Nearly 20 years after the Water Wars in Bolivia, the intensity of the debate over neoliberal versus statist approaches has receded, replaced by a unifying focus on global goals that is less about approaches in service provision and more about results. In Stemming the Tide, Madeline Baer takes the opportunity to leverage the intervening years since these debates raged in order to explore the clashing orientations of neoliberalism and human rights approaches as they apply to service provision and people’s access to drinking water. Through careful case studies, Baer examines these conflicting ideas at the global level and in the most well known cases representing each approach: Chile’s highly privatized context and Bolivia’s state-driven policy.
The book is a contribution not only to the study of the water sector but also to the issue of economic human rights. Baer’s work provides an illuminating exploration of the concept of economic, social, and cultural (ESC) rights and how these differ from political and civil rights. ESC rights take a different approach toward the state, which goes to the heart of the difficulty of achieving them. Rather than making claims against states when they violate rights, as is done for political and civil rights, actors seeking to achieve ESC rights must do so by strengthening the state. In other words, the state is not targeted as a violator of rights but as the primary actor to realize ESC rights. Relative to civil and political rights, ESC rights are also more ambiguous. Baer points out that while political and civil rights have even been so clear for some scholars as to be coded as dichotomous, there are various views on exactly what achievement of ESC rights would mean. As applied to the Human Right to Water and Sanitation (HRtWS), Baer works with two views: a narrow definition, which entails access, quality, and affordability, and a broad definition about the “degree to which water governance is democratized” (p. 11).
In the first case study, Baer traces the development of the HRtWS and the struggle against the view of water as an economic right at the global level. The international water-justice movement was ultimately successful in getting the United Nations General Assembly to explicitly recognize the HRtWS and the Human Rights Council to recognize states as the primary responsible party for ensuring it, even when “water services are delegated to third-party or non-state actors” (p. 56). Through a detailed account of how these actors achieved these milestones and infiltrated policy circles staunchly supportive of privatization, the author shows the gradual development of the foundation of HRtWS at the global level.
The analysis of the Chilean case provides key insights on the ways in which privatized approaches may (or may not) attain aspects of the HRtWS, and more importantly, traces the mechanisms that enabled Chile to achieve the quality of services it has in the water sector. Through a careful review of how water services developed and privatized, Baer dispels myths about Chile and the efficacy of privatization. Her research demonstrates that the achievement of access and quality occurred prior to privatization. The success of privatization in improving conditions relies heavily on preexisting conditions in place at the time of privatization, including robust regulatory bodies and relatively successful utilities. The analysis clarifies that Chile should not be seen as the textbook case of privatization for other countries to follow; rather, as Baer argues, “it is a rare set of circumstances that make this [success] possible” (p. 156). The take-home from the analysis of Chile is that privatized utilities and the highly functioning public ones that precede them have achieved a high standard of quality, but the ability of citizens to control the steadily increasing tariffs influenced by stakeholders living in other countries remains to be seen.
In stark contrast to the Chilean case, Baer shows that privatization in Bolivia undermined water services. The case reinforces the importance of preexisting institutions for the success of privatization. In this case, the utility in Cochabamba was both inefficient and reportedly corrupt, but most importantly, it had ignored communities in the city that then resorted to creating their own independent cooperatives, thus building their own water infrastructure. While the newly privatized utility faced what turned out to be an insurmountable challenge in unifying and improving city services, the situation was compounded by weak state capacity to regulate the privatized utility, unlike in the Chilean case.
The analysis of Bolivia also examines how successful the new state-led, rights-affirming approach in Bolivia has been. While the Bolivian government has made formidable progress extending services to small towns and rural areas, progress in urban contexts has been challenging. The state has demonstrated political will to achieve the HRtWS by openly reiterating the importance of water as a human right and through substantial financial commitment and reorganization of the water sector. While access is increasing, however, quality of water services remains an issue, as water treatment is insufficient and the reliable availability of water is a problem throughout the country.
Baer’s work shines a spotlight on the role of citizen participation. Like Amartya Sen’s view on the role of democracy in development, Baer depicts citizen participation as both constitutive of the broad definition of the Human Right to Water and Sanitation and instrumental in achieving it. Baer demonstrates how citizen participation is effectively curtailed. In Chile, citizen participation is legally possible, but the overly technical procedures limit citizens’ interest and ability to weigh in on key decisions. Even in Cochabamba, despite a highly organized civil society and the policy window of the dramatic cancellation of the Suez private contract, citizen participation is limited to elected citizen representatives who have only a minority vote on the utility board. There, calls for investigation of corruption by the citizen directors on the board have been blocked. These insights raise important questions for future research: When is citizen participation effective? And given that turnout in elections for board members is very low in Bolivia and interest in participation in Chile is lacking, under what conditions can citizen participation be effectively cultivated?
The book offers an important basis for future research on the role of water scarcity, even though this is not highlighted on its pages. In fact, the analysis of Bolivia shows the constraints of the human rights–based approach. As Baer astutely points out, the individualistic view of water as a human right undermines communal approaches and misses the increasingly important perspective that views “water as commons” as an integral and threatened part of ecosystems. Indeed, even if state capacity is strong enough to achieve the minimum standard of the HRtWS, if the state’s capacity does not account for the future availability of water, these achievements may be only temporary victories.
Overall, the rich, in-depth analyses of the development of the water sectors in two archetypical and extremely different countries provide important insights, both by tracing the temporal pathways of the sectors and how they have developed and by exploring what key concepts—capacity, citizen participation, and outcomes—really mean. Baer goes beyond the facades of official narratives about Bolivia and Chile to look deeper. And in doing so, Stemming the Tide adds an important dose of realism to the human rights–based approach: It is neither necessary nor sufficient for achieving the minimum standard of the HRtWS. Instead, the analysis reveals the key role of state capacity, which is a necessary condition. The Bolivian case shows how private approaches can undermine progress if state capacity is weak. Conversely, the Chilean analysis reveals that privatization is not the true mechanism that led to a high-performing water sector. Baer’s work suggests instead that state capacity conditions the effect of privatization, and this view brings a strong caveat to policies around privatization that are relevant for both policymakers and scholars to consider.
