Water supply privatization was emblematic of the neoliberal turn in development policy in the 1990s. Proponents argued that the private sector could provide better services at lower costs than governments; opponents questioned the risks involved in delegating control over a life-sustaining resource to for-profit companies. Private-sector activity was most concentrated—and contested—in large cities in developing countries, where the widespread lack of access to networked water supplies was characterized as a global crisis.
In Privatizing Water, Karen Bakker focuses on three questions: Why did privatization emerge as a preferred alternative for managing urban water supply? Can privatization fulfill its proponents’ expectations, particularly with respect to water supply to the urban poor? And, given the apparent shortcomings of both privatization and conventional approaches to government provision, what are the alternatives?
In answering these questions, Bakker engages with broader debates over the role of the private sector in development, the role of urban communities in the provision of “public” services, and the governance of public goods. She introduces the concept of “governance failure” as a means of exploring the limitations facing both private companies and governments. Critically examining a range of issues—including the transnational struggle over the human right to water, the “commons” as a water-supply-management strategy, and the environmental dimensions of water privatization—Privatizing Water is a balanced exploration of a critical issue that affects billions of people around the world.
By placing the global and the intimate in near relation, sixteen essays by prominent feminist scholars and authors forge a distinctively feminist approach to questions of transnational relations, economic development, and intercultural exchange.
This pairing enables personal modes of writing and engagement with globalization debates and forges a definition of justice keyed to the specificity of time, place, and feeling.
Writing from multiple disciplinary and geographical perspectives, the contributors participate in a long-standing feminist tradition of upending spatial hierarchies and making theory out of the practices of everyday life.
Focusing on key resources — oil, diamonds, and timber — he argues that resources and wars are linked in three main ways. First, resource revenues finance belligerents, a trend that has become all the more conspicuous since the withdrawal of Cold War foreign sponsorship in the late 1980s. Second, resource exploitation generates conflict. As global demand for raw materials has sharply increased, competition over critical resources such as oil has resulted in a flurry of ‘resource conflicts’, from local community struggles against mining multinationals to regional and international tensions. Third, economic shocks and poor governance sharply increase the risk of war (the ‘resource curse’).
While today’s resource boom is a major economic opportunity for resource rich but otherwise poor countries, reliance on resource exports often leads to sharp and unexpected economic downturns. Not all resources are the same, however, and effective responses are at hand. Sanctions, military interventions and wealth sharing have helped bring an end to conflicts, yet only deeper domestic and international reforms in resource governance can stop the plunder of Africa and Asia.
How temporary migration programs haunt the lives of families long after they have reunited
In a developing nation like the Philippines, many mothers provide for their families by traveling to a foreign country to care for someone else’s. Families Apart focuses on Filipino overseas workers in Canada to reveal what such arrangements mean for families, documenting the difficulties of family separation and the problems that children have when reuniting with their mothers in Vancouver.
Gentrification remains a subject of heated debate in the public realm as well as scholarly and policy circles.
This Reader brings together the classic writings and contemporary literature that has helped to define the field, changed the direction of how it is studied and illustrated the points of conflict and consensus that are distinctive of gentrification research.
Covering everything from the theories of gentrification through to analysis of state-led policies and community resistance to those polices, this is an unparalleled collection of influential writings on a contentious contemporary issue.
With insightful commentary from the editors, who are themselves internationally renowned experts in the field, this is essential reading for students of urban planning, geography, urban studies, sociology and housing studies.
The Shock Doctrine is the unofficial story of how the “free market” came to dominate the world. But it is a story radically different from the one usually told. It is a story about violence and shock perpetrated on people, on countries, on economies.
Based on breakthrough historical research and four years of on-the-ground reporting in disaster zones, Klein explodes the myth that the global free market triumphed democratically, and that unfettered capitalism goes hand-in-hand with democracy. Instead, she argues it has consistently relied on violence and shock, and reveals the puppet strings behind the critical events of the last four decades.
Equal parts journalistic expose, mall-rat memoir, and political and cultural analysis, No Logo vividly documents the invasive economic practices and damaging social effects of the ruthless corporatism that characterizes many of our powerful institutions.
No Logobecame “the movement bible” that put the new grassroots resistance to corporate manipulation into clear perspective. It tells a story of rebellious rage and self-determination in the face of our branded world, calling for a more just, sustainable economic model and a new kind of proactive internationalism.
