Review of “The right to water: politics, governance and social struggle”

I think I mentioned a while back my chapter for Farhana Sultana and Alex Loftus’ book, The Right to Water.

The book was recently reviewed in the journal Antipode; freely available here as a pdf.

John Agnew, chair of the geography department at UCLA, provided his thoughts on the book. Overall, the treatment of my chapter on ethics and global water governance is positive. In it, I make the beginning arguments  against the intersection of two themes I am now working on.

The first is the unquestioned utilitarianism of global water policy. The second is the intersection of utilitarianism with a specific version of what constitutes a ‘community’ in political liberalism. The version of community is not held by all liberals, and certainly not by those living non-liberal forms of life. But it is given global credence.

At any rate, it is my first cut on that issue, and I will return to the argument in the last chapters of the book I am drafting. But it will be reformulated (hopefully) more precisely.