Turning Off the Tap: Urban Water Service Delivery and the Social Construction of Global Administrative Law

This article explores the development of a cross-border dimension to the delivery of urban water services as an arena for the social construction of global administrative law. When companies from one country deliver water services in another country under decades-long concession contracts, the ensuing political and legal struggle engages one of the central strands of administrative law traditionally understood: the question of participation in decision-making processes that affect vital individual interests. Moreover, it does so in an arena that embeds public and private actors in hybrid routines of both formal and informal participation at multiple levels of governance. Using Argentinian and South African case studies, the article teases out in detail the interplay between international and domestic levels of the forms and processes (both formal and informal) that facilitate participation in transnational urban water services governance. The process of socially constructing global administrative law is centred in iterative interaction between formal legal and informal political modes of participation, especially social protest and political negotiations. It is a process with two modes, political and technical, and the political salience of global administrative law is shaped first by differential capacities to deploy both modes, and secondly by the capacity to switch between national and international levels of governance.