SAND

In an age where debt financing increasingly shapes the contours of public life, Andrea Muehlebach’s A Vital Frontier: Water Insurgencies in Europe stands as a vital contribution to understanding the politics of resistance. At its heart, the book is about the financialisation of water as a public utility, yet it extends beyond the specifics of the resource to engage more broadly with Europe’s regimes of enclosure of a commons. The title itself makes three crucial provocations that frame the book’s exploration of water politics. First, it underscores the vitality or life-giving and sustaining potential of water, nodding to a liveliness of the substance. Second, the financial “frontier” is understood as a continually shifting imaginary of capitalist expansion marked by the blurring of boundaries between public and private, licit and illicit. Third, it speaks to citizen-led efforts as insurgent acts of resistance against neoliberal encroachments. In response to unjust pricing schemes, the insurgencies were often seen as means to take the law into one’s own hands.

Drawing on cases from Italy, Germany and Ireland, Muehlebach outlines the overt and hidden financial logics which position water as a global commodity within structures of profit extraction.

Drawing on cases from Italy, Germany and Ireland, Muehlebach outlines the overt and hidden financial logics which position water as a global commodity within structures of profit extraction. She begins with the powerful image of a water bill which we come to see as a crucial artefact in the emergence of “new volatilities” (137) at the level of the household. This helps us visualise global financial logics not merely as abstract and intangible forces but, as experiences that have affective potential within a household. The impact of “crazy bills” on everyday lives and household utilities includes questioning not only the value of a utility, but also how a common resource has been drawn into a predatory system of market exchange. Muehlebach shows us the central role of women in creative modes of resistance, such as blocking the installation of water meters or recalculating one’s own water bill. Throughout the book, we are invited to think about value beyond its financial measures, its shifty regimes and how it emerges in localised settings.

The book begins with the protests in Naples against a 2015 bill which granted management of water springs and supply to a single entity. The movement to oppose this bill was led by environmentalists, trade unions and also the mayors from surrounding towns. Against the backdrop of Italy’s history of increased financial control and “law of the few”, citizens have played a key role in reversing privatised control and claiming water as a common good. The national referendum of 2011 was monumental to participatory governance from “below”, highlighting the role of local knowledge in the management of the resource. While most towns had eventually entered into public-private partnerships, the fight for attempts at remunicipalisation of water continue. This exploration of the financial frontier probes broader questions about ownership and the legal frameworks which are unable to defend public assets, whether in the case of property or utilities.

Distinct from this demand for democratisation, we are introduced to the Irish case of “noble law breaking” (70) as a powerful means of opposing the installation of water meters. Here, the role of the state enters into dialogue with histories of working-class movements and the Irish struggle against British enclosure. Not only was the act of using one’s body to stop installation work an opposition to the promise of “efficiency” it also evoked demands of progressive and just taxation. Muehlebach’s ethnographic attention to elderly participants in the movement and how the government grapples with citizens’ protests in a time of intense austerity, paints a dynamic image of the site. Through the text, she brings attention to the distinction between price and fee as analytical categories to be made sense of. This forces us to re-think the very foundations on which demands for “just pricing” – a valuation within the logics of market exchange – are made.

Further exploring these registers of pricing at the ever-shifting financial frontier, the Berlin case engages with perceptions around the accountability of public law. The successful efforts of the activist group Berlin Water Table show the role of hidden or “shadowy” deals (107) in the process of increasing privatisation of the public realm. Layers of debt allow for private investors to have stakes in the management of water utilities leading to the drawing of “secret contracts”. In considering contracts as objects of ethnographic attention (106), Muehlebach shows how it is not only the contents but also the social lives of these documents which feed into a fantasy of neoliberal values. They become objects of rumour, debate and speculation but most importantly, they lay bare the cyclical nature of accumulation at the frontier, often guised as “partnership”. The historical account of Berlin and its situated politics of public good, still leave me wondering: how does this imaginary of a “common good” influence everyday relations with public law?

Muehlebach draws on a number of Marxist theorists such as Rosa Luxemburg, E.P Thompson and David Harvey to draw out notions of value and modes of dispossession in the evolution of expropriatory practices of capitalism. She also engages with contemporary works on political economy and public life – such as by Julia Elyachar, Nikhil Anand and Hannah Appel – which help visualise acts of predation across scales in shifting political regimes. On the one hand, the technical account of global networks of debt financing enhance the reader’s understanding of the bureaucratic and legal complexities at play. However, the text could have benefitted from more ethnographic depth in tracing the lives of actors or insurgents as we come to see them. In doing so, the gender- and race- based complexities of these anti-enclosure movements emerging at the level of the household would also become more apparent.

While remunicipalisation doesn’t necessarily suggest a perfectly just or democratic means of resource management, efforts towards it can unlock the generative and radical potential of reversing privatisation.

In a time where anthropological studies on resources increasingly rely on narratives of “in-between” politics (obfuscating engagement with politics) Muehlebach’s powerful work takes a position against the global shift to making public utilities tradable assets. It makes clear the exploitative mechanisms at play behind the “ruse of public-private partnerships”. She reminds us that while remunicipalisation doesn’t necessarily suggest a perfectly just or democratic means of resource management, efforts towards it can unlock the generative and radical potential of reversing privatisation. These instances of rebellion encourage us think further: which models of collective holding can we lean on?; What are the conditions of citizenry involvement in remunicipalisation endeavours?; Can we imagine a future of a commons within and beyond the logics of market exchange?