Karen Bakker

Bakker analysed water concessions in cities around the world and found a pattern: the promise was investment and efficiency, and the frequent outcome was higher tariffs, disconnections for those who could not pay, and investment concentrated where the network already existed.

Her conclusion is not that public always works better, but that water does not behave like a commodity: it is a natural monopoly, a right and an ecosystem at once. She coined the framing of «commons» against «commodity» to name that third way.

A Canadian geographer, professor at the University of British Columbia, where she founded the Program on Water Governance, Bakker studied at Oxford the privatisation of water in England and Wales, and from that thesis came An Uncooperative Commodity (2003): water, heavy, local, indispensable and served by a single network, resists behaving as a commodity, which is why privatisation produces regulated monopolies rather than markets. Privatizing Water (2010) extended the analysis to Southern cities, where the 1990s contracts with multinationals failed one after another.

Her work influenced the debate on the human right to water, recognised by the UN in 2010, and the remunicipalisation of services in Paris, Berlin or Buenos Aires. In her final years she turned to technology and nature: The Sounds of Life (2022) told how bioacoustics uncovers the communication of plants and animals, and Gaia's Web (2024) explored what it means to govern the planet with sensors. She died in 2023, at 51, with her work in full expansion.