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Reference |
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Bond, Patrick (2012) Water rights, climate, ecosytem services and
post-neoliberal strategy from Johannesburg to Rio+20: A critique of liberal NGO and neoliberal Green Economy narratives. Patrick Bond on water rights and climate at Norwegian Development Studies panel, Oslo, 26 November : 1-19.
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Summary |
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A rights-based climate agenda can potentially challenge the dominant market narrative with respect to climate change reparations, adaptation and mitigation. But learning from the case of water in the most advanced court challenge to neoliberal state power that has yet been adjudicated, in Johannesburg in 2009, it is just as likely that rights-talk will be coopted by neoliberalism. If that happens more systematically within the climate justice struggle, at a time court cases emerge more frequently, momentum towards a genuine breakthrough against corporate control of global environmental governance (under the ‘Green Economy’ rubric) could well be distracted, halted or even reversed. The classical problems associated with rights-based narratives – liberal individualism and disconnection from broader socio-economic and ecological processes – may continue to be crippling, as witnessed in the example of South African water policy, law and activism. And like the threat from a Paris-based water privatization company (Suez) to Soweto women who sued the city to change its policies, the June 2012 Rio+20 Earth Summit made these ideological arguments yet more critical. There, endorsement of market determinations of nature required a stronger countervailing ‘decommodification’ narrative than ‘rights talk’ can offer. The question posed here, is whether using human rights considerations will make this task any easier, and the answer arrived at is negative, based on the evidence from Johannesburg.
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