"Local Neoliberalism"

I was very happy this week to get more of a breakdown between the concepts of public and private sector infrastructural services. Karen Bakker is able to question these categorizations by centering her focus on the mechanics of how people get water to their homes—with a wide perspective inclusive of a variety of strategies (water cooperative, municipal water service, state water corporation, etc.) (Bakker 2009: 28). Bakker’s purpose is stated here: “I argue that the debate over privatization is not well served by concepts derived from what Charles Taylor terms ‘our modern social imaginary,” which assumes a clear division between public (governmental) and private sphere, adjudicated by mechanisms of popular sovereignty. In successive chapters, I will provide examples of why conventional concepts of public and private are inadequate for describing the complex interrelationships between communities and water use” (Bakker 2009: 6) For my outside media source, I found a scholarly article that takes a province in the Philippines as a case study for water privatization: “Urban Water Supply and Local Neoliberalism in Tagbilaran City, the Philippines” by Karen T. Fisher.

Fisher looks at the development of a plan to incorporate private sector services into the Tagbilaran water system in the Philippines. Tagbilaran is a province in the central Philippines (or Visayas) that, at the time, was listed as one of the 20 poorest provinces in the country. Fisher compares Tagbilaran government’s successful implementation of private water services to Manila’s failed privatization plans. She specifically is paying attention to the differences in use of neoliberalization in an urban metropolis versus a non-urbanized province. She cites and builds on Bakker’s argument that the private and public are not easily definable and also not universal: “Bakker’s (2007) typology of market environmentalist reforms in resource management is useful in helping to conceptualise the myriad ways in which neoliberalism is enacted at multiple scales" (Fisher 2009: 187). This statement helps me a lot. In class, we have already discussed the idea of many versions or interpretations of modernity. There is also a similar challenge in understanding “globalization” as a phenomenon that might look and act differently depending on local or global scale. Fisher’s statement above (specifically: “the myriad ways in which neoliberalism is enacted at multiple scales”) really reconfigures my mindset on how to talk about neoliberalism. There is a consideration over the ways neoliberalism is enacted, and also a consideration over the scale in which it is enacted as well. I found Fisher’s argument a bit hard to follow, but in the end I think she concludes that the concept of neoliberalism and experience of neoliberalism needs to be pieced together from many different actors (consumers, the government, “the community,” etc.). I also think that she argues neoliberalism cannot be seen as successful or unsuccessful across the board—there is a collection of small successes and small failures in the partnership.

Additionally, I’m sharing the link to the documentation of Tagbilaran’s water privatization plan that Fisher cites in her article: http://pdf.usaid.gov/pdf_docs/Pnacu530.pdf . I thought it was interesting to see the layout of the decision processes in privatizing the area’s water system. Pages 18-22 are especially interesting because they lay out the options the government deliberated over:

1. Outright Sale

2. Bond Issue

3. Cooperative

4. Water District/MCWD Model

5. Rehabilitate-Operate-Transfer Arrangement (a variant of BOT)

6. Stand-Alone Entity (Debt Financing)

7. Pure Joint Venture

8. Joint Venture on a Rehabilitate-Own-Operate- Arrangement

References

Bakker, K. (2007). The “Commons” Versus the “Commodity”: Alter-globalisation, Anti-privatization and the Human Right to Water in the Global South. Antipode, 39(3), 430–455.

Fisher, K. T. (2009). Urban Water Supply and Local Neoliberalism in Tagbilaran City, the Philippines. Asia Pacific Viewpoint, 50(2), 185–197.

Province of Bohol. (2000). The Bohol privatization initiative: A documentation of the experience to privatize the province of Bohol’s water and Power Utility Departments – final draft. Tagbilaran, Philippines: PPDO.