Fighting for water: Resisting privatization in Europe.

Bieler situates the processes of water privatization as part of a larger drive towards the commodification of public services and social reproduction following the restructuring of the capitalist regime of accumulation after the 1970s. The approval of a 2009 law by a right-wing government mandating the privatization of local water services triggered a counter-reaction by a broad coalition of social movements and trade unions. Indeed, the strong and continued commodifying pressures exercised by the EU's new economic governance regime, which emerged after the 2008 economic crisis (Erne, 2015; Szabó, 2019), act as a countervailing force to movements opposing water privatization. [Extracted from the article]