Water grabbing refers to situations where powerful actors take control of valuable water resources for their own benefit, depriving local communities whose livelihoods often depend on these resources and ecosystems.

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1.What is ‘water grabbing’?

Water grabbing refers to situations where powerful actors are able to take control of or reallocate to their own benefit water resources at the expense of previous (un)registered local users or the ecosystems on which those users’ livelihoods are based. It involves the capturing of the decision-making power around water, including the power to decide how and for what purposes water resources are used now and in the future.

Thinking of water grabbing as a form of control grabbing means going beyond the narrow, proceduralist definition of ‘grabbing’ as ‘illegal appropriation’ since the means by which new powerful actors gain and maintain access to and benefit from water resources often involve legal but illegitimate dynamics.

The resulting trajectories of change frequently entail dispossession and ecological destruction. Often, the new economic and environmental arrangements overlook the hydrological complexity of local landscapes due to the fluidity of water. The socio-ecological impacts that follow on from the transformation of waterscapes are unevenly distributed, often with already poor and marginalised populations losing out most. The mismanagement of water further disrupts water-retentive landscapes and their hydrologic cycles, acting as an additional stress factor on fragile ecosystems and accelerating processes of desertification, depletion of fisheries, etc.

Water grabbing is not a new phenomenon. Water has to some extent always been a contested resource and water conflicts and water wars have featured throughout human history. While the contemporary wave of water grabbing shares much in common with earlier resource grabs and enclosures of the commons, it is distinct in that the mechanisms for appropriating and converting water resources into private goods are much more advanced and increasingly globalised. Water now features prominently within a global resource grab that is driven by processes of commodification, privatisation and large-scale capital accumulation.

Further reading:

Franco J. L. Mehta and G.J. Veldwisch (2013) ‘The Global Politics of Water Grabbing’, Third World Quarterly 34(9): 1651-75.

Mehta L. G.J. Veldwisch and J. Franco (eds.) (2012) Special Issue: ‘Water grabbing? Focus on the (re)appropriation of finite water resources’, Water Alternatives 5(2): 193-542

2. What is the scale and scope of water grabbing?

Water grabbing is implicated in a whole host of activities that span the food, energy, mineral and climate domains. From large-scale agricultural and biofuel projects, to the extractive industries, to hydropower schemes, to the privatization of water services for drinking and sanitation, the dimensions of water grabbing are truly global in reach and increasingly extending into new ecological frontiers (see Box 1). One can thus speak of a ‘global water grab’ that — while grounded in local realities — spills beyond national boundaries and connects diverse struggles for people’s control over water resources throughout the Global North and Global South.

The global scale of water grabbing is coloured by a set of intertwined complexities that often cloud its visibility. Firstly, hydrological complexity, involving surface water/groundwater interactions and inter-annual water variability as well as the distinction between ‘blue’ and ‘green’ water. Secondly, ecological complexity as water systems span a vast array of ecological contexts including floodplains, inland rivers, freshwater lakes, semi-arid or desert areas, coastal lands, wetlands, and peri-urban areas. Third, legal and administrative complexity, in particular the ‘fuzziness’ between legal and illegal, formal and informal rights, and the unclear administrative boundaries and jurisdictions that encompass diverse property regimes including commons, customary, informal and private tenure systems

This complexity across waterscapes and tenure regimes relates not only to the fluid properties of water but also to the ‘slippery’ nature of the ‘grabbing’, the unequal power relations, fraught negotiation processes and messy politics that often transform water into a contested resource. This complexity makes it harder to pinpoint the impacts of water allocation, re-allocation, distribution and quality, both now and in the future, and to identify what and what does not count as a ‘water grab’. Appreciating and understanding these complexities is however the first step to coming to terms with the political economy of water grabbing. Despite difficulties in quantifying and measuring its scale and scope, it is clear that water grabbing is happening everywhere in the world, across different political, socio-economic, and ecological contexts, and under many different forms and guises.

Box 1. Glacial water: the new frontier of water grabbing

Glaciers all over the world are shrinking, including in the Tibetan plateau,the world’s third largest store of ice and a major source of Asia’s fresh water supply. An estimated 150 to 200 000 of the Earth’s mountain glaciers, many of them located in this vast plateau, are shrinking at an average speed of 10 metres per year. Both the glaciers and the plateau now face a new threat in the form of glacial water products — that is, bottled mineral water produced from glaciers. Glacier mineral water companies are increasingly emerging in China and building plants at ever-higher altitudes, some even extracting water from the glacier tongue itself. As more and more glacial water companies are ascending into untouched plateaus, setting up bottling plants at high altitude — some above 4 and 5,000m — they disturb extremely fragile environments. Glacial water companies are claiming to have adopted some measures to protect the water source. However, the protection measures focus on the protection of water sources, without taking into account ecological issues that have emerged following the establishment of their plants: transportation, energy consumption, discharge and treatment of rubbish and wastewater etc. For example, the incomplete combustion of fossil fuels for electricity in plant areas is causing black carbon pollution that is accelerating the melting of glaciers. Further, gas, liquid and solid waste is piling up. As such, the marketed image on the label of bottled glacial water of pure and uninhabited and snow-capped mountain peaks is inconsistent with the current reality of glaciers: melting snow peaks and glaciers, occupied by spreading factories. For thousands of years, those glacial regions have been sparsely populated, not to mention free of industrial activity. The extraction of water by glacial water companies jeopardizes previous arrangements and downstream uses of glacial water by industries, agriculture and urban life. Withdrawing water from glacial sources throughout the year, also during the melting seasons of the glaciers, on an industrial scale is resource depleting, influences the microclimate of the glacier ecosystem, and negatively impacts the quality of land and water use patterns in downstream areas.

Source: Xingmin Z. (2014) ‘Bottled mineral water: the industry that consumes glaciers’, Snow Alliance and TNI, forthcoming

3. How does water grabbing take place?

Water grabbing has many different faces and forms of enclosure. Grabbing can happen through either simply dispossessing (un)registered users by violent appropriation; through delegitimising claims embedded in legislation; or through market mechanisms. In some cases, the capture of water is clearly illegal, violating state law; in other cases, it is ‘perfectly legal’ although not legitimate. Indeed, grabbers often make use of the legal complexity surrounding water rights to achieve their aims. In Ghana for example, the fact that land and water governance systems were separate and policy coordination poor enabled investors to take over water sources for biofuel plantations, disregarding previous local users. 1 This legal pluralism can be both enabling and disabling but in most instances it is difficult for local users to defend their claims.

The framework developed by Boelens, Gaybor et al. is useful here to unpack the various ways in which water grabbing takes place. 2 They identify four different ‘levels of confrontation’. The first level involves direct struggles over access, appropriation and concentration: who has the power to grab water resources. In Peru’s Ica Valley, the top 0.1% of users — powerful agro exporters — control a third of the total water, while small-scale farmers, 71% of the valley’s users, have access to only 9%. 3 The second level involves the power to determine the contents of rules, rights and laws governing water distribution and allocation. For example, hydropower development in Turkey is made possible through neoliberal reforms that have transferred exclusive access rights to hundreds of rivers and streams to private companies. 4 This is related to the third level, which involves the exercise of legitimate authority: who is entitled to take part in the making of laws and rules around water management. Decision making power within the various international policy-making forums and bodies dealing with water governance is for instance increasingly dominated by the corporate sector at the expense of civil society voices. A final level of confrontation is at the level of discourse: what languages and practices prevail in the framing of water rights and laws and what are the preferred ways of conceptualising water issues? In fisheries governance, the facts of over- fishing by small-scale fishers and of a lack of clear private property rights are taken uncritically to be the main issues, even though far from being a neutral assessment and clearly acting as an agenda-setter for particular solutions.

The above framework gives an indication of the way in which different facets of a hydropolitical regime converge to further the legal, extralegal or illegal accumulation of water resources in the hands of the few.

4. Who are the water grabbers?

In nearly all cases, water grabbing is in one way or another made possible by the state in which the grabbing is taking place. For a variety of reasons, many governments and bureaucrats within government agencies have special interests in large investments leading to state organisations creatively reforming, bending or re-interpreting existing rules and regulations that should actually prevent watergrabbing from taking place.

Beyond the state, a whole array of different actors, both old and new, are involved in the global water grab. These include specialised water-targeted investment funds that seek to profit from the monetisation of water and its transformation into an economic asset gaining in scarcity value. It also encompasses a whole host of transnational corporations, including large private water companies, agribusinesses and the extractive industries.

Water grabbing also involves all those actors whose activities and profits depend on the trade in ‘virtual water’. The ‘virtual water’ concept is used to measure the amount of water that is ‘embedded’ within the production, processing and trade of commodities. It is estimated for example that 1000 litres of virtual water are required to produce one kilogram of wheat while as much as 15.000 litres of virtual water are used to produce one kilogram of beef in Europe or America with soy imported from developing countries. 5 This trade in virtual water is rapidly transforming and transnationalising the waterscapes upon which local lives and livelihoods depend. It also significantly opens up the debate as to who the water grabbers are, based on an understanding of the complex linkages between meeting water demand in one region and the creation of water pressure and scarcity in another.

Renewable water resources in the Gulf States for example are set to run out in the next three decades. As a result, Saudi Arabia, once a net exporter of wheat, intends to phase out domestic production of wheat by 2016 due to the depletion of fresh water reserves in the country. 6 It seeks to compensate for this loss in domestic food production by acquiring farmland abroad, thereby transferring much of the pressure on water resources caused by agricultural production to other countries. This is a strategy likely to be pursued by other water deficit countries as they seek to ‘lock in’ access to water reserves and resolve their own water and food constraints by trading in virtual water

Further reading:

Polaris Institute (2003). Global Water Grab: How Corporations are Planning to Take Control of Local Water Services. Ottawa, Polaris Institute.

Keulertz, M. (2012) ‘Drivers and actors in large-scale farmland acquisitions in Sudan’, LDPI Working Paper 10.

5. What are the key drivers of water grabbing?

At a very fundamental level, water grabbing is an expression of an economic model of development in which capital accumulation is linked to increasing control over abundant and cheap supplies of natural resources, including food, water and energy. The capture of water resources is thus embedded within new production models and their associated trade and investments regimes. Based on this, five key drivers fuelling the new wave of water grabbing can be identified.

First, changing patterns in global food markets have triggered a renewed interest in acquiring land and water resources for agricultural production. This has led to an explosion in large-scale land deals that involve the cultivation of thousands of hectares of food crop monocultures that use up to ten times more water than biodiverse agricultural systems.

Second, rising oil prices and concerns that a ‘peak oil’ period has been reached have led to the rise of agrofuels that use large amounts of water throughout the production cycle. Other renewable energy strategies can also have perverse effects. Large-scale hydro-power projects involving the construction of (mega)dams and affecting entire river basis can incur high social and environmental costs.

Third, growing global demand for raw materials underpins the continued expansion of the extractive industries and large-scale mining projects. In particular, new technologies such as hydraulic fracturing or ‘fracking’ represent a major threat when it comes to water depletion and pollution.

Fourth, the market-based management of water resources, especially the privatization of water systems and services, jeopardizes the water access for poor and marginalized groups in many developing countries.

Fifth, the financialization of water — including water utilities, infrastructures as well as the resource itself — forms another key driver. Carbon trading or offsetting schemes linked to the creation of protected areas can curtail community rights and access to water resources as they become transformed into financial products (see Box 2).

Lastly, it is important to note that drivers of water grabbing are often interlinked. The nexus between food, feed, fuel, timber, minerals is manifest in the emergence of new agro-industrial complexes and global commodity value chains. The rise of ‘flex crops’ and ‘flex trees’ is one such example- with direct consequences for land and water use (see Box 3)

Box 2. Green grabbing of water resources: coastal conservation in Tanzania

Tanzania’s long coastline along the Indian Ocean contains important and biodiverse natural resources, providing livelihoods for small-scale fishers and a means of subsistence for coastal communities. When, at the turn of the nineties, community leaders from Mafia Islands alerted the authorities to the illegal practice of dynamite fishing, it spurred government agencies to develop what is now known as Africa’s largest marine park. Mafia Islands Marine Park was subsequently created, encompassing more than 18,000 local inhabitants, more than half of which depend on marine resources for their livelihood. The establishment and running of the park — originally to be under a form of co-managed, community-based conservation — steadily drifted towards authoritarian and repressive administration. Lucrative foreign-owned tourism enterprises emerged, enclosing access to land and littoral sites from local residents — including the most productive coral reefs, mangrove forests and the best beaches. Yet, these areas were under traditional ownership regimes that entitled local communities to the resources. This dispossession has been facilitated by the adoption of state regulations and so-called conservation measures that further restrict the daily activities of fisher communities, who are depicted as contributing to overfishing. Villagers have complained about the loss of their resource rights, as well as lack of proper compensation. The army has reportedly been used to intervene on occasion, using repression to help implement the new legislation.

Source: Benjaminsen T.A and I Bryceson (2012) ‘Conservation, green/blue grabbing and accumulation by dispossession in Tanzania’, The Journal of Peasant Studies 39(2): 335-55.