In several cities and regions in Spain there has been a fight against privatization of water supply in the past decade. Some cities have decided to re-municipalise water supply and debates about implementing the human right to water and sanitation have been held in many parts of Spain, following the success of the Right2Water European Citizens' Initiative. We unfold relationships with and between water movements in Spain—like the Red Agua Publica —and relationships with other networks—like the indignados movement and subsequently how water protests converged with austerity protests.
In different places these struggles took different shapes. Struggles for water justice in Spain are ongoing and we seek to identify the temporarily outcomes of these struggles, and whether power balances in Spain's water services provision have shifted in the past decade.
In the past decade the struggle for water and sanitation justice has been linked with alliances deploying informal strategies and campaigns for formal recognition of the human right to water and sanitation see, e. With that result it became the first successful ECI, simultaneously building a Europe-wide movement and putting the water issue high on the European political agenda.
Implementing such water justice notion is part of an ongoing socio-political struggle. This struggle had been going on in Spain before the start of the ECI and it has continued afterwards. Moreover, it looks at how social movements developed, reinforced or complemented each other in their struggles for social justice and against austerity measures that have marked the second decade of this century.
In the past decade a growing number of cities and regions have decided to re-municipalize water supply. The human right to water and sanitation framework was instrumental in this process, as we will show in a few cases.
