Towards a history of global water development? Against cognitive dissonance - PEGFA seminar

This talk aims to identify an important knowledge gap in the scholarly debate on international development. It does so by drawing on over 25 years of empirical research on water service reform in the Global North and South. We suggest that we are bereft of a comprehensive history of global water development, intended as an account of the institutional trajectories (including changes in ownership and organisational modes, pricing and regulatory regimes, and reliance on public or private sources of investment finance) that have accompanied the process of water universalisation in the Global North (whereas in the Global South the observer’s attention should go to the relative progress towards universalisation).

We argue that this knowledge gap has implications for policy, most notably the lingering expectation in neoliberal and mainstream circles that privatisation and financialisation can lead to sustainable water development, despite growing empirical evidence on the limitations of both. Otherwise put, the absence of this historical account facilitates the convergence of Cosean blackboard economics (e.g. ungrounded theoretical expectations on the benefits of water privatisation and financialisation) and the reproduction of water as “zombie policies” (i.e. failed approaches that nevertheless persist). The upshot is that filling this knowledge gap will lead to more informed (and less cognitively dissonant) scholarly and policy debates on an urgent topic.