Karen Bakker: Why Water Privatisation Failed in Cities

Key points

Bakker: water is an uncooperative commodity, heavy, irreplaceable and laden with rights, that the market manages badly.
The 1990s concessions in Jakarta, Manila or Buenos Aires did not extend networks to poor neighbourhoods because it was not profitable.
The answer is not public versus private but governance: regulators, social tariffs and community management.

Karen Bakker (1971-2023) was the Canadian geographer, a professor at the University of British Columbia, who best explained why water privatisation failed to solve the water crisis of the world's cities and what alternatives exist between market and state. In Privatizing Water: Governance Failure and the World's Urban Water Crisis (2010) and in An Uncooperative Commodity (2003), her study of privatisation in England and Wales, she argued that water is an uncooperative commodity: heavy, hard to transport, impossible to substitute and laden with cultural meanings and rights, which means neither private firms nor public bureaucracies manage it well without the participation of communities.

England and Wales 1989: full privatisation and its results

Bakker starts from the British experiment. In 1989 Thatcher's government fully privatised the water of England and Wales, the most radical case in the world, and her research showed that companies raised tariffs, disconnected non-payers until that was banned in 1999, paid out dividends and left leaks and sewage discharges that an increasingly weak regulator could not correct. The conclusion was not only that privatisation fails, but that the model of market environmentalism, treating water as an economic good to be allocated by price, collides with the physical and social nature of the resource.

Jakarta, Manila, Buenos Aires: the governance failure in the South

In Privatizing Water she widened the lens to the Global South. During the 1990s, the World Bank conditioned loans on granting urban water systems to private concessions, and Bakker followed the cases of Jakarta, Manila, Buenos Aires and Cochabamba. Her finding is that companies did not invest in extending networks to poor neighbourhoods, because it was not profitable, and that the private failure was blamed on poor governance that the public sector had not solved either: before privatisation, state utilities already left informal settlements unserved. The urban water crisis, she argues, is a governance failure that affects both models.

Neither public nor private: governance, tariffs and community management

Bakker therefore rejects the public versus private dichotomy. Her proposal is to analyse who governs water and by which rules: independent regulators, tariffs that guarantee a free or subsidised basic consumption, user participation and recognition of community forms of management, water cooperatives, neighbourhood systems, which in many Southern cities supply those the network does not reach. The human right to water, recognised by the UN in 2010, seems to her necessary but insufficient unless translated into concrete obligations to extend service and into a governance model that enforces it.

Political ecology of water and Bakker's legacy

Her work converses with Erik Swyngedouw's political ecology of water and with environmental justice. Against the reading of water as pure commodity, Bakker showed that decisions on tariffs, networks and disconnections distribute risks and rights among classes and neighbourhoods, and that cities that achieved universal service, such as Porto Alegre with its participatory public utility, did so by combining public ownership, citizen control and social tariffs. In her final years she turned to another subject, the sounds of nature and the technology to listen to them, in The Sounds of Life (2022), before her early death in 2023.

Bakker's lesson for cities is that access to water is guaranteed not by the form of ownership but by governance: clear rules, investment in the neighbourhoods that are not profitable, fair tariffs and a voice for communities. The wave of remunicipalisations that followed private failures, from Paris to Buenos Aires, confirms her diagnosis and also her warning: returning water to public hands is only the first step, and a public utility without transparency or participation can repeat the exclusion it was meant to correct.

Climate & nature Infrastructure Spatial justice Latin America Thinkers Informal housing

Guide · Urban nature and infrastructure

Read the full guide →

Infrastructure Infrastructure is the set of networks that make the city work and are only seen when they fail: water, sewers, electricity, data, roads, transport, waste.
Spatial justice Spatial justice is the idea that geography —where one lives, what is near, what is far— produces injustice by itself, and that changing space is therefore a way of doing justice.
Latin America Latin America is the most urbanised region in the world after North America —more than 80% of its population lives in cities— and the one that urbanised fastest in the twentieth century: from rural-urban migration to the ten-million metropolis in two generations.
Thinkers Urban thinkers are the authors —geographers, sociologists, architects, economists, journalists— whose ideas explain the city: from Engels and Howard to Jacobs, Lefebvre, Harvey, Sassen or Gehl.

Frequently asked questions

What does Karen Bakker argue about water privatisation?

That it failed because water is an uncooperative commodity, heavy, impossible to substitute and laden with rights, and that in England and Wales since 1989 and in Global South concessions companies raised tariffs and did not invest in poor neighbourhoods, though the public sector had not solved that exclusion either.

What does Bakker propose to guarantee access to water?

Analysing who governs water and by which rules: independent regulators, tariffs that guarantee basic consumption, user participation and recognition of community forms of management, and translating the human right to water into concrete obligations to extend service.