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Water justice will not be televised: Moral advocacy and the struggle for transformative remunicipalisation in Jakarta

Water justice will not be televised: Moral advocacy and the struggle for transformative remunicipalisation in Jakarta

Lobina, Emanuele ORCID: 0000-0003-4774-0308, Weghmann, Vera and Marwa, Marwa (2019) Water justice will not be televised: Moral advocacy and the struggle for transformative remunicipalisation in Jakarta. Water Alternatives, 12 (2):7. pp. 725-748. ISSN 1965-0175 (Online)

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Abstract

Aiming to advance our understanding of the transformative potential of remunicipalisation, this paper looks at the uncertain and unequal struggle for water remunicipalisation in Jakarta over the last twenty years and offers an ontological account of the discourse on the human right to water as a catalyst for progressive policy change. A first, formal definition of transformative remunicipalisation is herein offered. This is defined as an ideal-type of water remunicipalisation whose institutional legitimacy rests on the moral advocacy of emancipatory insurgency, and whose implementation offers concrete possibilities of progress towards emancipatory objectives. As regards moral advocacy and collective action, the hybridisation of emancipatory discourse enables to transcend the limitations of the Western origin of the concept of the human right to water. By drawing on cross-cultural principles like water as life and the primacy of human flourishing, the proponents of transformative remunicipalisation may turn the human right to water into a powerful discursive resource responding to Southern if not universal logics of appropriateness. While water justice is the terrain of inevitable contestation, the tensions between the normative ideals of collective action and the practice of advocacy require the constant reinterpretation of these ideals. This is why water justice will not be televised.

Item Type: Article
Additional Information: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike Licence which permits any non commercial use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original authors(s) and source are credited. See: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/legalcode
Uncontrolled Keywords: Water justice, human right to water, moral advocacy, transformative remunicipalisation, Jakarta, Indonesia
Subjects: G Geography. Anthropology. Recreation > GE Environmental Sciences
Faculty / School / Research Centre / Research Group: Faculty of Business
Faculty of Business > Centre for Work and Employment Research (CREW)
Faculty of Business > Centre for Work and Employment Research (CREW) > Public Services International Research Unit (PSIRU)
Faculty of Business > Department of International Business & Economics
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Last Modified: 01 May 2020 12:54
URI: http://gala.gre.ac.uk/id/eprint/24418

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