Financialising a Desalination Plant: Lessons From California
In this webinar, Professor Pryke explores how financial logics, actors, and instruments shape large-scale water infrastructure, drawing critical insights from the Californian desalination experience.
Watch the Webinar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNNyq9xU7tQ
The talk offers valuable perspectives for scholars, practitioners, and policymakers engaged with water futures, infrastructure finance, and environmental governance, and report on how a strong local activist coalition from Huntington Beach in California argued that their community does not need the water and that there were cheaper, more ecological water alternatives to a plant that would primarily benefit private equity firms and banks like JP Morgan, that Desal will hurt families and local businesses, that Desal is “poison for climate, ocean life, and clean water supplies, that Desal would increse water bills – through a 50-year take-or-pay contract.