Blue Planet Project campaigner Meera Karunananthan writes, “On August 2, United Nations member states signed off on the Post-2015 Development Agenda — a document two years in the making that will determine the shape of international development for the next fifteen. The agenda is comprised of seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that will replace the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), launched in 2000 with the goal of eradicating world poverty.”
While the SDGs emphasize economic growth and private-sector participation, Karunananthan points out, “There was one significant win, however. At the tail end of the negotiating process, a very powerful member state (one might even say a super-powerful one) tried to remove language codifying water and sanitation as human rights. But the persistence of water justice activists paid off, and the official SDG document states: ‘we reaffirm our commitments regarding the human right to water and sanitation’. …[The] acknowledgement of the human right to water and sanitation may be a positive contradiction, awkwardly embedded in the Post-2015 Development Agenda — and capable of being expanded in the future.”
She notes, “For nearly two years the Blue Planet Project participated in civil society consultations, made formal submissions, and lobbied member states and like-minded organizations in the fight to make water and sanitation a global human right. The Blue Planet Project never assumed that the UN would produce a development agenda that would eliminate inequality. The campaign was part of a broader strategy to use the right as a tool against neoliberalism — a tool not simply to make the system more bearable for its victims but to directly challenge some of the largest, most insidious neoliberal projects by demanding redistribution, thwarting corporate efforts to profiteer from basic needs, and preventing private encroachments on common resources.”
And she argues, “Given the increasing corporate interest in commodifying water, cordoning off the resource as a human right could serve as a beachhead from which to fight additional neoliberal encroachments. …Laws that uphold a human right to water and sanitation are thus a direct threat to corporations (particularly in the extractive, agricultural, and beverage sector), who have been using national and global policy to secure increased access to freshwater resources, particularly in the Global South.”
Karunananthan concludes by noting, “Securing the human rights language in the SDGs was a major victory for water justice activists, but the war over water looms. Water access permeates the Post-2015 Development Agenda, impacting a wide variety of goals including food, energy production, gender equality, poverty reduction, and sustainable cities. Framing access to water within a human-rights-based paradigm can help ensure that the desires of extractive industries or beverage companies are not prioritized over human and environmental needs. …If the human right to water and sanitation does nothing more than deepen the cracks in the neoliberal system by holding states accountable for their obligations, then perhaps those cracks will open up new spaces for resistance — spaces where we can plant the seeds for a more just future.”
To read her article in Jacobin, which has a web audience of 600,000 readers a month, please click here.
For more on the Blue Planet Project, click here.
Further reading
WIN! Sustainable Development Goals include the right to drinking water and sanitation (Sept. 25, 2015 blog)
