Dr Madelaine Moore1
1University of New South Wales, Australia
Biography:
Madelaine Moore is a lecturer for environmental studies at UNSW.
Abstract:
My research explores the increasing entanglements of financial logics and actors within global water governance, management policy and infrastructures. The terrains in and around water governance are rapidly changing. Within international fora – such as the 2023 UN conference on Water, the first UN conference on water in over 50 years – the global water crisis was increasingly approached as a crisis of financing. This financial gap was to be filled with novel forms of public and private finance, and reconfigured governance frameworks that would encourage favourable investment conditions though new water-based financial products as well financially reengineering water infrastructures. As a result, water, as it flows through catchment zones to irrigation, water services or infrastructures, is being rapidly embedded into global circuits of financial capital. At the same time, calls for water justice, affordability, and access have resonated around the world, with slogans such as “water is life” making a powerful case against water privatization. While privatisation and related policy agendas have become politically problematic due to the success of water justice movements, the inclusion of financial logics, tools and rationales appear murkier and distinctions between public-private actors and financial investments are more difficult to trace. My research tracks this contradictory political, economic, social, and ethical landscape by asking both how the profits drawn from present and future returns through financial investing impacts the “hydro-social cycle,” and as neoliberal water governance is transmuting in the face of financialization what water governance regimes are emerging in its wake?