Noor IJpma & Hugo Abad Frías: Your work focuses on the notions of scarcity and limits, addressed through the cases of water, sanitation, and the climate. Could you briefly explain these connections?

Lyla Mehta: Water is the lifeblood of ecosystems, and it is key for the functioning of everything, including our bodies. So, obviously, issues like water scarcity and sustainability are very important. We often talk about local and global water crises, and statistics are indeed alarming. Billions of people still lack access to safe drinking water, sanitation, and hygiene. Seen from afar, the Earth is a blue planet, but very little of its water is accessible for human consumption or can sustain life because it’s mostly oceans or  trapped in icebergs. The amount of freshwater is very small – less than 1 per cent of the total. So scarcity and the water crisis are real problems.

However, much of my research has been dedicated to showing that water scarcity is not just a natural phenomenon. More often than not, it is a socio-political issue of distribution and exclusion. In South Africa, for example, until 1994 Black people were racially segregated, and that included restrictions in access to water. In India, to this day there are wells from which lower castes are excluded.

More often than not, water scarcity is a socio-political issue of distribution and exclusion.

There are also huge differences in water consumption from country to country. In California, water use stands at about 300 litres per person per day, in the UK it’s about 150, and in the village in western India where I did my PhD research, it’s about 20 to 30 litres. In humanitarian settings like refugee camps, people often only have access to one litre of water per day. In Gaza, it’s even less. Israel has denied basic water to people for drinking and washing, and people are falling ill due to skin diseases and dying from dehydration and malnutrition. Civilians, including children, are even getting shot while collecting water, a basic right.

Where does the idea of limits fit into this discourse?

Water is not an unlimited resource, and climate change, acidification, pollution, and overconsumption add a real strain on its availability. But the examples above show that scarcity is often the result of unequal power relations.

Abundance follows the same logic. If you build a pipeline or a desalination facility in Bahrain, Kuwait, Israel, or California, you can create an appearance of water abundance even in the desert. In a sense, both abundance and scarcity are manufactured.

Of course, we need to limit how much water we consume. But who decides on those limits? And who are they imposed on? It is rarely big consumers who are asked to limit their consumption, because they can pay their way out of these restrictions, bribe, and flout rules and regulations. Unlike land, water is a fluid resource. This means that managing it is quite difficult, but also that it can be grabbed or captured in multiple ways. 

What institutional forms can this control take?

There is a range of institutional and pricing arrangements. But often these arrangements tend to adversely affect the poor, who end up paying far more for water than the wealthy. In certain slums in Ghana or Nigeria, people are paying up to 30 per cent of their income for water and other utilities. In higher-income countries like the Netherlands, Spain, or the UK, this doesn’t happen. But these countries have issues with water, too. In England and Wales, the situation is really bad because of decades of water privatisation, which has led to infrastructure neglect amidst increasing wealth for shareholders. By contrast, water bills have increased and private companies have made huge profits. Yet the water system is in dire condition: about a fifth of the supplied water is lost due to leaks from the pipes, and there are high environmental costs due to raw sewage discharge.

Another issue is that the wealthy and the powerful are rarely held to account for these water injustices and for increasing pollution. There is a saying that water flows uphill to money, and I think that represents the current system quite accurately. Water is supposed to flow downhill, but instead, you can pay your way to have access to water and to pollute, with very little accountability.

How can higher accountability be enforced?

For one, states have to fulfil their role. The right to water is globally recognised, and it is enshrined in many national constitutions. Yet, several decades after independence from colonial powers, many states in the Global South are not providing basic access to water to their most vulnerable citizens. There are situations in which a woman or a girl has to wait hours to access water for very basic needs, and basic sanitation is lacking. Governments need to be held accountable for these failures.

The private sector should also be held to account, especially those who divert water towards commercial interests rather than ensure that everybody’s basic rights and needs are met. Why is that allowed to happen? Again, it’s a question of poor regulation. In a crony capitalist system, private players are rarely held to account, including for industrial pollution. Even in the UK, rivers are in a dire state. People are pushing for justice, but very little is moving.

If scarcity is less an absolute notion and more a question of power and access, can the reality of limits be turned into an opportunity for solidarity and cooperation?

Definitely. There are many water justice movements, and many of them are pushing back against the idea that water is treated like a commodity.  While the right to food was recognised in 1948 in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, for water it took much longer. The human right to safe and clean drinking water and sanitation was only formally recognised by the United Nations General Assembly in 2010. There was initially a lot of resistance to that recognition amongst private companies. They argued that someone has to pay for the service, and if we recognised water as a human right, then people would assume it’s free. This argument is flawed: we still pay for food, even if it is considered a basic right. But treating it as a basic right means that there are some obligations on the state, and that you can demand public accountability if those obligations are not respected.

There are still lots of ongoing fights around access and control. For instance, why do we need bottled water sold by companies like Nestlé or Coca-Cola? In parts of Mexico, people drink more Coca-Cola than water, and Coca-Cola also owns bottled water brands. If we look at water as a basic human right, it has to be available to all. It shouldn’t be a source of profit. Unfortunately, corporations still control a lot of water resources, and also much of the discourse around water.

How did water become a commodity in the first place?

There was a shift in the discourse around water from the 1990s onwards. Until then, the discussion was very much supply-oriented, focusing on the role of the state in providing access to water for its citizens. In 1992, a global water conference in Ireland resulted in the four Dublin Principles. The first three principles recognised water as a finite and vulnerable resource, prescribed a participatory approach to water development and management, and recognised the central role of women in the provision, management, and safeguarding of water. But the fourth principle controversially stated that “Water has an economic value in all its competing uses and should be recognised as an economic good”.

This principle is based on a neo-classical notion of scarcity, which interprets economic goods as ones that are scarce by definition. But water can also be abundant when it’s out there in nature, or can be viewed as a commons. So when you declare it an economic good, you focus on certain attributes of water and omit others. Water is multifaceted; it has multiple ontologies: it is a commodity in some ways, but in other ways it is a cultural or social good.

When you declare water an economic good, you focus on certain attributes and omit others.

This framing of water as an economic good was the premise of privatisation. Around that time, we started hearing the idea that we need to be “more efficient” and that the state and its supply paradigms are “inefficient”. It’s true, there’s a lot of inefficiency, but instead of focusing on making the state “more efficient”, the proposed solution was water commodification and privatisation. This was the era of structural adjustment and debt relief programmes, and the state was retreating from many public services.

There are ongoing struggles to reverse that commodification process and to treat water as a commons. Activists like Vandana Shiva were already making the case for it in the early 2000s. At what stage is this battle?

From the time of the Dublin Principles, the trend has reversed in many parts of the Global North. Many countries have acted to put water back into public hands. But this is not the case everywhere, as demonstrated in England and Wales, and certainly not in the Global South.

The discursive shift towards water as a commons is a good sign, but we also need to acknowledge that in many contexts, this doesn’t automatically eliminate inequality and exclusion. Even if water were treated as a commons, there would still be patriarchal norms, excluding women and other vulnerable groups on social and racial grounds.

We need to acknowledge that public systems often fail very badly, and they also have a lot of bias. In Global South cities, they can serve wealthier areas and completely neglect the rest. This can result in rapidly urbanising areas where there’s no access to water, let alone clean water. Sometimes we have to be a little careful with public-private binaries because it’s not like private is always bad, and everything that is public is good.  The aim should be to strengthen public systems and public financing and make them work and accountable, especially for the poor, vulnerable, and marginalised.

What human activities and political dynamics lead to conflicts and competition over water use?

Agriculture accounts for more than 70 per cent of water consumption, but there is also urban consumption, industrial uses, mining, and, increasingly, AI. And balancing these competing claims can be quite tricky. The issue is also that there’s very little intersectoral cooperation around water. Managing water conflicts both within countries and internationally is critical. 

This challenge also presents an opportunity for transboundary cooperation. But cooperation can fall apart when there are conflicts. India and Pakistan have had a water-sharing agreement in place since 1960, but following recent armed tensions, India announced that it was walking out of the treaty, stopping river water from entering Pakistan.

When these intersectoral or international conflicts happen, they affect first and foremost vulnerable groups. So I think we should focus on covering the needs of the marginalised first, and then we can worry about other water uses, including industry, mining, and other activities. Everybody must have access to a basic supply of water for their daily needs, sanitation, livelihood, and food security, to lead a healthy and productive life.

Private speculation on water really has to stop, because in the end, these investments result in higher prices for consumers.

Are there any best practices at the local level that we can take inspiration from? In Spain, for example, water remunicipalisation has been quite successful, even though cooperation between social movements, experts, and local administrations could definitely be stronger.

I think collaboration and participation are key. The classic argument for privatisation is that there is no money to run public services, and so we need the private sector to step in. But with participatory budgeting and other forms of collaborative decision-making, people can decide that they want public investment in water management. And we can use that public will as a starting point to move forward with some creative experiments around water management. At the moment, there’s still a lot of trading going on around water, with investment funds pouring money into futuristic water projects that don’t even exist yet, like desalination facilities in Uruguay or in California. Private speculation on water really has to stop, because in the end, these investments result in higher prices for consumers.

I think the media can play a role in holding governments to account and popularising positive experiments in Spain and elsewhere. These experiments are not going to be perfect, but it’s easier to hold a public system to account than it is with a private company. A water company might be registered in one country, but its shareholders and investors are everywhere, going from one thing to the next, just making their money. That model clearly doesn’t work for water.

We need to find ways to reimagine water systems in a way that takes into account the climate emergency as well as current socio-economic challenges. Post-growth approaches and practices that focus on wellbeing, equity, justice, and sustainability can help with this reimagining.