Exploiting nature for social justice?

'Security, Justice and Sustainable Development' seminar

University of Bradford

21.03.2012

Chiara CarrozzaCES – Centro de Estudo Sociais (Portugal)

chiaracarrozza@yahoo.it

Introduction

Phd research: Italian water management reform and its impact on the actors involved

After the PhD: processes of political mobilization related to water

Aim and theoretical background

M. Hajer “The Politics of Environmental Discourse: Ecological Modernization and the Policy Process” (1995)

The Italian water discourse incorporates the two concepts of the “human right to water” and of the “commons” but also, in a way, goes beyond these concepts in raising local issues.

How local claims are expressed through the global language of water politics?

Global concepts Human right to water: from the 1970s, a series of international environmental or

water conferences have taken on the issue of the universal access to basic resources. What are the implications? Which kind of mechanisms can be identified to realize it?

Commons: emerging as an efficient system for mitigating over consumption amongst a delimited group of users or because of the moral economy of solidarity and equity that underpins these institutions.

Italian water movement

World Water Contract (1998) Italian section Forum of the Movement for Public Water (2003)

All the campaigns and the activities of the Forum translate the global concepts in the context of the contestation of the Italian water management reform.

c u s t o m e r

1 %

r e l i g i o u s a s s o c

4 %

t r a d e u n i o n

1 3 %

e n v i r o n m e n t a l n g o s

7 %

p a r t y - b a s e d a s s o c

2 4 %

s o c i a l m o v e m e n t s

4 7 %

o t h e r , n . a .

4 %

Composition of the Forum in 2007 (N=997)

Narratives in the Forum’s discourse

Local claims

Criticism of the political elite public participation

Restoring public management common goods (water as the first)