Flow For The Love Of Water Analysis

“FLOW: For the Love of Water” Tragedy of a common resource no one can relinquish

The award winning, 2008 documentary “Flow: For the Love of Water” presents a partisan piece of cinematography on a topic that until then had—for many living in the rich world—been taken for granted: clean drinking water. Following the long effective tactics of environmental shock doctrine, the movie makes a case for the pressing issues related to water shortage and wrongs within the water industry, especially the bottled water industry. After outlining the current threats global water supplies face, because of agricultural use and pollution for example, the movie moves on to what it deems the main culprit for the remaining water resources’ unfair distribution

While it is helpful to discuss and tackle the problems that these communities are facing, in terms of water shortage, vilification of corporations is not the right way to finding a solution for all the three stakeholders of society. Instead, it should be focused on inclusive problem solving. As outlined above, being part of the system, all three interest groups follow their incentives leading them to do what they do. The way to fix it would be alignment of these incentives. Privatisation of water can provide governments with the capital and resources to create localised water solutions for the communities. After all, most of the technological development that heralded many of the local solutions, from reverse osmosis to UV disinfection, would not have been invented without participation of corporations. However, privatisation might not always provide the best solution. In some cases, where initial investments for connecting the communities with water are too high and regulations low, corporations are likely to exploit their unique situation. Here, governments should step in and provide the service, or supply the communities with the resources to come up with a solution for themselves. After all, they managed to live there so

It admirably rolls out million dollar heavy rescue packages for countries in need of water, which sadly suffer a lack of practicality. In the movie, the bank is criticised for not providing pragmatic ways to solving water issues. Instead, it is often seen spending the money on big corporate projects that score low in cost against social benefit ratio. Similarly damaging is the well-intended but quixotic pressure toward privatisation and liberalisation of markets, which has unintended consequences for many developing countries. Usually, their modern governments are still in their infancies and situational circumstances often differ from the theoretical assumptions. The World Bank had to learn the hard way that one model for all may not always be the best solution. Instead, the institution should embrace the creativity and ingenuity of local governments and civil society. The movie makes a strong case for this by looking at, for example, a UV treatment solution in India that provides sanitized drinking water to affordable prices. There are similar solutions possible in most of the affected regions. The only barrier is that they would have to be worked on case-to-case basis. With this approach, tailor-made, efficient solutions could be found for each community