Work

Water, Territory and Power in the 2014 Water Crisis in the State of São Paulo

Year: 2026

Type: article

Abstract: Inter-basin water transfers are increasingly recognized as political infrastructures that re-produce territorial inequality, yet their intersection with financialized governance remains undertheorized. This article examines São Paulo's 2014–2015 water crisis through the Cantareira System, advancing three contributions: it situates the system within debates on large-scale water infrastructure and hydro-territorial extraction; it reconstructs governance decisions across water-rights renegotiation cycles through an original documentary cor-pus; and it demonstrates how Sabesp's mixed-capital structure embedded shareholder im-peratives into crisis management. The analysis reveals that instruments such as the Risk-Aversion Curve and the Water Bank consolidated Sabesp's operational discretion rather than ensuring equitable allocation, and that successive renewals preserved structural asymmetries between the Metropolitan Region of São Paulo and the donor basin despite adaptive reforms. The findings argue that scarcity under financialized governance is pro-duced rather than merely managed, pointing to the need to confront the spatial and finan-cial logics embedded in large-scale water infrastructure.

Source: Apollo (University of Cambridge)

DOI: 10.17863/cam.128439

Authors: Zambiasi, Tamara, Costa Ribeiro, Wagner

Language: English

Topic: Water Governance and Infrastructure

Subfield: Political Science and International Relations

Field: Social Sciences

Domain: Social Sciences

SDGs: Clean water and sanitation, Peace, justice, and strong institutions, Reduced inequalities

Open Access status: green

Funder: Economic and Social Research Council

Award: Cambridge Social Science Doctoral Training Partnership