EU Governance of Water Services and Its Discontents

Chapter 9 analyses the EU governance of water and the countervailing mobilisations against its commodification. Initially, European law decommodified water services through the harmonisation of quality standards that took them out of regulatory competition between member states. However, from the 1990s onwards, the Commission repeatedly attempted to commodify water through liberalising EU laws. When these attempts failed, EU executives tried to advance commodification by new means, namely, through the EU’s new economic governance (NEG) prescriptions. Our analysis revealed that all qualitative prescriptions on water services issued from 2009 to 2019 to Germany, Ireland, Italy, and Romania called for their marketisation, despite recent calls to increase public investment. Like preceding attempts by draft EU directives, the NEG’s consistent commodification script triggered transnational protests by unions and social movements that defended water as a human right and as a public service, namely, under the banner of the successful Right2Water European Citizens’ Initiative.