I’m still catching up on readings after being out sick this week, but it sounds as though Roy’s article is hitting on important points, so it’s in the queue.

Generally, I agree that the commodification of previously public resources can be extremely problematic, particularly as the wealth that accrues so often accrues to outside parties (rather within the community using the water), though challenging this can mean both opposing the notion of commodification altogether (water as a strictly public resource) and subverting it’s more negative forms (for instance, thinking about water as a resource for building wealth in the neediest places). I think there’s a lot to the former, but that the latter shouldn’t be discarded, either (that latter tack is the one we took in our [Bracket] project, where we proposed that the infrastructure for harvesting water from fog could be supplied in impoverished areas lacking clean water, and that, by granting ownership of the infrastructure to the residents of those areas, they would gain ownership of the resources produced by the infrastructure).