Water Atlas 2025
Selling public water supply systems to private companies was supposed to make management more efficient, and lower prices. But experience has often shown the opposite. Many municipalities and civil society initiatives now want to bring water back into the public domain.
Until a few decades ago, the supply of water was a self-evident component of public services – along with energy, public transport and social housing. The rise of neoliberalism in economic policy changed that. City governments sold off their municipal housing stock and privatised their power plants; and in the 1990s a wave of privatisations also hit the water supply. Water came to be seen as an economic good that firms could manage more efficiently and provide more cheaply than the state. Private companies held out the prospect of investments in the water infrastructure, which they promised would make drinking water more available in poorer parts of the world, too. In Europe, England and Wales were the first places to privatise their state-owned water utilities. The then-prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, sold them off in 1989.
It soon became apparent in many countries that the high hopes for privatisation were not being fulfilled. Around the world, investments in water supplies remained at a low level. Studies have shown that private firms do not generally supply water at lower prices. Privatisations have had particularly drastic consequences in the Global South. In the wave of privatisations in the 1990s implemented as a result of pressure from the World Bank, the smallest, poorest, and most indebted countries in Africa handed over their water supply to private companies. One analysis found that in 2000, the International Monetary Fund tied its loans to the privatisation of water utilities in one-third of cases. In the wake of the euro crisis after 2010, this pressure was also felt in several countries in the European Union, including Greece, Portugal, and Bulgaria. A troika of the European Commission, the International Monetary Fund, and the European Central Bank combined their austerity programmes with proposals to privatise water.
In Chile, water was privatised particularly early on and particularly drastically. In 1981, the dictator Augusto Pinochet introduced the Código de Agua, a law which granted agribusinesses, for example, rights to free water. The military dictatorship ended in 1990, but its neoliberal constitution is still in force in Chile today. Although the land sandwiched between the Pacific and the Andes is rich in water – with 1,250 rivers, 12,780 lakes and 24,110 glaciers – Chile ranks 16th in the list of countries subject to the highest water stress. More than 1 million Chileans generally have no access to clean drinking water, and almost half the population suffers from water shortages. Water scarcity is intensified by an export-driven economy that is not focused on meeting the needs of the local population; for example, more than 50 percent of water-intensive fruit production is exported to the global market.
South Africa shows the possible health consequences of privatisation. After the sale of municipal water utilities in many regions, the hitherto free water supply was switched to a prepaid, metered system. That meant that users have to pay in advance for a certain amount of water. As soon as they have used that quantity, the tap runs dry. In provinces such as KwaZulu-Natal, that has cut off many people’s access to clean water, forcing them to turn to polluted streams, rivers, and ponds to survive. In the summer of 2000, that led to a cholera outbreak in which 120,000 people fell ill and hundreds died.
Pollution and water shortages due to privatisation happen in Europe too. After the sale by Margaret Thatcher of state-owned water utilities in England and Wales, around half of these utilities’ staff lost their jobs. Water prices have since risen by around 40 percent. The profits are rarely reinvested in infrastructure, decent wages or water-quality testing, but stay with the profit-oriented investors in the water company. Dilapidated infrastructure results in massive water losses and has led to the complete failure of the domestic water supply in some places. Nearly 3 billion litres are lost each day in England and Wales through leaky pipes and ageing overflow basins, increasing the risk of contamination. Because millions of cubic metres of untreated sewage are discharged into rivers and the sea, riverscapes are transformed into stinking cesspools. A debate has started on whether to reverse the privatisation and to nationalise Thames Water, Britain’s biggest water utility, which is currently owned by a group of private equity companies and pension funds.
Many countries and municipalities in Europe and elsewhere in the world have made a U-turn. Between 2000 and 2015 alone, 235 cases were recorded of water and sewerage utilities being returned to municipal control. Many cities have seen referendums in which the majority of the population has spoken out in favour of buy-backs – for example in the German capital Berlin. In a referendum in Thessaloniki in Greece in 2014, 98 percent of voters chose not to put the water supply into the hands of private investors.
And more and more civil society organisations are advocating for water rights. For instance, the Blue Community movement, founded in 2009, has already brought together 210 communities worldwide, encompassing a total of 25 million people. These communities – including cities, municipalities, and trade unions, as well as universities and schools – commit to the three core principles of the movement: first, the protection of the human right to water and sanitation; second, the preservation or restoration of water as a public good, and third, the promotion of tap water, which is far less ecologically harmful than bottled water. Producing just one litre of bottled water can require up to four litres of water, due to extraction, purification, plastic bottle production, filling, and transportation. Additionally, the production of one litre of bottled water releases 202.7 grams of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO₂), whereas a litre of tap water results in only 0.4 grams of CO₂ emissions.
The history of privatisation shows that water can be used more responsibly and distributed more fairly when water supply remains in public hands – rather than being handed over to corporations driven by profit interests.
