Presentation short abstract

The Barcelona Metropolitan Area’s “warer social meter” regulation prioritizes the right to water over property rights, providing temporary water access to squatters without legal tenure. Using survey and implementation data, we examine the water-energy-housing nexus and its justice implications.

Presentation long abstract

Political ecology has begun to examine water and energy together, but their link with housing precarity is still overlooked. This paper addresses that gap through the case of the Barcelona Metropolitan Area’s “social meter” regulation, which prioritizes the right to water over property rights by granting temporary access to households squatting dwellings without legal tenure. This governance innovation, emerging in a Mediterranean context marked by housing crises and affordability struggles, challenges dominant approaches to utility provision and raises critical questions about justice and social reproduction.

First, we use the European Living Conditions Survey to highlight the co-occurrence of water and energy poverty, showing how these utilities are interconnected in everyday practices. Second, we examine implementation data on social meters in the metropolitan area, tracing their evolution and territorial distribution. These findings reveal how water access policies intersect with housing crises, creating new forms of vulnerability and struggle.

By situating these dynamics within broader debates on basic utilities, the paper argues for a broader understanding of the water-energy-housing nexus. This perspective shows how legal frameworks and infrastructure in the form of water meters shape access to water and energy, while exposing the uneven geographies of rights and governance. What new insights emerge when political ecology brings water, energy and housing together in struggles over affordability and environmental justice?

Presentation short abstract

Drawing on archival research and interviews, this presentation traces the production of an energy utility debt crisis in the US state of Pennsylvania, contextualizing this crisis in both utility expansionism and the remade utility-customer relationship post-market liberalization.

Presentation long abstract

This presentation considers the production of an energy utility debt crisis in the US state of Pennsylvania, where, as neoliberal crises intensified in the early 2000s, a punitive and enduring utility debt repayment policy ("Chapter 14") was instituted through lobbying efforts led by the city-owned utility Philadelphia Gas Works (PGW) with support from the state's private electric and gas utilities. In this presentation, I use archival analysis and interviews to map the development of Chapter 14, establishing how punitive utility debt policies emerged from both PGW's expansionism despite their bounded surface area and the remade utility-customer relationship post-market liberalization. I supplement this archival research with semi-structured interviews with indebted Pennsylvania residents to establish how Chapter 14 is lived and experienced. I argue that to understand and advance claims and campaigns for utility justice - including decommodifying energy and ending shutoffs - utility debt must be understood not as an unfortunate or inevitable symptom of unaffordability and high rates, but as a relation central to the enterprise of supplying electricity and gas for both public and private utilities.

Presentation short abstract

The presentation examines how financialization has become embedded in the provision of water and sanitation services (WSS) in Brazil, discussing the role the National Bank for Social and Economic Development and the characteristics of the new private companies that are leading WSS provision

Presentation long abstract

Over the past years, water and sanitation services (WSS) in many countries have undergone profound transformations driven by processes of financialization. This paper examines how financialization has become embedded in the provision of water services in Brazil. The privatization of these services has expanded rapidly over the last six years, and in 2025 approximately 42.6% of Brazilians have their services provided by private companies. This process has been facilitated by a new national legal framework that creates greater incentives for private sector participation in WSS and reduces financial support for public services. Furthermore, the National Bank for Social and Economic Development (BNDES) has played a significant role in organizing privatization projects and providing financial support to private companies.

In 2025, within the universe of private concessions, the five largest companies serve 92% of the population covered by private operators. These companies are primarily controlled by financial agents. Given the central role of BNDES in both structuring WSS privatization projects and financing the private companies that have taken over these services, this paper aims to discuss the role of the bank, the financial flows in water and sanitation services from public funds to private companies, the different strategies developed by private operators to maximize surpluses through financial instruments, and their cascading effects on the management of the services.

Presentation short abstract

Spain’s fossil-fuel oligopoly influences politics, regulation and academia through lobbying, revolving doors and funding, consolidating corporate power, slowing the energy transition, weakening democratic transparency and reinforcing its dominance over the state.

Presentation long abstract

The so-called fossil empire—the group of large energy companies that dominate the Spanish energy system (Endesa, Iberdrola, Naturgy, Repsol, and Moeve)—has consolidated structural power that transcends the economic sphere, decisively influencing politics, regulation, academia, and public opinion. Despite the scarcity of fossil resources in Spain, a network of infrastructure and corporations linked to international interests, sovereign wealth funds, and large investors has developed, which today controls most of the energy chain.

The fossil fuel lobby operates through various mechanisms, two of which are presented in this study: political advocacy and academic advocacy. In the political arena, it uses strategies such as revolving doors, indirect financing, legislative lobbying, and explicit pressure on parties and governments. A prime example is the repeal of Royal Decree-Law 10/2024, which sought to tax extraordinary profits from energy companies and was overturned after intense corporate pressure and the alignment of parties with prior links to the sector.

In academia, companies finance professorships, research, master's degrees, and educational programs, shaping the production of knowledge and legitimizing their narratives under the guise of scientific rigor. This phenomenon, described as academic washing, weakens university independence and consolidates a technocratic vision aligned with corporate interests.

The lack of effective regulation of lobbying in Spain allows much of these activities to take place with a lack of transparency, generating social mistrust. It is essential to strengthen citizen action, institutional transparency, and academic independence in order to move towards a just and democratic energy transition.

Presentation short abstract

Using over 35 qualitative interviews across the industry, National Roadmap to Ending Utility Shutoffs identifies the extent of the harms of shutoffs, evaluating best practices for reducing them and providing strategic recommendations for energy justice advocates, policymakers, and regulators.

Presentation long abstract

Millions of households across the United States experience utility shutoffs each year due to nonpayment, disproportionately impacting BIPOC and frontline environmental justice communities. Despite the fundamental need for electricity for survival, investor-owned utilities prioritize profit over people. Between January and October 2022, utility companies shut off power to households in the U.S. an estimated 4.2 million times, with few companies responsible for the vast majority of these disconnections (Bell et al., 2023).

Energy insecurity is a multi-dimensional crisis with economic, physical, and behavioral components (Hernández, 2016). It exacerbates health disparities, with shutoffs linked to respiratory conditions such as asthma and premature deaths (Hernández, 2016). Utilities use strategic, extractive tactics such as media manipulation, regulatory capture, and rate hikes to suppress consumer protections (Rivera et al., 2022). The consequences of utility shutoffs are severe: households without power struggle to maintain employment, access healthcare, and keep children in school. Moreover, the lack of transparent data on disconnections masks the full extent of the crisis, hindering regulatory and legislative solutions.

The National Roadmap to Ending Utility Shutoffs identifies the harms, evaluating best practices for reducing and providing strategic recommendations for energy justice advocates, policymakers, and regulators. This project delivers a set of targeted resources–including a white paper detailing the arguments for the elimination of utility shutoffs, a strategy memo outlining policies, administrative actions that advocates can take to achieve shutoff moratoria, and a literature review analyzing the harm of utility shutoffs and disparities across demographics–to inform and mobilize stakeholders toward eliminating utility shutoffs.

Presentation short abstract

This paper engages feminist urban political ecology to demonstrate how energy democracy organizers in the US South contest the appropriation of racialized social reproductive labor and chart an alternative imaginary for public power and affordable energy as part of a social wage.

Presentation long abstract

This intervention draws from ethnographic research on energy democracy organizing in Atlanta, Georgia and with the Knoxville Water and Energy for All coalition in Tennessee to consider how electric and water utility customers chart an alternative imaginary of public power systems in the US South. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic that heightened awareness of utility disconnections, energy and environmental justice organizations across the South formed or turned to focus on questions of racialized and gendered disparities in energy affordability and shut-offs. In this paper, I build on the analysis in my forthcoming book, Electric Life: Utility Regulation and the Fight for Energy Democracy, adopting feminist urban political ecology as a lens to study how utilities naturalize, invisibilize, and appropriate labor- and life-time. Here, I focus on the social reproductive labor that households undertake across everyday life to survive rising utility bills such as budgeting home water and energy usage, weatherizing homes, visiting charities, and applying for state assistance. Quotidian demands become collateral for speculative utility investment as utilities wager on customers' social reproductive labor to afford monthly bills. I ask how customers build solidarity and momentum to address regressive pricing by connecting these moments of everyday coping to longer histories of racialized discrimination that exacerbate disparities in affordability today. Contrasting two campaigns around a municipal utility in Tennessee and a regulated, investor-owned utility in Georgia, I demonstrate how organizing for affordable utilities drives at broader questions for democratic accountability and public investment in a social wage.

Presentation short abstract

This paper examines how the climate–sustainable-development industrial complex (CSIDC) is reshaping water governance in Africa through techno-financial interventions that convert racialized precarity into new sites of capital accumulation.

Presentation long abstract

This paper examines how the climate–sustainable-development industrial complex (CSIDC) is reshaping water governance in Africa through emerging regimes of financialization that deepen global ‘water apartheid.’ Through a political ecology and racial capitalist lens, drawing on qualitative analysis of policy documents produced by the World Bank, OECD and affiliated multistakeholder bodies, I examine how climate resilience and sustainable development are mobilized to convert racialized precarity into new opportunities for accumulation. Interrogating the focus on Africa as both a site of acute humanitarian need and an untapped investment terrain, I analyze how predatory practices promoted as ‘innovative financing solutions’ for water-related climate adaptation and sustainable development serve to facilitate the extraction of profits from vulnerable communities. As ecological and financial crises intensify, these strategies expose the racial capitalist drives through which international development is being reconfigured to guarantee the reproduction of Northern capital rather than to secure water for marginalized communities.

This analysis is grounded in collaborative research with water justice organizers in Cape Town, South Africa, whose everyday struggles illuminate the intimate impacts of urban entanglements with finance capital. Their experiences reveal how techniques of financial discipline entrench historical racial injustices while producing new vulnerabilities in the context of climate chaos and financial austerity. Through multi-scalar analysis connecting global finance, international development and household-level utility struggles, this paper shows how techno-financial interventions of CSIDC intensify the social reproductive burdens of historically marginalized communities and how insights from frontline water justice struggles can help articulate more just futures.

Presentation short abstract

This paper grapples with the contradictory logics and racialized politics governing water and energy affordability and assistance in Michigan which have produced a double-standard wherein utility bill surcharges are legitimized for energy assistance but not for water assistance.

Presentation long abstract

Like many states across the US, Michigan is working to address growing rates of water and energy insecurity. Residents in Detroit have experienced particularly high water and energy burdens, with utility rates far exceeding accepted affordability thresholds and with significantly higher rates of utility shutoffs. Water and energy assistance programs have existed in the state since the early 2000s, yet both programs have struggled to meet the financial needs. In response, the state approved legislation in 2024 that expanded a monthly surcharge on all energy utility bills, doubling the assistance funds available to low-income households. Similar proposals for a statewide water surcharge have repeatedly failed in the legislature, however, while Detroit-based community organizers have faced more than a decade of resistance from local administrators over a surcharge-funded water affordability plan for the city. This paper grapples with the contradictory logics and racialized politics that have governed water and energy affordability and assistance in Michigan over the last two decades. Not discounting several important distinctions between the two utility systems, including over ownership, regulation, and the material qualities of each resource, this paper examines the double-standard that has emerged across Michigan’s parallel affordability crises wherein the same affordability provision has been legitimized for energy utilities but not for water.