Life as debt, or debt to life? Water, finance and infrastructure.

This paper explores the forms of debt that come into play as public water utilities are privatized and financialized. On the one hand, the financialization of water utilities sets in motion a politics of frantic municipal debt repayment. As infrastructures become financial assets, they also become vehicles for future financial returns. On the other hand, the financialization of water infrastructures often provokes a very different calculus of debt, articulated by people mobilized into protecting 'their water' from privatization - that of the human debt to water as life. Based on research conducted in Europe, particularly Italy, I showhowwater movements insist on a very different kind of value - an incalculable, that is to say transcendent value that derives from life's indebtedness to water. I argue that water movements' insistence on the human debt to water as life opens up powerful pathways for a critique of capitalism's extraction of value from life, and of the financialization of value as such. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]