Property and the right to water: toward a non-liberal commons

I first met Kyle Mitchell in 2010 at the Right to Water conference in Syracuse and we each contributed a chapter to the book that came from it. After a few conversations, we decided to write a paper together that will be available soon at Review of Radical Political Economics.

I will link to the paper when it is up, which should be any day now.

Here is the title and abstract:

Property and the right to water: toward a non-liberal commons

Abstract

This paper examines the turn to considerations of property in arguments regarding the commons and the human right to water. It identifies commitments to liberalism in political economy approaches to property and human rights and develops a matrix for identifying non-liberal conceptions of the commons. The latter hold potential for an agonistic politics in which human rights are compatible with ecological sensibilities regarding the dynamics of conflict and cooperation in complex systems.