"Recommoning water: a counter-imaginary for democratising water governance?" by Dona Geagea (NEWAVE ESR10)

To what extent can the public and commons governance paradigms intersect? The call to ‘remunicipalise’ water resources has become a key strategy for water movements across Europe in the last 15 years, to counter the wave of privatisation and water commodification rolled out under austerity frameworks. In focusing on two deviant cities that shifted from private/market-models and pushed the boundaries of water remunicipalisation by employing a commons-oriented logic, I investigate the conditions that enable crossing this paradigm threshold. With invited guests we ask to what extent these experiments have succeeded to democratize local water governance, and 'what else' is happening that is shifting these hydrosocial territories.

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About the speaker

Dona Geagea is a water governance doctoral researcher at NEWAVE. She is based at the Institute for Environmental Studies at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Political scientist bytraining, she has worked for over a decade as a facilitator and project manager in the water/environmental sector, designing and moderating multi-disciplinary and multi-stakeholder knowledge and innovation collaboration projects. Combining her professional experience with her academic background, she brings feminist and decolonial thinking to her work on the water commons. Dona is a Rotary Global Scholar (2020-2022) and one of tenwomen selected as an Aura Fellow with Be the Earth Foundation (2020-2022).

Moderators & discussants

Maria Kaika (Moderator), professor in Urban, Regional and Environmental Planning at the University of Amsterdam’s (UvA) Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences

Lavinia Steinfort, coordinator of the Public Alternatives project, including the Public Power dossier at the Transnational Institute

Maria Francesca de Tullio, post-doc researcher in Constitutional Law at the Federico II University of Naples, activist in the urban commons movement in Naples and co-president in the Permanent Observatory on Commons of the City of Naples

This seminar is part of the “The Next Wave of Water Governance” Diffused Conference Thematic Seminar series. The series includes bi-weekly seminars on the key topics of water governance investigated by the NEWAVE Early Stage Researchers. You can register for learn more and see the full schedule of the upcoming sessions at this link.