That is exactly what happened in Jakarta, when Thames Water bought up half the city’s water management rights and then charged the highest tariffs in all of Southeast Asia.

It happened in Tanzania too. After pressure from the World Bank, the capital, Dar es Salaam, leased its water supply to a consortium of British, German and Tanzanian companies in a deal complete with a six-year tax break.

The British government has donated almost half a million pounds to Adam Smith International, a ‘free market’ lobby group, to handle PR for the project, a report by The Guardian.

The PR campaign was not enough to drown out the high tariffs, water disconnections and poor water supply that followed. Two years later, Der es Salaam authorities terminated the contract prematurely and deported the company’s executives.

Private

The government continues to funnel public money into buying up water infrastructure abroad, awarding Adam Smith International £400m between 2012 and 2017.

Today, the lobby group is proud to promote “market-based approaches” to water provision in 17 countries, mainly in southern Africa.

Furthermore, during her short and infamous reign as Prime Minister of Britain, Liz Truss rebranded international aid as British International Investment (BII), a state-owned company.

At the time, NGOs predicted that BII would “focus exclusively on private sector investment and profit.” Their predictions came true. In 2023, BII announced a deal to boost private investment in water infrastructure across Africa.

Another government-funded programme, the UK Sustainable Infrastructure Programme, aims to foster partnerships with the private sector in the Caribbean and South America.

Violence

An interim evaluation of the project found that the partnership with Lima’s municipal water company, Sedapal, was successful in creating a ‘robust stakeholder engagement strategy’ with the private sector.

In 2019, around the time that Extinction Rebellion ‘flowed like water’ and brought central London to a standstill, a river of protest was also flowing through Lima.

News sources reported that people filled the streets and chanted: “Water is a right, not a privilege.” They were furious that the government had announced a decree allowing private investors to buy up all shares in Sedapal.

The protest was part of a long history of resistance to water privatization in South America. A few decades earlier, during the Cochabamba Water Uprising, a mass movement organized blockades, roadblocks and a general strike against Bechtel, a California multinational that had bought the city’s water company.

The cross-class alliance of students, farmers and street vendors resisted privatization despite brutal police violence and won.

Destroyed

In this country, glimpses of resistance are emerging through the screens of water meters. Researchers Loftus, Marsh, and Nash put it this way in a 2016 paper: just as people rebel against being subjugated to the abstract world of clock time when they hit snooze on an alarm clock, people “disciplined by the water meter” can find ways to fight against a financialized water system.

That’s exactly what Caroline O’Reilly did when she found herself stuck in a pothole on a summer day in 2013. Southern Water had begun mandating meters in her neighborhood, and Arad, an Israeli company, was supplying the meters.

People like O’Reilly, mobilized by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, refused to march in solidarity with Palestinian calls to boycott Israeli apartheid.

Water is crucial to this story: Arad also supplies water to Israel’s state water company Mekorot, which, as protesters noted at the time, supplies water to the illegal occupation of the West Bank.

Mekorot denies Palestinians access to water, a tactic that has driven them from their land. Israel has only escalated this violence in its ongoing genocide; its military has systematically destroyed water infrastructure in Gaza and blocked water supplies through Mekorot lines.

Incentives

Each of the half a million Arad meters that eventually reached homes in southern England, silently providing updates on daily water usage, served as a reminder that water in this country has never been pure or immoral.

Thames Water plans to make smart meters mandatory everywhere from 2030, apparently in response to water shortages.

London is overrun by myths of exceptionalism and stereotypes about rain, making it easy to forget that it is the 15th most water-stressed city in the world.

Smart meters are touted as a way to regain control over personal water consumption, but they are also a source of injustice.

People without access to wealth or credit may not benefit from such incentives to save water, for example if they live in large families or cannot afford water-saving technology.

Sharp

Buying the latest water-saving washing machine costs money. We are not all water-deprived in the same way.

When Steve Reed talks about “protecting our rivers, lakes and seas,” he is tapping into a desire for sovereignty.

But by asking the question “Whose water is our water?” we see that water injustice plays out in cycles and flows that extend across borders and along lines of oppression.

Every time you turn on the tap, you encounter water in a moment in its infinite and far-reaching cycle. In the same way, an everyday encounter with a water meter or the sharp smell of a polluted river can offer a glimpse into a broken water system.

This author

Laurie Hancock is a youth work assistant, researcher and organizer.