BLUE AMBASSADORS

What is a Blue Ambassador? read here.

 

BLUE AMBASSADORS
Andrea Muehlebach
Professor of Anthropology at the Department of Anthropology and Cultural Research at the University of Bremen, Germany Autor of «A Vital Politics: Water Insurgencies in Europe» (Duke University Press, Open Access).

«I support the Blue Community Initiative because it represents a pact between water utilities and the communities they serve: This is a collective commitment to keep water in public hands and manage it with long-term goals and environmentally sound planning. This commitment by the public sector makes sense not only in economic and ethical terms, but also in ecological and infrastructural terms.»

BLUE AMBASSADORS
Andreas Bieler
Andreas Bieler is Professor of Political Economy at the University of Nottingham/UK and Co-Director of the independent Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice. Tweets on labour movements and resistance to neo-liberal globalization Author of “Fighting for Water: Resisting Privatization in Europe”.

«Blue Community is an excellent initiative raising the awareness of the importance of water and allowing people to mobilise with concrete measures in support of water as a human right.»

BLUE AMBASSADORS
Erin O’Donnell
A water law and policy expert with over two decades of experience, Erin is a Senior Lecturer and Australian Research Council research fellow at Melbourne Law School. Her work focuses on Indigenous water rights, water justice, legal rights of rivers, and water markets. Autor of Legal Rights for Rivers: Competition, Collaboration, and Water Governance.

«Rivers are living beings with whom we are all in a relationship of mutual interdependence and reciprocity. The sooner we stop dominating and exploiting all waterways, the sooner we can embrace a truly legitimate and sustainable way of life. Water is life: for us, for the planet, and for itself.»

BLUE AMBASSADORS
Daniel Jaffee
Associate Professor of Sociology, Portland State University, Oregon, US Autor of «Unbottled – The Fight against Plastic Water and for Water Justice» (see for our review here).

«Privatization of municipal water systems and the fast-growing bottled and packaged water industry are the two major ways that drinking water is being transformed into a for-profit commodity on a global scale. The Blue Community movement makes a critical connection between these two forms of commodification, highlighting how both of them pose a threat to realizing the human right to water. Cities, universities, schools, faith organizations, and others who become Blue Communities are taking an important stand–joining a worldwide movement to keep water a public good and working toward water justice.»

BLUE AMBASSADORS
Madeleine Moore
Political economist working on all things water, social reproduction, eco-socialism. Post-doc @bielefeld uni. Autor of «Water Struggles as Resistance to Neoliberal Capitalism. A time of reproductive unrest».

«Water is essential for all forms of life, we cannot exist without it. That is why it is so crucial that we organise together through groups like Blue Communities to protect water and make it accessible for all.»

BLUE AMBASSADORS
Rutgerd Boelens
Rutgerd Boelens is Professor ‘Water Governance and Social Justice’ at Wageningen University, The Netherlands, and Professor ‘Political Ecology of Water’ with CEDLA, University of Amsterdam. He also is Visiting Professor at the Catholic University of Peru and the Central University of Ecuador.

«Across the world, new water justice movements have proliferated that creatively enliven rivers in all their senses. As multi-scalar coalitions they deploy alternative river–society proposals and practices that foster environmental justice. They bridge, translate and merge local river commoning practices, languages and strategies into global ones and vice versa, joining forces among South and North, triggering fundamentally new ways of thinking, acting, defending and living with rivers.» (Riverhood)