexico, where this research is carried out, 22% of the population now lives in new housing developments predominantly defined by these periphery peri-urban conditions (Reyes Ruiz del Cueto 2018, p. 75). The problem is twofold. First, continued urban expansion has brought demand for first time water service connections beyond the reach of already existing infrastructure (OECD, 2009). Secondly, the lack of reinvestment in civic infrastructure has resulted in the decreasing quality and reliability in urban environments (OECD, 2009; Hasley, 2013). While this thesis will address the making of this world through the discourse of the powerful actors that are creating and reproducing these spaces, not to mention capitalizing, accumulating, externalizing, and dispossessing within these spaces, the main focus of this thesis is to understand how this

3 Godinez-Madrigal et al. (2020) show that even the most neutral appearing metrics, such as models calculating the physical flow of water in a river are highly political and reproduce social orders of inequality and power.

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undeniable form of poverty is experienced and the strategies that people undertake to cope with their own disparate realities. Households, composed of workers, families, children, elders, and youth in turn, make do. But what does that mean and how does that play out?

As an investigator carrying out ethnographic research in a number of projects in this region, and a student of actor-agency theory (Long, 2001) I became interested in the sublime, the absurdity of a bottled water world where it was completely normalized, habitualized, and even ritualized. As I travelled throughout the country I began to ask about local water practices and as a field investigator I began to include questions about household water, or the lack thereof, into lines of questioning looking at difficulties and costs in accessing safe water. I also began looking at how different individuals and groups created distinct configurations of reality underneath this bottled water paradigm (Greene, 2014; 2018). In community after community, polluted water was named as the biggest threat to household survival. Despite the argument made by Nobel Prize winning economists such as Banerjee and Duflo (2020) who say “the last few decades have been remarkably good for the world’s poor” in these communities on the front-line of the ecological crisis where we have crossed planetary boundaries, children are sick (Dominguez-Cortinas, 2019), living in deplorable conditions, and lacking even the most basic human need, access to life itself: enough clean water to drink.

In this context it is important to recognize the agency of actors in this space. Despite the fact that individuals and households frequently embody the neoliberal discourse that has objectified them and subjected them to this reality, seeking out individual solutions to this rather global problem, they also actively engage in transforming the limits of their reality and creating space for maneuver. “If therefore, we recognize that we are dealing with multiple realities’, potentially conflicting social and normative interests, and diverse and fragmented bodies of knowledge, then we must … look closely at the issue of whose interpretations of models … prevail over those of other actors and under what conditions” (Long and Villarreal, 1993, p. 26-7).

CHAPTER 1.1. FROM THE NEOLIBERAL PROJECT TO BOTTLED WATER

This section locates this thesis as the second part of an investigation looking at the rise of the bottled water industry and the bottled water paradigm (Greene, 2018) in Mexico.

This section then discusses the bottled water industry as a hegemonic project that forms part of the broader need of capitalism to traverse limits and expand into previously decommodified spaces. This is followed by a discussion of the industry’s rate of growth and the need to understand this as a rapidly unfolding global reality. Section 1.2.3.

introduces its iteration in Mexico.

In previous work, carried out from 2013-14, for the completion of a master’s degree in Global Policy Studies (Greene, 2014; and subsequently published as Greene, 2018), I examined the rise of the bottled water industry in Mexico. This work revealed the industry as part of a hegemonic project currently being carried out by a handful of transnational corporations.

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The intentions of these corporations have not been hidden. Gleick documents how bottled water companies have declared war against public tap systems and gives numerous examples of the discourse reflecting as much. Particularly suggestive are direct quotes from industry leaders. Pepsi Co. Chairman Robert Morrison once stated [as quoted by Gleick (2010, p.

11)]: “The biggest enemy is tap water. We’re not against tap water – we think it just has a place. We think it’s good for irrigation and cooking.” Morrison concludes, if there is really a war between tap and bottled water, based on the industry’s growth, “the bottled water companies have been winning.”

Elmore (2012) reminds us corporations have long used the strong arm of the government for their own ends. In the piecing together the history of Coca-Cola’s rise on the international scene he shows how they became primary proponents for government investment in standardized water treatment. They then ensured their ability to expand in these new markets, locating their bottling plants next to the municipal water treatment facilities.

“Revisionist historians interested in challenging the myth of corporate autogenesis have largely overlooked municipal public waterworks expansion in the Progressive Era as a critical state intervention that reduced supply-side costs for mass-marketing firms” (2012, p. 12). Instead, Elmore’s history tells us that in the first half of the 20th Century Coca- Cola was married to US national and international development policies, steering public resources to the development of public water supplies, first in the United States and then in Mexico, which then allowed them to “externalize expenses related to hydrological resource extraction and transport” (Elmore, 2012, p. 26). The logic changed throughout the 20th C.

Whereas in 1932, executives argued that “any water which is pure enough from a sanitary point of view to be used by cities and communities is pure enough for the beverage industry,”

(2012, p. 42), by the middle of the century they were seeing the “deteriorating quality of municipal water supplies and increasing awareness of environmental problems would be forcing factors in the future growth of the bottled water business” (2012, p. 50-1). The company had moved full circle, from promoting public water supplies as a way to lower their business costs to planning how to capitalize on the economic crisis of a lack of investments in public water systems. Even in 1971, Coca-Cola executives were predicting an, “the future quality of public water supplies in the U.S. will continue to deteriorate, thereby generating for bottled water an increasing quality advantage” (2012, p. 51).

Over the past two decades, bottled water’s worldwide growth rate has been the envy of many investment sectors. Beginning in the early 2000s annual reports from Coca-Cola, Danone, Pepsi and Nestle all began to report high earnings and massive investments and expectation for this new development (Coca-Cola, 2002; Danone, 2008; Nestle, 2003, 2004; Coca-Cola FEMSA 2002-6; Castano, 2012). While the initial growth was slow in absolute terms, high returns to initial investors created a rush to scale. As Holt (2012, p. 249) writes, “once bottled water became a key profit center these companies did everything in their power to sustain the institutional underpinnings of the market.” Gleick explains the growth in the so called “developed world” as occurring because of increased perception that tap water was impure during a time of increased awareness of health. “Those of us who live in the richer nations of the world are buying more and more bottled water because we increasingly fear or

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dislike our tap water, we distrust government to regulate, monitor, and protect public water systems adequately, we can’t find public fountains anywhere anymore, we are convinced by advertisers and marketers that bottled water will make us healthier, thinner or stronger, and we’re told that it is just another benign consumer ‘choice.’ If we let our tap water systems decay, however, soon bottled water won’t be a choice – it will be a necessity as it already is in countries without safe tap water,” (Gleick, 2010, p. 170).

Since then the industry has grown exponentially, particularly in Lower and Middle Income Countries (Cohen & Ray, 2018) since the late 1990s to its current state representing hundreds of billions in annual sales. In an increasing number of countries where networked drinking water is compromised by low quality and poor service, bottled water (and packaged water in general) has become the primary source for entire populations. The WHO and UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme for Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (JMP) produced a report in 2017 showing the populations in 15 countries now relying on packaged water as a source of safe drinking water. Most of these countries are small (like Belize (55%) and the Dominican Republic (79%) but bigger countries also made the list (Honduras 39%, Lebanon 49%, Jordan 43%, Ecuador 21%, and Mexico 73%). The industry is currently in a global expansion phase and a brief review of annual reports from the four multinational corporations dominating this industry makes it clear that Latin America and South East Asia are frontier markets with almost limitless growth potential. By reaching 73% of Mexico’s 120 million citizens, as reported by the WHO and UNICEF (2017), if not 97% (as reported by Kantar Worldwide in 2017, (El Universal 2018), the industry has proven it can serve larger populations and hopeful marketing strategists have their eyes set on the nearly 300 million Chinese who lack access to basic improved water sources. Business Monitor International (2013) cited 100 cities as China facing severe water constraints and increasing concerns with contamination as the rationale for why “bottled water, therefore acts as a necessity.” The rise of the bottled water industry in small countries, while noteworthy, is insignificant compared to the absolute growth in countries like India, Indonesia and China. In China alone, between 2010 and 2015 the industry doubled growing from relative obscurity to becoming the world’s largest consumer of bottled water in absolute terms (Rodwan, 2020).

Notably lacking from the bottled water literature are ethnographic studies looking at the impact the rise of this industry has on the household. This present work follows these earlier investigations (Greene, 2014), returning to the field in Mexico from 2016 through 2020, to investigate how bottled water and the industry itself has become a cultural phenomenon, territorializing the waterscape. It did not answer, as Holt (2012) asks how patterns develop in which consumers “orient their lives around consumption.” While my earlier work shows this as a manifestation of neoliberal restructuration of the water management, it did not answer how this global phenomenon is reified on the ground through an individual range of specific contexts and the differentiations within those contexts, focused on how this form of water access impacts humans and their environment.

This study complements the previous work (Greene, 2014; 2018) in several regards. First it takes the previous study, which was supply side focused and returns it to a conversation

What happens when water is commodified? Case study Mexico: dominant movements and alternative discourses in the access to water landscape

Thesis

Reference

What happens when water is commodified? Case study Mexico:

dominant movements and alternative discourses in the access to water landscape

GREENE, Joshua

GREENE, Joshua. What happens when water is commodified? Case study Mexico:

dominant movements and alternative discourses in the access to water landscape . Thèse de doctorat : Univ. Genève, 2021, no. SdS 161

DOI : 10.13097/archive-ouverte/unige:154585 URN : urn:nbn:ch:unige-1545850

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN WATER IS COMMODIFIED?

Case Study Mexico: Dominant movements and alternative discourses in the access to water landscape.

THÈSE

Joshua Cullen Greene

sous la direction de Solène Morvant-Roux

pour l’obtention du grade de Docteur en sciences de la société mention socioéconomie

Membres du jury de thèse:

Prof. Jean-Michel Bonvin, President of the Jury, University of Geneva Prof. Armelle Choplin, Reviewer, University Geneva

Prof. Jaime Hoogesteger, Reviewer, Wageningen University (NL) Prof. Solène Morvant-Roux, Director of Thesis, University of Geneva

THÈSE NO 161

GENÈVE, 10 FÉVRIER 2021

La Faculté des sciences de la société, sur préavis du jury, a autorisé l’impression de la présente thèse, sans entendre, par-là, émettre aucune opinion sur les propositions qui s’y trouvent énoncées et qui n’engagent

que la responsabilité de leur auteur.

Genève, le 10 février 2021 Le doyen

Bernard DEBARBIEUX

Impression d’après le manuscrit de l’auteur

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN WATER IS COMMODIFIED?

Case Study Mexico: Dominant movements and alternative discourses in the access to water landscape.

This research was financed by the Swiss national Science Foundation (SNF)

Grant # PP00P1_163774

Directed by Dr. Solène Morvant-Roux

CONTENTS

RÉSUMÉ

ABSTRACT

DEDICATION

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:

PART I.

GENERAL INTRODUCTION TO A BOTTLED WATER WORLD

“The lesson of history is that in the tumultuous adjustment that surely lies ahead, those societies that find the most innovative responses to the crisis are most likely to come out as winners while the others fall behind.” (Solomon, 2010, p. 5)

CHAPTER 1. ACCESS TO WATER IN THE PERIPHERY