The Human Right to Water: Critiques and Condition of Possibility

This Advanced Review analyzes recent debates over the human right to water. While accepting critiques from scholars that the right to water risks entrenching unequal and unjust forms of water governance, the paper nevertheless takes a more sympathetic view of the potentials within struggles for the right to water. Recognizing that such struggles can take many different forms, we urge scholars to adopt more nuanced and geographically sensitive analyses of the conditions out of which movements for the right to water have emerged. We reject the claim that the right to water depoliticises struggles for water justice and we instead find conditions of possibility for deeper and more lasting changes to water governance within struggles for the right to water.