PSI signs cooperation agreement with water support network
30 April 2015
The parties agreed to jointly search for funding to consolidate the cooperation in research and teaching activities, with a long-term perspective. The main areas of common interest between the PSI and the research network are:
- The democratization of water politics and management
- Social and political struggles against commodification and privatization of water and essential water services
- The challenge to develop an ethics to defend public sector institutions, involving public companies, trade unions, and other relevant civil society organizations
- The development of alternatives to prevailing policy frameworks predicated on economistic understandings of development that prioritize economic growth and private capital accumulation at the expense of the destruction of the material basis of human communities worldwide, which are being dispossessed of their territories, their lands, their water, and their living conditions
- The formulation of public policies oriented by the ideal of human equality in the access to goods and services essential for human life, such as quality water and sanitation and health-related public services.
- The struggle to protect the wide range of social actors, including members of poor communities, trade union members, environmental activists, academics, and other actors who are the target of threats, persecution, torture, and assassination owing to their political positions in defence of the public and community sectors, of human rights, and for the protection of the water sources that constitute the basis of life on earth.
The Cooperation Agreement will be implemented through bi-annual work plans with specific objectives and targets. The first work plan that will cover 2016-2017, will be announced at the WATERLAT-GOBACIT Network’s VII Annual Meeting, which will take place in Guadalajara, Mexico, on 19-23 October 2015.