The fight against neoliberalism to make water a human right

[Oscar]

The Most Basic of Rights - The global fight to make water a human right is part of the broader struggle against neoliberalism

[ https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/10/sdgs ... s-detroit/ ]

by Meera Karunananthan - October 29, 2015

On August 2, United Nations member states signed off on the Post-2015 Development Agenda — a document two years in the making that will determine the shape of international development for the next fifteen. The agenda is comprised of seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that will replace the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), launched in 2000 with the goal of eradicating world poverty.

While they’ve received plenty of spin, the MDGs — which set numerical targets for states to reduce various indicators of poverty such as homelessness, child mortality, and lack of access to basic services — ultimately failed in many areas.

The MDG calling for the reduction of slum populations is illustrative: instead of spurring an increase in decent housing for the poor, in some countries this nebulous goal led to the criminalization and forced eviction of slum dwellers. States could meet their targets simply by showing quantitative improvements rather than qualitatively improving the lives of people living in poverty.

The SDGs, with their focus on sustainability, are said to be more comprehensive than the MDGs because they include environmental, social, and economic considerations, and unlike traditional development programs targeting the Global South, are meant to be applied universally.

Proponents also tout the SDG deliberation process as more inclusive than the MDG process. For two years broad sections of civil society were consulted through formal processes that lumped together impacted communities (women, youth, indigenous people) with various interest groups and corporate lobbyists.

The result was a depoliticized cacophony of conflicting views: the business community, like the fertilizer industry and big agriculture, drowned out the voices of small farmers, while big mainstream NGOs claiming to promote the interests of children countered the feminist discourse of women’s groups.

And though civil society actors had limited communication channels during the formal negotiation process, the secretary general, working outside that process, consulted with companies like Unilever — a corporation fêted for sustainability despite charges that it illegally dumped mass quantities of mercury near its operations in Kodaikanal, India.

Then as political horse-trading heated up in the final days of negotiation, activists who had consulted and lobbied for years took a back seat to member states, who flexed their political muscles and exercised their diplomatic prowess to secure last-minute gains.
The backroom deals in those final days contained substantial concessions. As the Third World Network points out, progressive language on debt restructuring was revised to lay blame on borrowing countries, and according to the Women’s Major Group, last-minute changes weakened language concerning access and benefit-sharing of genetic material. Moreover — as numerous social movements around the world have noted — the final documents emphasize economic growth to the detriment of everything else.

There was one significant win, however. At the tail end of the negotiating process, a very powerful member state (one might even say a super-powerful one) tried to remove language codifying water and sanitation as human rights. But the persistence of water justice activists paid off, and the official SDG document states: “we reaffirm our commitments regarding the human right to water and sanitation.”

In the international development context, poverty reduction plans often deliver the opposite: as a rule, global and regional development plans have been wealth-generation schemes for elites, and many debt-ridden Southern economies are still suffering the impacts of structural adjustment plans packaged as poverty amelioration programs.

Whether the SDGs will be the latest ignominious example remains to be seen. But acknowledgement of the human right to water and sanitation may be a positive contradiction, awkwardly embedded in the Post-2015 Development Agenda — and capable of being expanded in the future.

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[ https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/10/sdgs ... s-detroit/ ]