Past Events
The Water Futures Workshop was a three-day event focused on critically examining neoliberal water governance, financialization, and water justice movements. The workshop brought together academics and activists from around the world to diagnose the current governance model, explore the entanglement of water justice with financial discourses, and imagine future regimes of water governance. Out of this meeting, we founded JustWaterFutures as a response to the urgent need for alternative visions of global water stewardship.
Speakers –
Kate Bayliss – School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
David Hall – University of Greenwich
Video – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wz7pIyrCt4
This first JustWaterFutures seminar features a discussion of Thames Water and its Troubles. Kate Bayliss (Research Associate at the Department of Economics, SOAS) presents on private equity, Macquarie and the financialisation of the water system, as well as on the impossibility of regulation. David Hall (Greenwich University, PSIRU) discusses investments, dividends and the political context of the UK water industry. The discussion includes an assessment of the UK government’s “independent commission” which cannot consider public ownership even though 82% of the British public demand it.
This second JustWaterFutures online event brought together a panel of academics, activists and experts who critically evaluated the recent report on The Economics of Water by the Global Commission on the Economics of Water.
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsNKHfEOr8E
They delved into the Global Commission’s proposals for water governance and the challenges they pose from a water justice perspective. Panelists: Margreet Zwarteveen – IHE Delft & University of Amsterdam. Alex Loftus – King’s College London. Dante Maschio – People’s Water Forum. Meera Karunananthan – Carleton University & Blue Planet Project. Leo Heller – Former UN Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights to Safe Drinking Water and Sanitation. Chair: Lyla Mehta – Institute of Development Studies, UK & Norwegian University of Life Sciences.
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkmITx6pmEY
Debates about water privatization have tended to construct a simplistic binary of public versus private. In reality, ‘public’ water is varied and complex in its institutional and ideological make-up, illustrated in part by the rise of very different types of ‘remunicipalized’ water services over the past two decades as well as the growth of ‘corporatized’ public utilities. Drawing on over 25 years of empirical and theoretical work on this topic, David McDonald will highlight key tensions and synergies in the emerging debates about the nature of public (water) services. Speaker: David McDonald is Professor of Global Development Studies at Queen’s University, Canada, and Director of the Municipal Services Project. He has conducted research on public services in more than 50 countries. Recent books include “Meanings of Public and the Future of Public Services” and “Public Banks and Public Water in the Global South.”
This bilingual (Spanish-English) JustWaterFutures Event explored the financialisation of water through water funds and their implications for community and public control. Speakers: Camila Perez Failach, Gyekye Tanoh, Javier Marquez. Moderated by Meera Karunananthan.
Video English: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-Umo5QJSDw
Video Spanish: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTPYMRDyKU4
This JustWaterFutures seminar brought together academics and civil society actors to reflect on the accelerating privatization of Brazil’s water and sanitation sector, examining its drivers, consequences, and the challenges it poses to the human right to water and sanitation.
Video English: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SA270oSGwPs
Video Portuguese: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0vb4OXzxPE
Organized in collaboration with ONDAS, the National Observatory on the Human Right to Water and Sanitation in Brazil, the event explored the historical and political context behind the current wave of privatizations, assess patterns of market concentration and financial flows, and considered ongoing struggles and possibilities for resistance. Speakers:
- Léo Heller, former United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Human Right to Water and Sanitation
- Isadora Cruxên, Senior Lecturer in Business Politics and Development, Queen Mary University of London.
- Marcos Helano Fernandes Montenegro, Communications Director, ONDAS – National Observatory of the Rights to Water and Sanitation
- Edson Aparecido da Silva, Executive Secretary, ONDAS – National Observatory of the Rights to Water and Sanitation
In this event, we explore the Global Commission’s proposals for water governance from international law, physical science and a water commons citizens’ perspectives and ask what these mean for water justice, especially for the poorest and most marginalised.
Watch the Event: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqNrkehLt88
Panelists:
Henry Thomas Simarmata: Lawyer and negotiator for the United Nations Declaration on Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas (UNDROP)
Bruce Lankford: Professor Emeritus of Irrigation and Water Policy, University of East Anglia
Marcela Olivera: Water Commons Organiser, Cochabamba, Bolivia and Blue Planet Project (BPP)
Chair: Lyla Mehta – Institute of Development Studies, UK & Norwegian University of Life Sciences
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.
Video Recording: https://youtu.be/B2aoqSs_Lx0
This JustWaterFutures February 2026 seminar was titled AI and Water Justice: Data Centres as Sites of Struggle and explored the ways in which communities across the Americas are rising up against data centers, their failure to consult directly with affected communities, and the massive ecological footprints they leave behind.
The seminar also discussed strategy and Steven Renderos shared this incredible organizer toolkit: https://mediajustice.org/wp-
Thank you for a marvelous session, Steven Renderos and Nicolás Bejarano!
Nicolás Bejarano is an architect (Universidad de los Andes, Colombia), researcher, lecturer and PhD candidate in Architecture, Design and Urban Studies at UC Chile. Currently, Nicolas is a doctoral researcher at the Millennium Nucleus: Future of Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR), where he studies hyperscale data centers exploring how society intertwines with digital data matter in local territories. In 2023, Nicolas won the CCA “Architecture as Public concern” 2023 fellowship with Marina Otero Verzier and Serena Dambrosio for exploring environmental justice of data centers in Quilicura, Chile. In 2025, he was co-curator of the Chilean Pavilion – Reflective Intelligences – at the 19th Venice Architecture Biennale with Linda Schilling and Serena Dambrosio and a member of the ECOS-ANID collaboration project SEED: Social and Environmental Effects of Data connectivity: Hybrid ecologies of transoceanic cables and data centers in Chile and France led by Martin Tironi and Antonio Casilli.
The ‘Pathways for Water Justice From Dakar to Abu Dhabi’ event can be viewed on the following links below –
Video English: https://youtu.be/
Video Spanish: https://youtu.be/
Video French: https://youtu.be/
Join us for a report-back by the People’s Water Forum from the preparatory meeting for the 2026 UN Water Conference, held in Dakar, Senegal in January.
Speakers:
- Dinesh Suna – Ecumenical Water Network
- David Boys – Public Services International
- Aderonke Ige – Africa Water Justice Network
- Henry Simarmata – KruHa Indonesia
With special remarks from UN SR Pedro Arrojo-Agudo
