| From the end of the Soviet Era in the early years after 1989 through the early years of European Union (EU) membership since 2004, the countries of the southern and eastern Baltic Sea underwent a massive restructuring of municipal services management in the context of pulling Eastern Europe into capitalism and into the strictures of the European Union. The Soviet Bloc had been limited in its capacity to build adequate water infrastructure to keep up with urban and industrial expansion, to ward off disease, to fix crumbling pipes. EU membership demanded infrastructure investment to meet EU regulations. International Financial Institutions drove a pro-private sector involvement agenda as conditional to financial support. The cities of Gdansk, Poland and Tallinn, Estonia are presented as case studies to examine winners and lasers where the route of privatization of water services was taken to address the needs for new investment, but these case studies also clarify what "privatization" means, the political and ideological drives that led there and the social, political and socio-natural implications of neoliberal capitalist restructuring. The relationships between municipalities and their hydrological environments are affected by the intervention and interaction of local and national authorities, local hydrological circumstances, technical capacity and capital. Urban water provision and waste-water treatment has been part of this transition, subject to changes brought about by multiple levels of relevant governments - municipal, regional, national and at the EU level - and subject to the vagaries of finance and corporate ownership changes. And this has theoretical implications for understanding the complex relationships of local states, national states and capitalism, as well as the relationships between people and the infrastructure that support social and capitalist reproduction. |
