Analysis of the difficulties accessing water encountered by households in arrears on their water bills and perceptions of the quality of the water companies’ management of these households in France
Based on complaints registered on the Coordination Eau Ile de France and Fondation France Libertés water supply disconnections and disconnection threats complaints platform over the period 2014 to March 2017.
Marie TSANGA TABI
February 2018
SYNTHESIS OF THE STUDY’S KEY FINDINGS
In the dominant discourse and public opinion, hydropower must be developed for the energy transition and only a few very large dams and hydropower plants in Amsud, Africa and China have very negative environmental impacts. The European Water Movement questions these assertions through examples from France, Spain and the Balkan region.
The Balkans are the region in Europe where there are currently the most projects of dams and hydropower plants.
The European Water Movement and its members contributed to the self-organised sessions of the FAMA, on March 17 and 18.
In particular the European Water Movement was involved in four sessions: three co-organised by the EWM and one organised by a member of the European Water Movement (CICMA) and its local partners, in collaboration with the EWM.
In Greece, resistance to austerity comprises a mosaic of struggles for a right to the city, conceived as the collective self-determination of everyday life.
When talking about Greece and “the crisis,” it is easy to fall in the trap of “Greek exceptionalism.” After all, it is through essentializing orientalist narratives that austerity and structural adjustment have been justified: the Greeks are corrupt, lazy and crisis-prone, and they should be adapted and civilized for their own good. There is a flipside to the orientalist gaze, however, which ascribes extraordinary qualities to the other: the Greeks have a surplus of collectivism, revolutionary zeal or solidarity, which makes them more likely to organize and resist.
Both these narratives prevent us from seeing that the conditions that brought about the “Greek crisis” are prevalent in many parts of the world, that capital is moving towards policies of exclusion and dispossession even in the capitalist center, and that resistance is not the prerogative of southern peoples, but will soon be the only reasonable response even in the north. In fact, the “Greek crisis” is neither “Greek” — since it is only a symptom of the shift of global capitalism towards a new regime of accumulation based on shock and dispossession — nor is it a “crisis” in the sense of an extraordinary event. Instead, it represents a new normality that threatens to shake the very foundations of social coexistence. Nevertheless, Greece has been a privileged spot for observing how this global paradigm shift plays out within the boundaries of a single nation-state.