Ethnography of a Mobilization for Water as a Common Good in the Italian Alps
In 2011, a referendum against the privatization of water was held in Italy. Throughout the country, social movements organized actions to raise public awareness on the importance to consider water as a common resource. Based on an ethnographic research I carried out in 2011 on the social mobilization in the Alpine region of Trentine, this article has two aims. The first is to examine how the discourse on water as a common resource has been elaborated, combining three different arguments: the crisis of neoliberalism, the Alpine tradition of the common goods and the social struggles of Andean peoples. It therefore tackles the “globalization of ethnicity” in our contemporary societies. The second is to analyze how the discourse developed within the Italian mobilization for water as a common resource questions the recent transformations of the public service and proposes to rethink it. Public service should therefore include the (common) resource to be managed, the service to be provided and new forms of governance based on citizen participation.