Is the WTO after your water? The General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) and poor people's right to water

The General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) seeks to expand international trade in a wide range of services ranging from tourism to telecommunications and education. In recent years, it has come under attack from civil society organizations in both the North and the South for having a detrimental impact on poor people's right to basic services. This article explores some of these controversies, using the example of water services. It focuses specifically on the impact of the GATS on poor people's right to water and national governments’ ability to safeguard the interests of poor people through regulation. It demonstrates that, de jure, the liberalization of water‐related services under the GATS may not necessarily undermine the ability of governments to introduce the kind of legislative measures necessary to realize poor people's right to water. Still, de facto, the exercise of policy autonomy might be substantially curtailed due to inherent ambiguities in treaty interpretation, the politics of process arising out of power asymmetries, a lack of transparency in processes of negotiation as well as institutional and other deficiencies in the domestic politics of WTO member states.