It Takes a Network: Water Seminar Draws Participants From Across the Globe

From February 1 to 3, 2010, the Reclaiming Public Water Network held an international seminar in Brussels to bring together people involved in strategic organizing around global water challenges and "people-centered solutions." Over three days, participants from more than 30 countries shared knowledge and experiences about how to improve water provision through the democratization of water management. For those of us involved in advocating for water justice, and social and ecological justice more broadly, it was an instructive moment.

The event opened with Dr. V. Suresh, Director of Tamil Nadu’s Centre for Law, Policy and Human Rights Studies, introducing the ancient concept of the koodam, a notion that resonated through the three-day gathering. In rural communities in India, Dr. Suresh said, the koodam is "a place where people gather, a space that is sacred but not religious, and where, once you enter, you are not an individual but a part of the collective. Decision-making in the koodam is strictly by consensus; you may have an identity outside, but inside the koodam, all are one." As Dr. Suresh spoke, participants from thirty countries poured vessels of water they had brought into a large container symbolizing the unity of struggles and the essential, elemental oneness of water.

"Our task," Dr. Suresh said, "is to create a new tomorrow. Behind all our political activities is the spirit of recreating society, and this is the spirit that brings us together."

It Takes a Network

In 2009 Transnational Institute (TNI) and Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO), two of the groups that initiated the Reclaiming Public Water Network (RPW) and organized the 2010 meeting in Brussels, brought out a report called "Progressive Public Water Management in Europe," in which they assert that:

"There is no exemplary model of ‘good’ or ‘progressive’ public water management…. It would neither be possible nor desirable to develop one model of water management to be implemented everywhere. Instead, responsible ways of handling water need to be developed around existing local structures."

Given the diverse, decentralized nature of the network, the respect among RPW members for locally developed solutions, and members’ high regard for internal debate, this commonsense but all-too-often neglected assertion could well serve as one of the organizing principles of RPW. Indeed, the formation of RPW as a loose-knit network without formal membership, rather than an organization or clearly structured institution, is a sign of its members’ engagement in forms of social organizing specifically constructed to enhance, rather than diminish, the diversity of local contributions.

Trends throughout the nineteen-eighties and ‘nineties brought the increasing merger of individual corporations into both conglomerates and global and regional bodies such as the World Trade Organization and the World Economic Forum, as well as trade lobby groups like the EU’s Aquafed, that aggressively advocated market liberalization and free trade. Acutely aware of the tactical logic that "it takes a network to fight a network," advocates of economic justice, human rights, and the reclaiming of social and environmental commons reacted by establishing their own loose-knit, autonomous global bodies.

It is of course not entirely unsurprising that a group of water advocates, many of them involved in direct service in the water sector, should organize this way; for water managers, a network is not merely a metaphor to describe decentralized ways of building social cohesion -- it is a fact of infrastructure, the basic principal by which drinking water (as well as electricity, gas, wastewater, and so on) travels within out cities.