Water democracy
From KLAMediaWiki
Organization:
Transnational Institute
Description
In Cairo, water was flowing to the rich gated communities but not to the poor areas of town: because of this grave injustice, water justice was one of the demands in the Egyptian revolution. What has changed in terms of citizens' access to essential services such as water and sanitation in the social transformation after the Arab Spring? In post-Arab Spring Tunisia, the government's neoliberal austerity policies may lead to the privatisation of the public water company SONEDE. Elsewhere in the world privatisation has proven to undermine the human right to water. This workshop aims to connect the grassroots water struggles, including the resistance to privatisation, in Tunisia, Egypt and other countries in North Africa and the Middle East as well as the rest of the world. What are the perspectives for reclaiming public water and developing well-performing and democratically accountable public utilities, which meet the needs of communities and protect the environment? Relation with the Thematic axes of WSF 2013:
- For a radical deepening of the revolutionary and decolonization processes in the North as well as in the South,
- For a world rid of any hegemony or imperialist domination,
- For a human society, based on the principles and values of dignity, diversity, justice, equality between all human beings,
- For the building of democratic processes of people's integration and union
- For the build up of alternatives to capitalism and neoliberal globalization, regulated upon the principles of cooperation,
