A personal opinion by Roland Brunner.
Today, the World Water Week 2024 starts, organized by the Stockholm International Water Institute SIWI, and lasting until 29 August. Thousands of participants (15’000 registered), hundreds of speeches and workshops, lots of pomp and glory. What is this whole event all about?
The website of the World Water Week states:
World Water Week 2024 is centered on water cooperation, for peace and security in its broadest sense. The theme, Bridging Borders: Water for a Peaceful and Sustainable Future, asks us to recognize the regional and global interconnectivity of communities and nations, and underscores the collaborative effort needed to achieve a peaceful and sustainable future.
Supported by the Government of the Netherlands, but also the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank and many others, cooperation is the key term in the statement above. The claim to work for peace and security according to the programmed events rather shows an understanding of peace as stability (status quo), not as peace resulting from social justice.
For most of the participants, mainly water professionals, the WWW offers a great opportunity to gather, to meet and greet, to exchange and learn, to make contacts that might be helpful in the further career. That is what I would consider the rather positive part of the show.
The whole setting of the event looks very much like an opportunity for money making. While all the technical aspects of how to deal with the virulent water crisis are discussed, the human rights aspect of water and sanitation stay on the margins. The mess privatized water and wastewater companies made in the UK? Not on the agenda. The positive experience of cities like Paris or Berlin with the remunicipalisation of their water services? Not a topic.The ongoing human rights violations, water poisoning etc. by mining companies? Sorry, no. The horrors of plastic from bottled water etc. in the rivers, in the sea, in the food chain, in the human tissue, in the blood, in the brain? Nope. Nope. Nope.
There is no statement at all of the World Water Week or its organizer SIWI for water as a common, as a public good, under public control and in public ownership. On the contrary. Private companies are dominating most of the discourse and the events. The halls are full of stalls, where private companies offer their technical “solutions” for a political problem. From desalination to rain catching, it is all about how companies and people working for them can make good money with the water crisis.
The World Water Week pretends to be out of politics, except eventually when some government in the global south can be blamed for not being fast enough in spending money on the technical solutions the global north is offering.
As long as this mega-event does not clearly put the human right to water and sanitation in the center, I rather stay off. And you? What do you think about the World Water Week? Are you attending? Share your thoughts about the event here on the website by sending your opinion by e-mail.
See the program of the World Water Week here
See also my article Markets, money, and moral. An essay.