The United Nations
Around the world, private companies and free market ideologies are threatening to increase water disparity, further impoverish the water poor, and entrench continued abuse of our natural water systems.
Water services, resources and ecosystems are increasingly under threat from the impacts of climate change and profit-hungry corporations and financial actors which seek to profit from water amidst multiple interrelated crises.
These powerful influences can be seen at international institutions like the United Nations and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, multi-stakeholder governance platforms like the the World Water Forums, international financial institutions like the World Bank and regional development banks, and in national and local governments.
The United Nations
In March 2023, the United Nations hosted the UN 2023 Water Conference to take stock of progress on Sustainable Development Goal 6, which seeks to realize universal access to and sustainable management of water and sanitation services and resources by 2030. The first UN water conference in 46 years, the conference was widely welcomed as an occasion to address lacklustre progress on improving water services and sustainable resource management.
Despite the promise of this forum, private corporations and finance and water governance institutions captured by them dominated the conference, appropriating water justice language to promote increased private-sector participation in the sector. Water defenders and communities on the frontlines of struggles for water justice were largley excluded or sidelined from the conference.
But their voices were not to be silenced as water justice movements from around the world came together to engage and contest the corporate capture of the event and amplify the voices of water defenders and frontline communities.
World Water Forums
The World Water Forum (WWF) claims to be a democratic, multi-stakeholder platform for governments, civil society, academics and industry on global water issues, but past forums have shown that in fact, they are dominated by a handful of multinational food and water corporations with a strong agenda of privatization and corporate control of water. Forums are held every three years, with the last one held in Bali, Indonesia in May 2024.
The WWF is organized by the World Water Council – an umbrella organization with more than 250 members, ranging from NGOs and citizens’ groups to international financial institutions and public sector representatives. The world’s biggest private water companies, including Suez, Veolia and Agbar play a major role in driving the Forum’s agenda. As a result, the WWF consistently refused to acknowledge or promote water as a human right prior to its adoption by the UN in 2010, after which they have proposed that it best be achieved by the private sector. Private water companies are more concerned with profiting from the global water crisis than working toward sustainable public solutions.
The Blue Planet Project – along with other civil society groups and organizations – attends the WWF to amplify the voices of the more than 2 billion people around the world who do not have access to clean water. For the past two decades the BPP has played a central role in organizing the Alternative World Water Forum to challenge the corporate capture of water governance at the WWF, and the need to view water as a life-giving public resource, not a commodity.