Maya Ganesh and Yue Cao

 

Key words: tragedy of the commons, privatization, neo-liberalism, governance, stakeholder participation.

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Introduction

According to Hardin (1968), the ‘tragedy of the commons’ occurs when a pasture is not owned by any person and each herdsman attempts to maximise his or her gain by adding cattle to their respective herds, until the carrying capacity of the land is exhausted due to overgrazing. In The Tragedy of the Commons, open-access resources suffer from the problems of excludability, whereby no one can be kept from using the resource, as well as subtractability, whereby as each user uses the resource, he or she subtracts from the welfare of the others (Griffin, 2013). These observations hint that the commons need to be governed under a particular form of property right regime (Griffin, 2013).

The objective of this paper is to examine privatized governance of the commons from looking at a case-study in Bangalore, where there was an attempt to privatise the lakes in and surrounding the city. We are going to use the debate on the water privatisation movement led by Karen Bakker in 2011 and evaluate it from a critical political ecology perspective.

Background

In the era of neoliberalism, assigning private property rights over public assets grew rapidly (Griffin, 2013). However, before British colonisation, there were several lakes in Bangalore that were locally managed by the village communities, who depended on them for their livelihood (D’Souza and Nagendra, 2011). After colonial settlement, the city began to import piped water from the Cauvery River and the lakes no longer served for water supply. With rapid urbanisation from the 1980s, over 40 of the city’s lakes were filled and transformed for urban land use, including building bus stands, golf courses, malls and residential areas (D’Souza and Nagendra, 2011). The property rights over Bangalore’s lakes shifted radically.

Until 1983, the lakes in Bangalore were managed by the centralised state, but due to an increased public concern over their deteriorating condition, a special committee and department were formed that year to deal with such issues (D’Souza and Nagendra 2011). However, these were still not effective at resolving all issues and in 2002, the government adopted a new public-private partnership approach in order to maintain and restore lakes.

An Attempt of Privatization

Between 2005 and 2006, four lakes in Bangalore – Hebbal, Nagavara, Venkanayakere and Agara – were leased out to private bodies in the hospitality and real estate sectors. Hebbal Lake, for example, originally a bird sanctuary, was leased out to the Oberoi Hotel for a period of 15 years for an annual amount of Rupees 72,10,000 (approximately USD 1.44 million).

This resulted in the lakes being exclusively used by wealthy urban residents for recreational purposes while other stakeholders, such as the fishermen and washer men, were banned from having access. The transformation of a given space changes the relationship and interactions people have with it. People’s identities are affected in the process of displacing a given space from their free use of it (Baindur, 2014). This process can also be framed as ‘accumulation by dispossession’ whereby the enclosure of public assets profits private players at the cost of greater social inequalities (Harvey 2004). In the case of Bangalore, the lakes carry different meaning for the stakeholders involved. For some they are an economic input or a private good, for others an aesthetic reference, a religious symbol and a public service (Bakker, 2011).

Although there was a significant outcry against the privatisation of the lakes, which was widely reported in the media, the state could not manage them due to a shortage of funds and inadequate staffing. Their only alternative was to lease out the asset to private companies (Down to Earth, 2011).  However, it does not seem that privatisation was in this case a viable solution to achieve just and equal access to the commons.

Applying the political ecology framework

From an environmental point of view, privatisation of lakes in Bangalore caused fauna, such as fish and birds, to be disturbed by excessive human activity and caused high levels of pollution by transforming the space around the lakes into amusement parks. The privatisation of the lake overlooked its direct use for fishing and washing and instead engineered it into an exclusionary common for consumption and entertainment under the guise of lake conservation (Baindur, 2014).

From a socio-economic point of view, one of Bakker’s main critique for privatisation is social exclusion or the marginalized disempowered communities, in this case the fishermen and other residents who cannot afford to pay for accessing the lakes, which is indirectly linked to the ‘accumulation of nature’ by the most powerful actors (Bakker 2011). This is not to say that governance by the state would have resulted in a more favourable outcome. Indeed, there had previously been several attempts to shift property rights to different departments who failed to maintain environmental standards.

Conclusion

To conclude, more inclusive forms of governing the lakes, such as co-production, which involves users of the lake, could possibly offer more sustainable solutions to improved management and maintenance of the lakes in ways that are both anthropocentric and eco-centric. Co-production involves citizens playing an active role in producing public goods and services that are important to them (Ostrom, 1996).

 

CITE THIS ARTICLE

Cao, Y. and Ganesh, M. (2014). Governing the Commons through privatisation in the urban Global South: A Case of Bangalore Lakes Privatisation | UCL Encyclopaedia of Political Ecology. [online] Available at: https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/esd/governing-the-commons-through-privatisation-in-the-urban-global-south-a-case-of-bangalore-lakes-privatisation/

 

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Baindur, M., (2014), ‘Bangalore Lake story: reflections on the spirit of a place’,  Journal of Cultural Geography, 31 (1), pp. 32-56.

D’Souza, R. and Nagendra, H., (2011), ‘Changes in public commons as a consequence of urbanization: The Agara lake in Bangalore, India’, Environmental management, 47 (5), pp. 840-850.

Down To Earth, (2011), Commercial interest cannot drive lake conservation in Bengaluru, [Online]. Available at: http://www.downtoearth.org.in/content/commercial-interest-cannot-drive-lake-conservation-bengaluru  [Accessed: 28th February 2014].

Griffin, L., (2013), Governing the Commons, London: University College London. Moodle site. Module BENVGES1: The Political Ecology of Environmental Change. [Online via internal VLE], Restricted availability at: https://moodle.ucl.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=8066. [Accessed: 3rd March 2014].

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Harvey, D., (2009), ‘The ‘new’ imperialism: accumulation by dispossession’, Socialist register, 40 (40), pp. 63- 87.

Ostrom, E. (1996), ‘Crossing the Great Divide: Coproduction, Synergy and Development’, World Development, 24 (6), pp 1073- 1087.