Urban Water Conflicts in Buenos Aires. Voices questioning the economic, social and environmental sustainability of the water and sewerage concesión

BOTTON, SARAH; MERLINSKY, GABRIELA

Urban Water Conflicts, an analysis on the origins and nature of water-related unrest and conflicts in the urban setting

UNESCO - International Hydrological Programme (IHP)

Lugar: Paris; Año: 2006; p. 53 - 70

In a city that lies along the banks of the Río de la Plata, an inexhaustible source of freshwater, and also sits on the largest reserve of groundwater in the world, large numbers of the inhabitants of the Buenos Aires metropolitan region do not have access to a supply of quality water. Some of the city’s inhabitants, mainly in the southern part of the concession, are suffering serious environmental externalities. This observation merits research into the conditions under which the resource is managed and distributed. Under pressure from international organizations, Carlos Menem’s ‘justicialist’ government launched a series of wide-ranging reforms at the beginning of the 1990s3, enabling the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB) to carry out and assess the results of ‘on-site’ tests of the neo-liberal policies that they had advocated. An analysis of the various developments in the Aguas Argentinas S.A. (AASA) concession agreement makes it possible to retrace the gradual whittling away of the neo-liberal economic model that had been based on the idea that private operators, under public authority control, would be able to inject large financial investments into the water sector, enabling the public operator to make up for lost time by maintaining and expanding the water network. Such investment was to be recuperated via a suitably adapted pricing mechanism, accompanied by effective commercial management. The ultimate objective of the agreement was a full quality service (serving 100 per cent of all users) in the largest concession area in the world. The AASA’s concession agreement and regulatory framework stipulated a certain number of action principles as the basis for organizing the concession. In this study, we will seek to analyse how these action principles may be perceived as incorporating the seeds of urban water conflicts and how they gradually changed with the development of the conflicts, in order to draw conclusions with respect to the dynamics at work in this concession area.