Looking to the future in water management models

Moderator: Mar Satorrras Grau

Objectives of the session

Describe different views and approaches to water management, from a more commercial and financialization perspective, to innovative approaches such as ecofeminism.

Maude Barlow: Dangers of the financialization and commodification of water

Maude Victoria Barlow is a Canadian activist and writer. She is the former Chairperson of the Council of Canadians and co-founder of the Blue Planet Project, which works internationally for the human right to water. She also chairs the board of Washington-based Food and Water Watch, is a founding member of the San Francisco-based International Forum on Globalization and is a Councillor with the Hamburg-based World Future Council.

In 2008/2009, she served as Senior Advisor on Water to the 63rd President of the United Nations General Assembly and was a leader in the campaign to have water recognized as a human right by the UN. She is also the author of 19 books, including her latest, Boiling Point: Government Neglect, Corporate Abuse and Canada’s Water Crisis; and Whose Water is it Anyway? Taking Water Protection into Public Hands.

Pedro Arrojo: Mandate challenges of the special rapporteur on HRTWS

Pedro Arrojo is PhD in Physical Sciences and emeritus professor at the University of Zaragoza. He has extensive experience in issues related to water and the environment

He started the creation of the New Culture of Water Foundation and promoted many of the mobilizations against the Ebro transfer. In addition, he was the first Spanish to receive the Goldman Prize for the Environment in the Europe category. Finally, He has been appointed as the United Nations Special Rapporteur for the Human Right of Access to Water and Sanitation.

Satoko Kishimoto: Reclaiming Public Services: How cities and citizens are turning back privatisation

Satoko Kishimoto was an environmental activist and active in the youth environmental movement in Japan in the 1990s. She began working with The Transnational Institute (TNI) in 2003, at the time of 3rd World Water Forum held in Kyoto, Japan. She started the water justice project in TNI to seek Alternatives to Water Privatisation. She is the co-founder of the Reclaiming Public Water (RPW) Network which was created as a result of the book "Reclaiming Public Water: Achievements, struggles and visions from around the world" in 2005. The RPW is an open, multi-sectoral network that enables activists, trade unionists and academics to work together with water utility managers and engineers to promote democratic, public models for providing water as the best means of ensuring safe, affordable access to water for all.

Miriam Planas: Ecofeminist perspective in the management of water - ESF

Miriam Planas is Chemical Engineer specialized in water treatment and sustainability. She was head of AE Damià de Veuster and trainer at the MEGSJC Training School. Member of “Engineers without Borders” since 2007, where she worked for 5 years in the campaign of “Water, a right and not a commodity”.

She is also a spokesperson for the platform “Aigua és Vida”, of the Movement for Public and Democratic Water of the CON, and participates in the Public Water Network and in the European Water Movement. Finally, she is member of the executive and advisory committee of the Association of Municipalities and Entities for Public Water, and of the directive committee of the Global Water Partnership Alliance (GWOPA) that depends on UN- Habitat.

Edurne Bagué: Example of a public water management model by the Terrassa Water Observatory (OAT)

Edurne Bagué is a Dra in Social Anthropology, specialised in water, society and culture, from the Center for Research and Social Studies in Social Anthropology (CIESAS, Mexico).

Her doctoral thesis was based on the remunicipalisation of water, analysing the case of Terrassa. She has published several studies and articles. Her line of work is organized around three groups: (1) social models and forms of water management and regulation, from public policies to the impacts of management models on local populations; (2) analysis of institutions and water as a common and new governance practices around water and services; and (3) relationships between democracy, commons and sustainability in the framework of the eco-social transition.