Water, Corporatism And Democracy

The paper aims to help the reader to see how a doctrine could sustain, serve and promote globalization, bringing with it seemingly unlimited possibilities, but in its background coming with wealth dispersion and capital concentration, and creating schemes for payment for a vital resource. High development in communication technology has supported economic globalization; but to promote it there was needed a doctrinal and institutional framework. Neo-liberalism, promoting a smaller role for state in economic affairs overlapped with institutional efforts carried on under the multilateral negotiations’ GATT/WTO umbrella. Globalization of rules concerning foreign investments and services’ providing focused on the possibilities to invest in business having as focal point a vital resource: water. The debate of state versus market is one of the longest and tensioned in the history of civilization. Reducing the role of state in economy, there has been created the possibilities of seemingly unlimited gains, but it brought not only that, but economic convulsion and environmental decay, too. Water and investment connected to this resource have made no exceptions. Global players from soft drink and food industry areas stepped into the lucrative bottled water’s industry, while giants specialized in building great infrastructure projects headed to gain access on administrating big cities’ network of water pipelines and pumping or cleaning stations. Huge profits started to pour into their pockets, but with them came in many cases higher costs for piped water, lower water quality, and hardship for poor to gain access to what is a vital resource. Large investments determined by the globalization of concrete revolution resulted in damming almost all rivers of the world with huge impoundments, strongly harming natural habitats, coupled with population’s relocation together with a peculiar life-style’s losing. International credits needed to finance such projects created an almost frenetic market for international lending institutions. Countries aiming at quick modernization stated to fight for access to these financial resources in order to create the capacities to build huge dams and irrigation schemes, but in numerous cases the results were far from what had been expected. All these have created a favorable framework for making water an asset which can be traded as any other commodity, strongly reflecting the neo-liberal tenets in relation with this resource.