The politics of Third World water privatization: Neoliberal reform and popular resistance in Cochabamba and El Alto, Bolivia

This dissertation is about the political economy of Third World water privatization and the dynamics of resistance to privatization in the water and sanitation sector in Bolivia. The study uses the tools of political sociology to examine how changing state-market relations affected the water sector over the past century, arguing that the development of the Third World "water problem" has been fundamentally related to the politics of international debt and the contradictions of capitalist development. It hypothesizes that the intervention of international financial institutions in the water sector during the neoliberal period has exacerbated social conflict because it has heightened the perception amongst social movement actors that water has been converted into a "commodity." These arguments are probed through an in-depth analysis of two case studies of failed water privatization in Cochabamba and El Alto, Bolivia.;In sum, this dissertation explains how different social movement actors, confronted with the government's neoliberal policies and the conditional lending practices of international financial institutions, have sought to resist the privatization of water and build democratic alternatives at the local level.;Based upon fieldwork in Bolivia between July 2004 and August 2005, the social struggles against water privatization are analyzed as exemplars of the processes that David Harvey identifies as "accumulation by dispossession." While most scholars have tended to portray the water wars as the reaction of "new social movements," this study argues that contemporary struggles for water justice in Bolivia must be understood in the context of a long history of worker and peasant mobilization. United by a common desire for "social control" over the use of water resources, formal and informal workers and peasants built coalitions to defend a basic necessity of human life. After the water war, however, the coalition that once united diverse social actors in Cochabamba broke down due to a tension that emerged between the producers and the consumers of water services over the terms of public utility reform, as the consumers sought to cheapen wage goods and workers who produce these services sought to defend their wages and working conditions. Similar dynamics were observed in El Alto.