NGOs: Water Forum a Failure

By today, workers are cleaning up at the Centro Banamex, the site of the Fourth World Water Forum in Mexico City. In reporting on the results of the forum, analysts and activists from around the world are beginning to assess the likelihood that this forum will make a significant contribution to solving the world's water crisis.

Many share our disappointment that the final ministerial declaration did not clearly affirm the human right to water. Radio Netherlands reports, however, that Henk van Shaik of the Cooperative Program on Water and Climate did not expect a stronger action statement from the ministers. Van Shaik, who played a role in drafting the section of the document on risk management, told RN, "It is a complicated process getting agreement between all the countries about taking action."

Others hold the decision makers to a higher standard. A group of nongovernmental organizations active on water issues declared the forum a failure for its inability to tackle the world's water crisis. They expressed particular disagreement with the forum's insistence on keeping private sector water management on the agenda. For most of these organizations, the notion of "public-private partnership" made popular at the 2003 World Water Forum in Kyoto must be replaced by a notion of "public-public partnership" that recognizes water as a vital part of the global commons.

Take a look at the final ministerial declaration and judge for yourself if projects both the necessary sense of urgency about the water crisis and the bold agenda of change necessary to respond to that crisis.

The World Water Council stagemanaged the creation of the final declaration and organized the Forum, itself. Created as a high level think-tank on water, the WWC includes a large number of representatives of governments, corporations and multilateral institutions, such as the World Bank. The Council has so far kept the World Water Forum well within the elite consensus that increased private sector participation is the only way out of the world's water crisis. That consensus was clearly under attack in Mexico City, both inside and outside of the Forum.

In its excellent closing article on the Forum, InterPress Service highlights that debate, and reports on the effort by the governments of Bolivia, Venezuela, Cuba, Uruguay and Spain to include a dissenting view as an annex to the ministerial declaration.

Clearly, there are impressive cracks in the international consensus on the solution to the water problem. The debate will continue as the World Water Council prepares yet another World Water Forum in Istanbul in 2009. Unfortunately, while elites debate the path toward a solution, thousands of people, most of them children, will drink to their deaths each day because they don't have access to clean water.