Politics of Water Flows: Water Supply, Sanitation, and Drainage Page 1 of 24 PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE (oxfordre.com/environmen talscience) (c) Oxford University Press USA, 2020. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibit ed (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 01 February 2020 Subject: Environmental Processes and Systems, Policy, Governance, and Law, Environmental History, Management and Planning Online Publication Date: Jan 2020 DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780199389414.013.649 Politics of Water Flows: Water Supply, Sanitation, and Drainage Tatiana Acevedo Guerrero Summary and Keywords Since the late 20th century, water and sanitation management has been deeply influ enced by ideas from economics, specifically by the doctrine of neoliberalism. The result ing set of policy trends are usually referred to as market environmentalism, which in broad terms encourages specific types of water reforms aiming to employ markets as allo cation mechanisms, establish private-property rights and full-cost pricing, reduce (or re move) subsidies, and promote private sector management to reduce government interfer ence and avoid the politicization of water and sanitation management. Market environ mentalism sees water as a resource that should be efficiently managed through economic reforms. Instead of seeing water as an external resource to be managed, alternative approaches like political ecology see water as a socio-nature. This means that water is studied as a historical-geographical process in which society and nature are inseparable, mutually produced, and transformable. Political ecological analyses understand processes of envi ronmental change as deeply interrelated to socioeconomic dynamics. They also empha size the impact of environmental dynamics on social relations and take seriously the ques tion of how the physical properties of water may be sources of unpredictability, unruli ness, and resistance from human intentions. As an alternative to the hydrologic cycle, po litical ecology proposes the concept of hydrosocial cycle, which emphasizes that water is deeply political and social. An analysis of the politics of water flows, drawing from politi cal ecology explores the different relationships and histories reflected in access to (and exclusion from) water supply, sanitation, and drainage. It portrays how power inequalities are at the heart of differentiated levels of access to infrastructure. Keywords: water supply, sanitation, drainage, neoliberalization, socio-nature, power relations, properties of water, hydrosocial cycle