The water issue and the management of water supply services in Brazil

Institutional changes and conflicts face the neoliberal agenda

Abstract

The issue of water has been gaining ground in global debates on socio-environmental development, in general themed based on concerns about the “water crisis”, which deepens as the interests of capitalist accumulation overlap with the defense of the environment and in that the State assumes no responsibility for the provision of sanitation services, transferring them to the market in privatization processes. With a methodological focus centered on the analysis of specialized literature and on the normative frameworks of sanitation policy, it analyzes the commodification of water and sanitation services and the public policy for this sector in Brazil, recently marked by the presence of public-private partnerships that seek reconciling market objectives with the rhetoric of formal democracy, although firmly articulated with transnational neoliberalism. We argue that the new political arrangements for the expansion of the private sector in the control of water resources and in the provision of water supply and sanitation services are part of the neoliberal project in its most recent face, a framework that reiterates the old social and environmental problems that produce unequal relationships in access to sanitation services in Brazil.