People's Water Forum 2024 - Bali, Indonesia

 

From 18-24 May 2024, Indonesia will host the 10th World Water Forum (WWF). This triennial event is convened by the World Water Council (WWC), a corporate-driven multi-stakeholder body that brings banks, transnational water companies, academics and public agencies together to promote private sector solutions to water governance, management and delivery.

This is why for more than two decades, the WWF has been opposed by the global water justice movement—a growing network of water and environmental justice organizations, social movements, small scale farmers, trade unions and human rights advocates around the world. The organizers of the People’s Water Forum (PWF) firmly believe that water is life and sacred, rather than a market commodity, part of our global commons to be shared equitably and protected for future generations.

Beyond protesting the water merchants, profiteers and enablers gathering at the WWF, the PWF seeks to showcase alternatives, learning together, planning together, and finding new ways to live together.

What we will be doing in Bali

The PWF 2024 in Bali offers global water justice movements and their allies and partners an opportunity to learn, organize, mobilize and unite struggles for the human right to water in Southeast Asia with other struggles against privatization and for public and community water alternatives across the globe. In Bali, and for participants who will join virtually from around the world, water activists will continue challenging and resisting water privatization, recognizing that the struggle for water is an intersectional, internationalist struggle that requires an anti-capitalist, anti-racist, feminist and people-centered orientation. Water defenders and others will join hands and voices with communities in Bali, Southeast Asia and across the world to strengthen the global water justice network and movement (see the PWF programme for more).

In Bali we will:

  • Call on governments and democratically elected representatives to stop using the neoliberal cost-recovery, market rate model for water services, break ties with companies seeking to profit from water and to put water under the control of democratic public and community institutions.
  • Unite our voices to protest and call for an end to the deliberate and cruel financial barriers which deny low-income households and communities safe drinking water through the use of prepaid meters and other so-called electronic payment and water restriction devices.
  • Stand in solidarity with water workers against privatization in all its forms, wasteful investment and corruption in the water sector that threatens jobs and people’s access to safe water.
  • Expose the inaction of governments which continue to abet the extraction of resources by national and transnational capital in Southeast Asia, Indonesia and other nations in the South and North.
  • Call for an end to the pollution of water systems, from small streams to great rivers and oceans, including calls for economic boycott of institutions whose fortunes are linked to environmental degradation.
  • Consider legal actions from the local to international level to protect and actualise the inalienable human right to water, hosting a People’s Tribunal for Water Justice.
  • Call for transparency, accountability and greater equity in the allocation and utilization of tax and donor funding in the water sector. Strengthen and grow public and community water services and resources management.
  • Support the creation of a Southeast Asia Water Justice Network to coordinate human right to water actions in the region, beyond the forum.

The Objective of the Alternative Water Forum

The forum will continue to create spaces for gathering, preserving and creating information and knowledge about where the water we use and need comes from, who owns it, who sells it, what is at stake, and how we can stand together to protect it.

The Future We Seek

Learning, organizing, mobilizing and working together, we seek to:

  • Assert people’s needs and power over water companies and other industries impacting people’s ability to sustain themselves and water systems.
  • Mobilize in greater numbers and encourage more people to join the struggle to wrestle control and influence of water from national and global bureaucrats and businessmen.
  • Realize state commitments to implement the human right to water, ensure universal access and protect water as a commons, not a commodity.
  • Protect common public goods such as water and air, which are non-renewable, finite and collective human needs, from marketization by international trade regimes.
  • Achieve recognition and support of democratic public and community water management, control and ownership.

Register now!

We invite those who are able to travel and join us at the PWF 2024 Bali and those who wish to participate virtually to register here.