Dispossessing H₂O: the contested terrain of water privatization

Challenges to Water Security along the “Emerald Coast”: A Political Ecology of Local Water Governance in Nicaragua

“…In this sense, it recognizes the efficacy of place-based supply and demand notions of water security (i.e., reductionistic), while also extending the analysis to include political and social factors that serve to produce insecurity (i.e., integrative). In moving beyond solely material perspectives of water, our research is able to include social understandings and solutions that involve policy, governance, and management schemes [51,[55][56][57][58]. We employ the definition of water security outlined by the Global Water Partnership whereby "every person has access to enough safe water at affordable cost to lead a clean, healthy and productive life, while ensuring that the natural environment is protected and enhanced" [31] (p. 12).…”

Accumulation by securitization: Commercial poaching, neoliberal conservation, and the creation of new wildlife frontiers

“…Specifically, accumulation by dispossession solves the capitalist crisis of overaccumulation, or Òthe lack of opportunities for private investment,Ó by enclosing common assets and releasing them for private investment where they are then commodified, thereby ensuring capitalismÕs expansion and survival (Harvey, 2003, 139). The framework of accumulation by dispossession has been employed to analyze a variety of issues in the neoliberal economic period from the privatization and commodification of utilities (Bakker, 2007;Swyngedouw, 2005), life itself (Prudham, 2007), and, closely related to this paper, the phenomenon of land grabbing Hall, 2013;White et al, 2012), along with a variety of neoliberal conservation practices (Benjaminsen and Bryceson, 2012;Corson and MacDonald, 2012;Leach et al, 2012;Sullivan, 2013). Hall (2013Hall ( , 1598, for instance, demonstrates the concept is vital in understanding the Òdispossessory responses to capitalist crises, the use of extraeconomic means of capital accumulation, and the creation, expansion and reproduction of capitalist social relationsÓ that are central to the phenomenon of land grabs.…”

Theorizing command-and-commodify regulation: the case of species conservation banking in the United States

“…Critical approaches in environmental sociology and political ecology suggest an alternative account, arguing that market-oriented institutions like species conservation banking are part of a neoliberal project to reregulate human relationships with nature in ways that enrich capitalists and that serve as "environmental fixes" to crises of accumulation in other economic sectors (Bakker 2005;Swyngedouw 2005;Smith 2007;Castree 2008;Brockington and Duffy 2010). Indeed, a focus on capital accumulation in many ways defines critical accounts.…”