Social Work and the Moral Economy of Water

This paper presents highlights from research on community-based water activism in Guelph, Ontario, Canada – one of the most water-rich regions of the world. Social network analysis in conjunction with qualitative methods was used to explore the influence of water activists' normative motivations on the mobilization of collective action on water issues. The findings revealed that even where scarcity is only a remote, long-term threat, decision-making and economic activity involving water have the potential to trigger local citizen action based on a fundamental conflict between the drive of commodification and a countervailing, popularly-held normative consensus concerning water. The findings suggest that a popular consensus that holds water as a commons – and as such, places universal access to water, environmental sustainability, and local community self-reliance ahead of profit making – is an important trigger for collective action when violated by decisions or actions taken in the local community. Understood as such, I draw on scholarship on the moral economy to argue that collective action on water issues in Guelph exposes a unifying theme that connects Guelph's water activists to each other and to a growing worldwide movement to defend the water commons. Moreover, with Canadian social work striving to incorporate matters of environmental justice into its scholarship and practice, in this paper I outline a rationale and identify priorities for social work involvement in this area.