This is a book about water: water as a basic good, an essential resource and a life need that is deeply embedded in relations of power, meaning and identity. But it is also a book about collective institution-building, about governing in a world of rapidly shifting power dynamics between governments, businesses and ‘ordinary’ people. From this second perspective, struggles over access to water are emblematic. They are an instance – a particularly intense instance – of conflicts over how to provide collective goods and services. The questions about provision and governance of water services explored in this book resonate with the provision and governance of other basic goods too – education, health, transport, communications, energy. These are all areas where the scope of state-led capitalism is especially contested, and many of them also echo the question that water raises most intensely: how far should economic principles of market-based delivery govern the provision of collective goods? What is the fate of ‘the social’ as state–market relations are ever more intensively reconfigured? Where, if not with respect to water, can we find, define and make real the limits of a market-based political economy?

These substantive political questions are deeply linked to the reconfiguration of state–market relations in a context of global governance, where the role of the nation-state in collective provision of essential services is increasingly supplemented and re-shaped by transnational institutions.