In the 1990s and mid 2000s, turbulent political and social protests surrounded the issue of private sector involvement in providing urban water services in both the developed and developing world. Water on Tap explores examples of such conflicts in six national settings (France, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, South Africa and New Zealand), focusing on a central question: how were rights and regulation mobilised to address the demands of redistribution and recognition? Two modes of governance emerged: managed liberalisation and participatory democracy, often in hybrid forms that complicated simple...

Policy makers and social actors increasingly face inter-related and inter-penetrated levels and realms of governance. The effect is that some of the intuitive contrasts between rights and regulation are no longer tenable. As the essays collected in this volume show, different combinations of rights and regulatory claims serve as barometers of current changes in political economy. These are not only restructuring political space, but also changing the assumed relevance of rights and regulation. Bringing together a range of fresh perspectives on socio-legal scholarship from a variety of...