• About Us
    • About the platform
    • Editorial Collective
  • Essays
    • Short Essays
    • Longer Reads
    • Reviews
    • Interviews
  • Series
    • Italian Political Ecologies
    • Reimagining, remembering and reclaiming water
    • Political Ecologies of the Far Right
    • Green inequalities in the city
    • Authoritarianism, populism and political ecology
    • Ecology after Capitalism
    • Ecomodernist socialism and comunist futurism
    • Political Ecology for Civil Society
    • World Press Photography Awards
    • Authoritarianism, populism and political ecology
    • Green inequalities in the city
    • Political Ecologies of Pesticides
    • Political Ecologies of the Far Right
    • Political Ecology for Civil Society
    • Ecomodernist socialism and comunist futurism
    • World Press Photography Awards
    • Ecology after Capitalism
    • Reimagining, remembering and reclaiming water
  • Resources
  • Events and Calls
  • Art & multimedia
  • Contribute
  • About Us
    • About the platform
    • Editorial Collective
  • Essays
    • Short Essays
    • Longer Reads
    • Reviews
    • Interviews
  • Series
    • Italian Political Ecologies
    • Reimagining, remembering and reclaiming water
    • Political Ecologies of the Far Right
    • Green inequalities in the city
    • Authoritarianism, populism and political ecology
    • Ecology after Capitalism
    • Ecomodernist socialism and comunist futurism
    • Political Ecology for Civil Society
    • World Press Photography Awards
    • Authoritarianism, populism and political ecology
    • Green inequalities in the city
    • Political Ecologies of Pesticides
    • Political Ecologies of the Far Right
    • Political Ecology for Civil Society
    • Ecomodernist socialism and comunist futurism
    • World Press Photography Awards
    • Ecology after Capitalism
    • Reimagining, remembering and reclaiming water
  • Resources
  • Events and Calls
  • Art & multimedia
  • Contribute
  • About Us
    • About the platform
    • Editorial Collective
  • Essays
    • Short Essays
    • Longer Reads
    • Reviews
    • Interviews
  • Series
    • Italian Political Ecologies
    • Reimagining, remembering and reclaiming water
    • Political Ecologies of the Far Right
    • Green inequalities in the city
    • Authoritarianism, populism and political ecology
    • Ecology after Capitalism
    • Ecomodernist socialism and comunist futurism
    • Political Ecology for Civil Society
    • World Press Photography Awards
    • Authoritarianism, populism and political ecology
    • Green inequalities in the city
    • Political Ecologies of Pesticides
    • Political Ecologies of the Far Right
    • Political Ecology for Civil Society
    • Ecomodernist socialism and comunist futurism
    • World Press Photography Awards
    • Ecology after Capitalism
    • Reimagining, remembering and reclaiming water
  • Resources
  • Events and Calls
  • Art & multimedia
  • Contribute
Dimensions of Political Ecology 2016
August 25, 2015
The Political Ecology of Everyday Life under Settler Colonialism I – Reporting from Palestine
September 2, 2015

The Bio-Financialization of Irish Water: New Advances in the Neoliberalization of Vital Services

Published by Undisciplined Environments on August 27, 2015

By Patrick Bresnihan *

Patrick Bresnihan discusses the emerging neoliberal trend of financialization of basic infrastructure and its implications for scholars and activists, in the context of significant ongoing changes in the organization of water services in Ireland.

In their recent article, “Banking Spatially on the Future: Capital Switching, Infrastructure, and the Ecological Fix” (2015), Noel Castree and Brett Christophers make an important analytic connection between the climate crisis and the financial crisis. They focus their attention on the unprecedented scale of capital-intensive infrastructure projects (from housing to road to energy and water provision) that will be required to address the effects of climate change as they intensify. They also see how such investments can provide a positive and socially progressive response to the current financial (and more broadly, economic) crisis: by drawing some of the vast reserves of financial capital away from speculative, short-term investments into more productive, sustainable and long-term investments the financial system can be moved to benefit society at large.

For Castree and Christophers, the objective of national governments and policy-makers should be to find ways of attracting financial investment into infrastructure, thereby linking the flows of finance capital with the flows of vital resources necessary for social and ecological reproduction – an argument that fits with similar calls for a ‘green’ new deal for the twenty-first century.

In a recent paper, I show how something like this process is already happening in Ireland but not in a way that Castree and Christophers envisage. In response to the fiscal crisis of the state (post-troika bailout) the decision was taken by the Irish government to establish ‘Irish Water’, a new state owned water utility responsible for the operation, maintenance and improvement of all water services infrastructure, customer billing and charging.

The new water utility is designed to take the cost of water services off government expenditure, a strategy of financial engineering that is also being applied to other parts of the public sector (healthcare, housing, transport infrastructure). Previously, water and wastewater services were paid for through general taxation (no water charges) and were the responsibility of thirty four local authorities.

The new national utility centralizes the management of water services within a single, streamlined semi-state company and aims to generate the revenue from the introduction of household water charges and by raising external private investment independently. This latter point is important because the income generated from the water charges alone will not be sufficient to finance the projected 20 billion euro investment in water infrastructure over the next fifteen years.

The new utility must therefore harness the new stream of revenue from water charges to borrow directly from global financial investors, such as pension fund managers (most likely by issuing five or ten-year infrastructure bonds). In this way a significant, new relationship is being constructed between the flows of water in Irish taps and the flows of money in global financial markets. This describes a process of financialization of public services.

However, while there has been much focus on the privatization and commercialization of water services in both the Global North and the Global South in the context of neoliberalism, there has been less attention paid to this process of financialization. I want to briefly highlight three points about the novelty of this process and why it is important for political ecology scholars and activists to consider.

Infrastructure Investment Cycle

The neoliberal model of infrastructure investments. Source: EC Harris Built Asset Consultancy Report (2014)

First, while large amounts of finance capital have always been involved in the production of core, physical infrastructures the changing and growing role of the financial sector in the shaping of infrastructure provision indicates that something different is at stake today. While much of the work on the financialization of infrastructure examines how private financial institutions are profiting from existing investments in infrastructure projects, there is less work examining the process through which large-scale infrastructures become a financial asset to begin with.

In other words, the transformations required to turn something like a water system (pipes, treatment plants, energy pumps etc.) from a material, spatially-specific infrastructure into a predictable, well-performing asset circulating in secondary financial markets. This transformation demands the re-organization of the water system in line with the legible (i.e. understandable, readable) terms of financial investors and markets – namely by showing it compares favourably with other investment opportunities in terms of yield and risk.

Examining this process is particularly important because of the central role played by the state in transforming a previously publicly funded, state managed service and infrastructure into a financial asset for private investors to benefit from (e.g. as the graph above illustrates, countries with strong market regulation are not conducive to borrowing from private investors).

Environmental data: the new resource. Source: IBM

Second, the need to measure and demonstrate the financial performance of a utility like Irish Water dovetails with new approaches to environmental management and ecological modernization, particularly as articulated through European directives such as the Water Frameworks Directive.

In my article I describe how Irish Water has been taking steps to assess the performance of more and more aspects of the hydro-social cycle, including through the installation of household water meters. This is not just to improve its financial performance but to comply with highly technical and demanding regulatory frameworks, such as the EU Water Framework Directive.

It is important to note that what is being measured here is not the present value or condition of Ireland‘s water resources and infrastructure but their future value and performance (i.e. as providers of ecosystems services). One consequence of this is the central role that data and information communication technologies will increasingly play in mediating and representing the value of the water network and the comparative performances of the utility and of individual households.

This intensifies and extends a more general tendency in how ‘nature’ is being valued within contemporary capitalism: no longer a limited stock of material inputs metabolized within the production process, but an infinite series of performing assets that can be measured, evaluated, circulated and speculated on in financial markets. Of course, the overlaying of these new information systems onto water resources and infrastructures are not neutral or transparent. They transform social and ecological interactions and generate new exclusions.

National Water Protest, Dublin, 2014. Source: Declan Carr

Finally, the establishment of Irish Water has provoked by far the largest and most significant popular mobilization of people in Ireland since the economic crisis of 2008 and the austerity policies implemented after 2010. While protesters have different motivations for resisting the new utility, the main target of opposition has been the introduction of water charges. These are rightly seen as regressive and an unfair burden on many people after five years of austerity.

In a context where the financial viability of the new utility relies on the disciplining of water users as reliable sources of revenue and efficient users of limited resources it is clear that the ongoing resistance to the charges is an effective obstacle to the financialization of the Irish water system. As supporters of Irish Water and water charges keep affirming, however, a consequence of this resistance will be an inability to access the external financial investment necessary for the upgrading of the water system.

This raises important, broader questions about the highly uneven power relations that characterize the global financial system and the challenge of making alternatives that are not so dependent on that system. Meeting this challenge will require experiments with (and struggles for) new ways of financing, governing and organizing vital infrastructures that don’t rely on nostalgic visions of the state-managed model of the past. These experiments will need to re-politicize and ecologize infrastructure-making away from the limited technical and financial concerns that have historically dominated the field.


* Patrick Bresnihan received his doctoral degree in sociology from Trinity College Dublin in 2012. He is currently working for the National Economic and Social Counci (NESC) in Ireland as lead researcher on the project: ‘Environmental Sustainability and Local Development: Aquaculture‘. He has just completed a book entitled Transforming the Fisheries : Neoliberalism, Nature, and the Commons, which will be published by the University of Nebraska Press in early 2016. He is also part of the Provisional University, an activist-research project based in Dublin.

Share
Undisciplined Environments
Undisciplined Environments

Related posts

January 10, 2023

Biodiversity breakthrough or time to stop global environmental meetings altogether?


Read more
December 13, 2022

Formulating poisons: racism, agrochemicals, and cotton


Read more
November 1, 2022

Ocean Mourning – R.I.P. Mar


Read more

0 Comments

  1. The financialization of social housing? | provisional university says:
    January 11, 2016 at 4:43 pm

    […] adding to general government debt or the deficit. In other words, the logic is similar here to what is happening with Irish Water, the government similarly seeks to get investment of water of the books by allowing private finance […]

    Reply
  2. The Irish Water Insurgency: No More Blood From These Stones |  SHOAH says:
    February 15, 2017 at 1:28 am

    […] intimate relationship that has emerged “between the flows of water in Irish taps and the flows of money in global financial […]

    Reply
  3. Thinkery on water, anti-privatization struggles and the commons | ENTITLE blog – a collaborative writing project on Political Ecology says:
    June 9, 2017 at 5:04 pm

    […] and financing infrastructural upgrades and extensions through off-balance sheet financing (see our previous blog post on this […]

    Reply
  4. The Irish water insurgency: no more blood from these stones – The Radical Marxism Project says:
    July 20, 2017 at 5:58 pm

    […] intimate relationship that has emerged “between the flows of water in Irish taps and the flows of money in global financial markets” […]

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Search this site

✕

Subscribe to our Newsfeed

We keep your data private and share your data only with third parties that make this service possible. See our Privacy Policy for more information.

Check your inbox or spam folder to confirm your subscription.

Tags

Agriculture Alternatives Anthropocene Art Brazil Capitalism Cities Climate change Climate crisis Climate justice Colonialism, Post-colonialism & Decolonization Commoning Commons Conflicts Conservation & Biodiversity COVID-19 Culture Decolonial Political Ecologies Degrowth Democracy Development Disaster Energy Environmental Change Environmental History Environmental Justice Environmental movements Extractivism Food Forests Green inequalities Indigenous Peoples Land Methodologies Mining & Extractivism Movements & Resistance Neoliberalism Post-colonialism Post-colonialism & Decolonization Social Movements & Resistance Urban Violence Waste Water water governance

Visit WEGO

wegoint.org
This website is co-funded by WEGO

Popular Posts

  • Biodiversity breakthrough or time to stop global environmental meetings altogether? 591 views
  • The trouble with rewilding… 273 views
  • About refrigerators 158 views
  • What does virtual water conceal? 127 views
  • Against the misrepresentation of climate activism in Lützerath aka the ZAD Rhineland 121 views
  • Indigenous Science 103 views

Recent Comments

  • January 4, 2023

    Timo commented on Against the misrepresentation of climate activism in Lützerath aka the ZAD Rhineland

  • November 15, 2022

    Connecting academic (air) mobility with carbon inequality: Perspectives from a Global South scholar - Bliss commented on Connecting academic (air) mobility with carbon inequality: Perspectives from a Global South scholar

  • November 8, 2022

    On the Racist Humanism of Climate Action - Bliss commented on Challenging extractivism

  • November 8, 2022

    On the Racist Humanism of Climate Action - Bliss commented on How new is the Green New Deal for the Global South?

  • November 7, 2022

    Summer break note 2022 – Undisciplined Environments commented on Reconceptualising boundaries *

  • November 4, 2022

    Undisciplined Environments commented on Environmental Inequalities in Cairo’s Urban Housing Sector

✕

Tags

Agriculture Alternatives Anthropocene Art Brazil Capitalism Cities Climate change Climate crisis Climate justice Colonialism, Post-colonialism & Decolonization Commoning Commons Conflicts Conservation & Biodiversity COVID-19 Culture Decolonial Political Ecologies Degrowth Democracy Development Disaster Energy Environmental Change Environmental History Environmental Justice Environmental movements Extractivism Food Forests Green inequalities Indigenous Peoples Land Methodologies Mining & Extractivism Movements & Resistance Neoliberalism Post-colonialism Post-colonialism & Decolonization Social Movements & Resistance Urban Violence Waste Water water governance

Follow us

facebook       twitter
E-Mail Us : undisciplinedenvironments@gmail.com

Contribute

If you want to contribute send us your text at undisciplinedenvironments@gmail.com
Find our posting guide here

About Us

We are a collective of scholars and activists oriented towards a common horizon of emancipatory social and ecological transformation. With this platform, we aim to animate a space to share, debate and critically reflect on research and activist experiences, observations, methodologies, news, events, publications, art, music and other themes and objects related to political ecology.
powered by andromedia
  • About Us
  • Essays
  • Series
  • Resources
  • Events and Calls
  • Art & multimedia
  • Contribute
go