a FUTURE H ISTORY of WATER ANDREA BALLESTERO Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2019 with funding from Duke University Libraries https://archive.org/details/futurehistoryofwOOball a FUTURE H ISTORY Of WATER Duke University Press Durham and London 2019 a Future History 1 of Water Andrea Ballestero © 2019 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper °° Designed by Mindy Basinger Hill Typeset in Chaparral Pro by Copperline Books Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Ballestero, Andrea, [date] author. Title: A future history of water / Andrea Ballestero. Description: Durham : Duke University Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018047202 (print) | LCCN 2019005120 (ebook) ISBN 9781478004516 (ebook) ISBN 9781478003595 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN 9781478003892 (pbk.: alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Water rights—Latin America. | Water rights—Costa Rica. Water rights—Brazil. | Right to water—Latin America. | Right to water—Costa Rica. | Right to water—Brazil. | Water-supply— Political aspects—Latin America. | Water-supply—Political aspects— Costa Rica. | Water-supply—Political aspects—Brazil. Classification: LCC HD1696.5.L29 (ebook) | LCC HD1696.5.L29 B35 2019 (print) | DDC 333.33/9—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018047202 Cover art: Nikolaus Koliusis, 360V1 sec, 360V1 sec, 47 wratten B, 1983. Photographer: Andreas Freytag. Courtesy of the Daimler Art Collection, Stuttgart. This title is freely available in an open access edition thanks to generous support from the Fondren Library at Rice University. PARA LIOLY, LINO, R6MULO, Y TfA MACHA CONTENTS ix PREFACE XV ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 1 INTRODUCTION 36 1 FORMULA On how a human right hinges on the techno-legal metaphysics of balance and equilibrium in an equation that stands for society and is responsible for precluding the generation of unethical profits in the provision of public water services 75 2 INDEX Through which goods and services such as beets, pantyhose, and internet access purchased by “households” come to determine the nonmarket character of water as a gift of Nature and God and, in the process, dissipate the human as a self-evident subject of rights 109 3 LIST Where the material borders of water are challenged through incendiary discussions that counterpose the excesses of Libertarian beliefs to the liberal tradition that undergirds activist strategies to recognize water as a right and public good 144 4 pact In which traveling consultants, colored slips of paper, and promises gather to generate commitments to care for water, while allowing promise-makers to remain disparate fragments that clasp to each other without any homogenizing sense of belonging CONTENTS 185 CONCLUSION 201 NOTES 211 REFERENCES 225 INDEX viii PREFACE I was walking toward the exhibit in the 2009 World Wa¬ ter Forum held in Istanbul, Turkey, when I heard someone call my name. Surprised, I turned around to see Lucas, a friend from Ceara, in northeast¬ ern Brazil, who at the time worked at the Water Management Company created in the 1990s when the state revamped its water institutions. I was happy and surprised to see him. After we greeted each other he told me he had collected a couple of things that I would find interesting and handed me a poster and a brochure he had picked from an NGO in the exhibit I was trying to get to. As I unrolled the poster I was astonished. Without know¬ ing, out of the dozens of stands, Lucas had picked up and was handing me a poster produced by an organization in Costa Rica that I had been follow¬ ing for several years. I thanked him profusely, and after we said goodbye I found myself pondering how all the particularities of location that I had imagined would ground my research had just been troubled. Geography and location were too performative, too flexible to use as grounding de¬ vices for my research. Lucas and his colleagues from Brazil, the NGO, and state representatives from Costa Rica, and I were all fellow travelers in this international water circuit. They all were giving talks about their experiences in shaping the political materiality of water, telling stories about how they were mobi¬ lizing categories, challenging legal infrastructures, questioning economic models. Their talks described particular experiments, new attempts to change the future of water, and the specific tools they were using to do so. All their stories were about the possibility of different futures, narrations where the materiality of the present—rivers, water pipes, rain patterns, evapotranspiration rates, land titles, and water pumps—was experienced as an anticipatory event, as a trace of the yet to come. PREFACE Without being able to rely on geography to stabilize my research, I quickly refocused on those futures and the technical crafts involved in bringing them about. Understanding the ethical possibilities for the future that they inscribed in their technical craft required me to pay attention to prac¬ tices and artifacts that often seem unremarkable, or even worse, uninter¬ esting tools of familiar economic and legal systems we wish to undo. In this book I suggest that those knowledge forms and the practices by which they are brought to matter are devices with wondrous capacities to trans¬ gress ontological boundaries, even while seeming to merely replicate what currently is. Rediscovering these devices and their wonder reminds us of the intensity by which everyday life, including technocratic life, constantly shapes the limits of the possible. In philosophical terms, wonder takes over when knowledge and under¬ standing cannot master what they should. It arises when, “surrounded by utterly ordinary concepts and things, the philosopher suddenly finds himself [sic] surrounded on all sides by aporia” (Rubenstein 2006). Wonder ( thau- mazeiri) is regarded as the point of origin of Western philosophy (Socrates/ Aristotle). Yet, as with many origins, this one is also imagined as in need of being superseded because of its pathos (Aristotle), its heretical implica¬ tions (St. Augustine), and/or its lower value as a passion that is closer to the feminine and the childish (Descartes!). For ethnographic analysis, how¬ ever, the task when thinking with wonder is different. If wonder strikes when people, things, and other beings encounter each other in concrete times and places, the analytic task is to trace how those encounters rede¬ fine wonder as an affective disposition. This is what the process of doing the research for this book and writing it did to my own thinking. The four devices I present in this book reshaped the sense of ethnographic won¬ der with which I embarked on the project. In dry technocratic procedure, I found space for wondrous wonderings. Thus, rather than defining wonder as a particular vision of the world, I want to invite you to think of wonder as an underlying epistemic mood. In its Western philosophical trajectory, wonder has ended up resembling the concept of marvel or enchantment. But that is not the only meaning wonder has. Wonder is instability, confusion, maybe even frustration. It entails a fluidity that, while rendered enjoyable and desirable in much an¬ thropology, also entails a type of difficulty and disorientation that is not necessarily a pleasurable sensation. When denuded of its positive valence, wonder is much more textured and less idealized. It entails openness and the potential expansion of pos¬ sibilities. It is more than the comfortable position of the modest witness, or the point of view from nowhere, or the God trick. It is dirty, messy. It can make you allergic, want to avoid it. From this point of view, one could not limit an anthropological wonder to worlds that differ radically from the liberal tradition (Scott 2013). 1 Social analysis that begins with wonder is moved by a “peculiar cognitive passion that register(s) the breach of bound¬ aries” (Daston and Park 1998: 363), regardless of where those boundaries were originally placed. Wonder opens up familiar worlds for rediscovery. The predecessor of this type of wonder is the early modern collection of oddities and its attempt to reorganize worlds and beliefs. xi Surfacing throughout Europe in the sixteenth century, after Christopher Columbus’s imperial travels to the Americas, collections of “all curiosities naturall or artificial” began to proliferate in Europe (Hodgen 1964: 114). First put together by the aristocrat, merchant, or eccentric personality, the collection of oddities gathered “books, manuscripts, card-games, coins, gi¬ ants’ bones, fossils,... zoological and botanical specimens” (Hodgen 1964: 115). The items in the collection were extraordinary as well as unremark¬ able. Smaller items were stored in cabinets or cupboards following the de¬ sign of the apothecary shop. Larger artifacts were suspended from walls or ceilings, enveloping the body of the observer. The result was high density and the accumulation of semiotic charge until it could barely be contained. Due to this aesthetic uniqueness, these collections came to be known as les cabinetes de curiosites (cabinets of curiosities) or Wunderkammer (cabinets of wonder). Part of the power of the cabinet of wonder resided in how it took the familiar form of the geologic and botanical collection, repurposed it, and transformed it into something very different. While those collections re¬ corded “natural” taxonomic ontologies, the collection of oddities recon¬ sidered inherited hierarchical structures and the limits of nature. It was a “force-filled microcosm” unlike any other, since each collection was a unique and unrepeatable assemblage (Frazer 1935: 1). Due to this trans¬ gressive nature, the collection reinforced a sense of chaos at a time of ma¬ jor cosmological transition, an era when European colonists confronted a world that no longer was what they thought it used to be. 2 By grouping ar¬ tifacts of radically different origins and forms, collectors challenged inher¬ ited orders and made new ones possible. This openness showed the power of setting things side by side in one formation, even if the things brought PREFACE PREFACE together did not seem to belong next to each other—a manufactured tool, a doll, and a leaf could all be part of a single heterodox set. This collecting impulse, and its accompanying sense of wonder, was not limited to artifacts that could be placed inside a drawer. Another type of object, one that did not lend itself to easy placement, was also pursued: the manner or custom. Impossible to hang from a wall or put in a drawer, the custom was suspended on the page of the printed book. It required descrip¬ tion, translation, and illustration, and had to be connected to ideas such as nation, society, and civilization. In Europe, the most popular and well known among the early collections of customs was The Fardle ofFagions by xu Johan Boemus, translated into English in 1555 (Hodgen 1964). 3 The book describes cultural groups by way of their laws and institutions, including marriage systems, religion, funeral practices, weapons, diet, and apparel (Hodgen 1964: 287). Boemus wrote the book with two objectives. First, he wanted to make accessible to a broader audience existing knowledge about the variability of human behavior. Second, the book was written to im¬ prove the “political morality” of his readers and expose them to “the laws and governments of other nations,” with the purpose of developing intel¬ ligent “judgments” as to the best “orders and institutions” to be fitted into new colonial lands (Hodgen 1964: 131). In today’s terms, the book was a collection of case studies, an early modern repertoire of techniques for co¬ lonial control so successful that it was reissued at least twenty times and translated into five languages. 4 Fast forward five centuries, and the collection of customs, with its ana¬ logical structure and the wonder it inspires, still prevails as a means to imagine sociomaterial improvement and cultural difference in many cir¬ cuits, including the World Water Forum. Described as compilations of best practices and policy tools, and brought together in documents such as man¬ uals, frameworks, and anthologies, these contemporary collections circu¬ late nationally and internationally with the purpose of “improving” the “political morality” of water. These documents juxtapose “models” from different countries, environments, and societies to offer possible answers to collective questions, such as how to improve community participation in water management, how to charge just prices for water services, or how to guarantee the human right to water for all. And also just like Boemus’s, these collections are not cohesive arguments about the proper, but heterogenous samples of the possible. Their consti¬ tuting items can contradict, complement, expand, or oppose each other, and yet the collection remains viable as a summation of items that pre¬ serves their odd asymmetries. This book replicates that epistemic gesture. It takes you into a particular collection of devices, into their histories and the actions by which they are activated to produce what the professionals among whom I worked see as the necessary ethical bifurcations to trans¬ form a world that always resists change. The curatorial work behind this collection takes “odd” technocratic de¬ vices that we often take for granted and suspends them on the page of the book. The devices I bring together come from different parts of the world and are not homologous in any way. Each is a microcosm of selected histories and possible futures that conveys an expansiveness that is dif- xiii ficult to capture. At the same time, each device gives the sense of being a thing in and of itself. But just as with the premodern collection of oddities, what I want to emphasize is how, when we put them together into a collec¬ tion, these devices invite us to wonder about what we take as self-evident. I imagine this book as an invitation to linger in wonder, as we encounter familiar worlds. PREFACE ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Books are collective accomplishments. People, organizations and compan¬ ion species make them possible. Those listed below had a direct impact on the book itself. Many more helped bring about the project in the first place. I am truly thankful to all of you in so many different ways. I hope you can see some of yourselves in the pages that follow, I certainly can. ^ !> NSF-Cultural g® p 1 g^ NSF-Law and Social ^ Leonardo 3 v^T Anthropology £2 p- £ Sciences Program *%■%*%* PerucciS. PrD JT 1 to p Program tn . 2 b? Raul < $ > ^ | 3 Pacheco- & Ve § a G° P A r- 1 w Marisol 2 de la Cadena 5 2? J2. n 4 " p<> < O £ a <6 $ W nj 3 O S 3 3 o 3 'P 4 ?° e 3 f 1 3 Cl s 1 cr 3 3 id n> ' fu ^ % % % p\> Reviewer 1 pa Reviewer 3 tj r 1 n> n> P o C 3 B. a s o G n . Q -. 0 s& „ Lino %\ v»v Margo \ ^ ^ % 4 % 3^ 9. Q p j> 'ft t) 3 ^ m o ^ a. % * rD 5. P3 rD rD % s- m ft ^ § NJ re Nj "f Teresa Caldeira Johnson .V ,O 0 A** oV e S’ II ft 3 H. !i 5 i ? 3 3 & 3^ Ft > S' 5 2 £b c a co CT. 3 s n> jd Vo O Jenna Grant CENHS, > Rice University « to <$, % % £ T Munoz % p CO P3 3 3 3 j£ e \^ C Fondren S' 3 ,A e ,\P Library- Mel ^v° ca ^ ^ Rice University to ■p Ford A Volz ^ n r< c B. 2T cn & a. Jfl 0 * H g \\ ^ ^ I \\ « 3- A v by rD h 3 ^ O) Mei Zhan < N I S: ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xvi Eudoro C> ^ Leo Coleman Santana ^ oa a o o ^ to n ^ K N S SJ C*> CD 5T* 3 CD' i-t O pj ^ 2 co *J. nj C/5 ^ n n> o pi 9- (U O 3 3 rt on 3' 3- w 3 A °0 % \s Nicholas DAvella , > £ *^ e £ § y? ^ ^ .%. Georges Allison Fish •$A ac rt> r Verger N cT <5 Cymene Howe Magnus ^ Orn Sigurdsson A % ^ "3 xe y p-v E ^ o 3 ^ %>% S C>* v r-t Q- zr ^ £ 2 v, 9> 03 ?3 C O » * 3 to' 3* ° 9 <5*. tr 1 oo C 3 (/> (u 3 sr CTQ CD CTQ CD in Jorg Niewohner po x iL 3 3® a> c/5 ql \ Helena Zeweri % v&P A \N" ^ a ;» 2 o w 3 r; p. CTQ ^ c/J CD CD — c/5 V* o m u A E. S S' 3“ a; G° oO V Rolando Castro ac ^ CD CD ^ EJ- rf O) 05 3 % Jim ^ 3 TO r-f o 3 Michelle Lipinski Faubion / Leticia Barrera % % % s? 3 ff £ g 3 n> ° >-< C/5 3 w Claudia Arroyo Asambleia Legislativa do Ceara, Conselho de Altos . Estudos 9 n ^ e G J2 3 3 < ro X5 po > O « D- H- CTQ jd 0) ac ^ w SL "« 3^ G 3 TO ft> 3 A 03 ?>3 9 &T n ™ ^ 'T 3 Don Marcos a> 3" ac 3 3 or o yr Rosemary Hennessy 9 % %* INTRODUCTION Around noon on the fourth day of the World Water Forum, held in 2006 at Mexico City’s convention center, fifty out of the ten thousand participants managed to sneak in the necessary tools to stage a surprise protest. As the demonstrators went through the metal de¬ tectors that turned entry doors into security checkpoints, the guards in¬ specting their personal belongings ignored the water bottles, small coins, and folded pieces of cloth that they were bringing into the building. The would-be protestors walked briskly toward the lobby, where three levels of meeting rooms connected through an intricate system of balconies and escalators, creating an ideal stage for attracting an audience. Within min¬ utes, empty plastic water bottles emerged, coins were dropped into them, and cloth signs unfurled. The protestors began shaking their bottles rhythmically and chanting: El agua es un derecho, no es una mercanda! El agua es un derecho, no es una mercanda! (Water is a right, not a commodity! Water is a right, not a commodity!) With the opposition between a right and a commodity, the demonstra¬ tors were not invoking just any right; they were referring to the human right to water. Their voices were tactically recruiting water’s universalism to denounce the injustices and dispossession occurring around the world as a result of its commodification. Their chant was more than a mere dem¬ onstration slogan; it was a calculated rhetorical move marking the prac¬ tical and material distinctions between human rights and commodities. The demonstrators were convinced, as were many other participants in the forum, that water should be a universal human right accessible to all, and for that reason should never be commodified. But they also knew that those distinctions need to be produced in all sorts of places; courts were not the only spaces where rights were enacted, and markets did not hold a monopoly over commoditization practices. INTRODUCTION V Figure l.i. Disposable water bottle turned protest rattle. The sound of the shaking bottles in the protestors’ hands immediately attracted security guards, who approached from all corners of the build¬ ing and threatened to detain them unless they stopped. After heated ex¬ changes, the protesting voices slowly quieted and the plastic-metallic rattling of the bottles stilled. What had been a hub of intense energy dis¬ solved, quickly reverting to the hum of a controlled, professional environ¬ ment. If you had entered the lobby at that moment, you would not have imagined a vigorous protest had just ended. The significance of that his¬ torical moment had become precarious—a happening whose energetic ex¬ uberance had been effaced. Among all of the things one might find intriguing about this protest, the shaking bottles are what continue to captivate me so many years later (see figure l.i). Inhabiting the space previously occupied by water, the coins inside the bottles insinuated that water had been transubstantiated into money, the ultimate commodity. While the demonstrators’ chant cre¬ ated a clear structural bifurcation between human rights and commodi¬ ties, the coin-filled bottles confounded the clarity of that contrast. With their rhythmic movements up and down and the penetrating sound of metal pounding against plastic, they complicated the clarity of the protes¬ tors’ words. These bottles were sound-making instruments and statements about water’s confounding nature. They were conceptual things, material abstractions. These protest bottles, with their unruly embroilments, became the con¬ ceptual locus of my research on the technolegal politics of water. What kind of relation was there between the activists’ words, with their clear partitions, and the bottles in their hands, with the transubstantiation they suggested? If water is to be a human right, and not a commodity, how do you differenti¬ ate these two legal and economic formulations? And more generally, how do people create distinctions and bifurcations if the world in which they live con¬ stantly drifts toward entanglement, blurring stark oppositions? These questions are not only relevant to our thinking about the politics of water, they go beyond. Human rights and commodities directly shape or distantly hover over much of the organization of value, collective life, and nature. The relations between property and body parts, health and healing, food, nature, and even access to the internet are all discussed through sim¬ ilar oppositions: should they be human rights or “just” commodities? As we see, commodities and human rights are generative ethnographic objects; they are classifications already shaping the world. From theological discus¬ sions of natural rights, to moral arguments about property, all the way to the universalisms that defined human dignity in the twentieth century, these two notions continue to establish the conditions of possibility for life and death in the twenty-first century. Not surprisingly, however—as the shaking bottles teach us—what from a distance seem to be clearly distinct ideas, under closer inspection are far from that. For example, does paying for water automatically turn it into a commodity? Is the collective respon¬ sibility to care for water enough to transform it into a human right? Can a legal definition transform a commodity into a human right? This book is designed to address the nuances of these questions. I con¬ ducted most of the fieldwork for this project in two Latin American coun¬ tries: Costa Rica and Brazil. I selected these sites because these two coun¬ tries were among the few in the region that had not formally incorporated an explicit recognition of the human right to water into their national laws or constitutions. This omission created a climate of ongoing strug¬ gle among the activists, experts, and public officials I worked with. Their struggles included the promotion of legal reforms, creating more just water pricing systems, and experimenting with more democratic water manage¬ ment programs. Given that they could not fall back on the symbolic power of the law to promote the human right to water, they took those processes INTRODUCTION INTRODUCTION as opportunities to affirm the distinctions they are committed to, the dis¬ tinctions between a human right and a commodity. This book centers on that work and examines the affective, epistemic, and political work of mak¬ ing distinctions matter. The people with whom I worked in Costa Rica and Brazil devote their energy and time, and sometimes even their lives, to creating a difference that matters, a separation that they hope will make clear what practically, and even morally, sometimes seems blurred. 1 They do that work from a variety of locations: NGOs, bureaucratic offices, scientific institutions, and even their respective congresses. They are economists, lawyers, engineers, 4 environmental scientists, philosophers, sociologists, farmers, schoolteach¬ ers. They consider their technical work—a combination of legal, economic, and hydrologic knowledge—a tool to attain ethical goals. For them it is not sufficient to state that water is a human right, as if the mere act of placing it under a general category accomplishes the outcomes they hope to achieve. They are interested in what exactly that difference means and for whom, what forms of collective life are implicated by creating a distinction. But this does not mean they are all in agreement. My interlocutors hold differ¬ ent political ideologies, represent contradictory interests, and have built their political and technical authority on their active involvement in or op¬ position to policy-making efforts. At the same time, they are all active par¬ ticipants in national and international networks, such as the World Water Forum, where people share the latest frameworks for action and partici¬ pate in training workshops and technical talks. Since 2003 ,1 have talked to this group of activists and experts in their offices, on field trips, at workshops and community meetings, and in many other settings where they have had to articulate for themselves and oth¬ ers how they define the difference they want to see in the world. I also met with them in other countries where we were all attending international water meetings, such as the World Water Forum. I conducted interviews and fieldwork in Spanish, Portuguese, and English. To prepare for our con¬ versations, I had to learn about the technical dimensions of their ideas, which in turn required delving into legal doctrine, economic theory, and organizational techniques. Across those different locations and areas of knowledge, my interlocutors always brought me back to the question of how a human right and a commodity are made different. They emphasized that to act in the world is to change the future by defining differences that are ethically important. This book centers on the imaginative work they do to create these valued distinctions. I analyze the work necessary to separate categories that resist separation—a condition that is experienced by all sorts of people around the world, anthropologists included. Following what the protestors and their shaking bottles taught me, my analysis does not take us to the usual locations. I do not trace human rights in courts or commodities in markets. Instead, I follow water activists and experts as they attempt to create those separations across other kinds of locations: cubicles, community meetings, international workshops, and even Excel files. Throughout those locations, they attempt to produce the preconditions of futures where differences become plausible and entanglements do not preclude the viability of the 5 distinctions necessary for a more just form of sociality. Through that work we will see how water is kept mattering through the everyday bureaucratic and technical decisions whereby its very materiality is at stake. Through that work we can also understand how people connect their everyday work to a future that has not yet arrived. The chapters in this book focus on the assumptions imbued into the technical tools through which the work of differentiation is performed; they show how people touch the future with their technolegal tools. I specifically focus on four instruments people use: a formula, an index, a list, and a pact. I show how each participates in mak¬ ing the future history of water while attending to how these technolegal tools have become staples in the organization of all sorts of legality and au¬ thority (Johns 2016). As I show, these tools quietly determine the limits of the possible by both narrowing down certain options and opening the pos¬ sibility of creating different, and maybe better, worlds. This book attends to that dual potential and this introduction elaborates on the conceptual work that potential requires. BIFURCATIONS As I conducted fieldwork for this project, I became more and more capti¬ vated by my interlocutors’ commitment to create distinctions despite the slipperiness of the worlds they were part of and the slippages between the concepts that guided their work. Thus, I came to see the differentiations they worked for as forms of bifurcation, “moments when terms cannot be taken as self-evident and require explicit reference [not only] to their meaning” but also to their semiotic tensions with other terms (Strathern 2011). INTRODUCTION INTRODUCTION I find two things particularly helpful in the idea of a bifurcation. On the one hand, it shows how things that seem to be unitary are in fact separa¬ tions waiting to happen (see figure 1.2). On the other hand, the notion of a bifurcation reveals that once a first separation has been produced, if we continue looking, we realize that what seems to be just one of two is in fact an already entwined line requiring a new differentiation, a new bifurca¬ tion. In the world of water, for example, it looks like this: if regulators de¬ cide they will keep the price of water tied to inflation to make it a human right, once they have performed that operation they still have the problem that water continues to be a commodity people are paying for. Thus, they need to perform a new differentiation to affirm, in some other way, its hu¬ manitarian nature. Following the lines in figure 1.2 makes this dynamic visual. 2 This never-ending bifurcating mesh reveals that there is no end point to this kind of work: once a bifurcation is effected, a new one becomes necessary for each of its branches. Thinking about making differentiations in the world in this way emphasizes that such processes occur in time, as ongoing attempts that are never fully finalized. Keeping things clearly separated and distinct has important conse¬ quences (see also Candea et al. 2015; Roberts 2017). In the cases I stud¬ ied, making things distinguishable helps people decide whether a water valve is legally closed, what kind of price increase would preclude profiting from water, and who is held responsible for water supply at times of scar¬ city. But as soon as those separations are successfully put in place, what was clear blurs, revealing unexpected consequences that seem to undo the clarity people like my interlocutors worked hard to achieve. It is as if the separations they put in place are political and moral arguments that “take off in one direction by rendering another [direction] also present” (Strath- ern 2011: 91). Because of this dynamic, the bifurcations they produce are a mesh of distinctions that sidestep any simplistic dualisms; the only clear- cut effect a bifurcation produces is the need to determine new and future distinctions. The time I spent with my interlocutors showed me firsthand how the world of bifurcations operates. Converting water into a human right en¬ tailed keeping the implications of its commodification at the forefront; ar¬ guing for its commodified exchange depended on mobilizing humanitarian logics of universal access. In this kind of bifurcating mesh, a human right and a commodity are absent presences to each other, figures that shape each other’s respective forms from within and preclude any easy reduction- 7 Figure 1.2. Mesh of never-ending bifurcations. ism. It is in this situation that my collaborators’ work becomes a constant effort to make distinctions recognizable, since the more you try to clarify and separate, the more you bring about mutuality. As I will show, these dif¬ ferentiation struggles turn water into a planetary archive of meaning and matter (Neimanis 2012: 87), an archive that is constituted through ongoing processes of abstraction and materialization where word and matter, for¬ malization and substance, are inseparable (Barad 2003; Helmreich 2015). But there is more. As I will show, it is through these processes that people like my interlocutors are quietly and constantly elucidating profound ques¬ tions about the meaning of life, property, and subjectivity at the beginning of the twenty-first century—a time when science has diagnosed the Earth as being already anthropogenically transformed and when the notion of the Anthropocene occupies those with a planetary imagination. Making differences is not an easy or innocent task, though. The water professionals I worked with create these differences from a subject posi¬ tion that is far from any idealized modern imagination of the individual as the master of history. The dream of Homo faber, as the fabricator of the world bringing permanence, stability, and durability (Arendt 1959: no) to make events match her desires has been long dissolved, if it was ever there at all. Inherited and long-standing economic asymmetries, the in¬ ertia of legal systems too baroque for their own good, a bureaucracy that moves extremely slowly, and all-too-uncontrollable environmental events INTRODUCTION INTRODUCTION quickly dissolve any sense of control to produce radical transformation; there is too much path dependency and too much recalcitrance (see also Riles 2013). In place of that maker of linear histories of cause and effect, we find a humbler figure whose capacity to act is directed toward tactical modifications—transformative shifts that are unpredictable. This subject locates the possibility of change not in a historical metanarrative but in the concrete junctures where she conducts everyday political and epistemic labor to effect bifurcations. These junctures include things like a legal defi¬ nition, a percentage, a variable in a formula, or a promise. I conceptualize each of these junctures as a technolegal device, and I make the device the 8 organizing analytic of this book. DEVICES Each chapter in this book centers on one of four devices—formula, index, list, and pact. All of these devices are inscribed in larger processes of wa¬ ter price setting, legal reform, or the promotion of care for water. They are also pieces in even larger trajectories of globalization, the financialization of water, the judicialization of politics, and even the nationalist, neolib¬ eral redefinition of the public sphere we are witnessing. We could begin analyzing these devices by asking questions about those macrohistorical processes, bounding their significance to a specific role in those larger hap¬ penings. That approach would turn each device into a token of larger politi¬ cal and economic contexts, namely the history of welfarism in Costa Rica or oppressive patron-client relations in northeastern Brazil. In this book I want to sidestep that token relationship and take a different approach. I will remain close to the morphology of the device, attending to its varia¬ tions and textures, to its crevasses and revelations, in order to capture the power of seemingly minor technopolitical decisions to shape the abstrac¬ tion and rematerialization of water. By attending to the form and liveli¬ ness of these devices, we gain a different analytic entry point to see how people mobilize history, knowledge, affect, and ethics in their daily profes¬ sional and political lives. I take this approach because while we search for new macroschemas to adequately address ongoing struggles over things as basic as water, many fundamental ethical questions of our time are be¬ ing answered quietly, almost inadvertently, through devices like the ones I study. I believe that better understanding their intricate details allows us to imagine new forms of technopolitical mobilization; these devices can open space for new future histories. A device is a highly effective instrument for organizing and channeling technopolitical work. 3 It is a technical instrument that merges practices and desires with long-standing assumptions about sociality that have been embedded in legal, economic, and other technical vocabularies and institu¬ tions. A device is a structured space for improvisation; it is embodied in the actions of specific persons, but it is also a braiding of long histories of eco¬ nomic, legal, and political systems. In my conceptualization, a device both affirms and destabilizes social categories and institutions, while providing a way to identify the particular practices, offices, computer files, and con¬ versations whereby that material-semiotic labor is performed. Given this capaciousness, I think of a device as an intense node of tem¬ poralities and passions, a combination of diverse technical inheritances (the history of ideas) that open the possibility for other possibilities. 4 A device opens space for technical improvisation even if it is often described by highlighting its fixity, as if its components were already predetermined. People constantly engage these devices through tweaks and hacks that make the technical traditions that seem to be already ordained more flex¬ ible and open than they appear. That simultaneous fixity and openness gives a device its capacity to affirm and destabilize social categories and institutions. But, as I mentioned above, it also gives the device its concrete¬ ness, allowing us to identify the particular subjects, practices, and loca¬ tions where we can study them ethnographically. Although producing diverse constellations and forms of water, the de¬ vices I analyze in this book are deceptively humble. In our conversations and work together, my interlocutors were not shy about reminding me that they were fully aware of the precarious nature of their devices, yet, at the same time, they insisted that despite such precariousness, their work consisted of pushing those tools to their limits and getting them to do as much work as possible. Inaction was not an option. While having an unassuming appear¬ ance, these devices have the capacity to effect important differences. After all, as the history of Christianity shows, an iota of difference, a barely per¬ ceptible divergence, can divide nations, religions, and the histories of whole continents. 5 Some of the devices I study in this book emerge from a partic¬ ular body of knowledge, as in a mathematical formula; others result from people’s lived experience, as in the creation of a pact to care for water. And INTRODUCTION INTRODUCTION while formulas, indices, lists, and pacts are portable and can travel across geographic locations, the results of their activation are never homogeneous. Each time a device is used, its outcomes vary in small and large ways. I encountered these devices in the manner that other anthropologists encountered necklaces and arm-shells when they asked people in the Tro- briands about their valuables (Malinowski 1920; Weiner 1985,1992). When I asked my interlocutors about the future of water, they explained the need to differentiate a human right from a commodity and immediately referred to the devices they were using to achieve that goal. What I originally imag¬ ined were going to be discussions about moral values and ethical futures quickly shifted to explications of the tasks of calculating a formula, design¬ ing an index, delineating a list, and securing a pact. As it turns out, these devices are the means by which people clarify moral preferences and enact temporal assumptions about the “goings-on” of life. I imagine these devices as something akin to a gadget, a small thing with aptitudes to crystallize regimes of technopolitical value and relationality. These seemingly small devices help people carve out a sense of what a good common life could be, though they may also often undo that very same sense. Understood in this way, the devices in this book possess capacities simi¬ lar to those of complex words (Empson 1977). They create space for the play of ideas and their “histories, transformations and divergences,” while exerting pressure on that creativity to stay within particular parameters (Swaab 2012: 272; Williams 1977). These devices create conditions that make some decisions predictable, as when an inflation index is the go-to re¬ source to adjust the price of water, while in other cases they compel people to lift the rug to see what things have been “swept under” it in the rush to deal with pressing problems, as when people unwittingly generate a taxo¬ nomic list to legally define what water is. In this conceptualization of a device I attend to its semiotic charge as developed in linguistics when we talk about a stylistic device or device of speech. I also attend to its technicality as investigated by science and tech¬ nology scholars who remind us to ask questions about epistemic histories and material configurations. And, I also pay attention to the political ca¬ pacities of a device as mapped through governance projects that depend on disciplinary associations of knowledge/power as diagnosed by Michel Foucault. But these theoretical markers are labels that I assign to them a posteriori, after having encountered them in the world. So, while I offer these ideas as guideposts for the reader, I am more interested in developing the potential of the device as an ethnographic category. If these devices are practices in the world, they also affect the world by creating new categories. I want to suggest that devices are not only good things to think with, but also good thoughts to act with—for ethnographer and interlocutor alike. They help us create concepts to make sense of the world, and they make worlds in relation to concepts. Consider, for instance, the act of haphazardly producing a working list of types of water to be covered by a constitutional reform to recognize water as a public good and human right in Costa Rica (see chapter 3, “List”). Such a device, the working list, has a dual power. On the one hand, it reveals what seems implicitly reasonable: the types of water that should be con- 11 sidered a public good to guarantee universal access. On the other hand, the items on the list open an opportunity to propose a different arrangement, to come up with an unconventional answer for the simple question of why things are the way they are. What if, say, rainwater were included in the list of public goods? How would that change the distribution of matter, entitle¬ ments, and costs? How might that alter the very idea of a human right? In Costa Rica that list has occupied more than fifteen years of congressional sessions devoted to the discussion of constitutional reforms. While taken seriously by some and used by others as an excuse to ridicule the idea of a human right to water, the list and the procedure that made it possible have functioned as a wedge, carving out space for discussions of the strategic, the self-evident, and the nonsensical. The list’s capacity to absorb the en¬ ergy of those participating in its construction has turned it into a symbol of effervescent political polarization that has almost exhausted the will of those promoting the human right to water. What follows, then, is an examination of how categories, practices, and devices animate social worlds. I have put together a collection of four de¬ vices, three from Costa Rica—formula, index, list; and one from Brazil— pact. The three Costa Rican devices are all highly technical instruments that required a lot of effort to make sense of. I not only had to follow prac¬ tices that are not readily available for observation, many of which included people sitting at their desks; I also had to familiarize myself with economic and legal technical languages, and with the rules of congressional proce¬ dure. All three of these devices are critical passage points in bureaucratized processes. It is not surprising that studying the creation of differences in Costa Rica takes this form. Today, environmental politics and really most mobilizations to address collective life in relation to the state take a frag- INTRODUCTION INTRODUCTION mentary and piecemeal approach. There is no sense that all-encompassing change is possible in the country. Rather, there is a feeling of things being stuck the way they are. If by a stroke of luck transformations are brought about, they are piecemeal, only one small step at a time. When my research in Brazil began, it was striking to me how different the political mood and sense of possibility was in comparison to Costa Rica. In my first days of fieldwork, particularly in early visits to the state of Ceara’s regulatory agency, I encountered technopolitical devices similar to the ones I followed in Costa Rica. Lula da Silva, Brazil’s leftist president, was in power and in Ceara a conservative governor was in his last term. The whole country was wrapped in a mood of profound transformation. There was an intoxicating sense of openness. A year or so later, after I ar¬ rived in Ceara again, I found something else was happening besides what I had noticed in the regulatory agency—there was a process that was touch¬ ing, in one way or another, almost all the water activists and experts that I knew. That process was the creation of the Water Pact (wp), an ambitious statewide effort to promote care for water among all of Ceara’s citizens. To me, it was notable how the pact was predicated upon the possibility of mas¬ sive change, of transforming society as a whole. The rationale and tech¬ niques the pact organizers relied upon were geared toward “large-scale” visions, ways to aggregate the political will of “all of society.” While the devices in Costa Rica focused on more narrow issues, the pact was an at¬ tempt to effect larger-scale change. I switched my focus and made the pact the focus of my fieldwork. That is how this collection of four devices, one from Brazil and three from Costa Rica, came into being. I have preserved the distinct tones of each de¬ vice throughout my writing, in part to keep in mind that there is nothing set in stone about the form, scale, intent, or motivation of a device. All of those are questions that have to be ethnographically elucidated. Further¬ more, I have also tried to preserve their asymmetric scales in order to con¬ vey the sense of fragmentation, lack of closure, and comprehensiveness within which my interlocutors conduct their work and attempt to change their worlds. Yet, all of the devices I have followed are experienced as one possibility among many. My interlocutors commit to that possibility, ac¬ cepting its legacies and hoping for its potential to be achieved, but they are aware that with their selection they have no monopoly over the future. The devices that they use to help organize their technopolitical labor are, most of all, just one of many possibilities. By analyzing these devices, along with the intellectual and affective pas¬ sions they ignite, I want also to mirror the temporality of social life as it is experienced by my collaborators: amid unknowns and without the cer¬ tainty of hindsight. Theirs is a world in process, experienced from within the instabilities of the present. This temporal orientation allows me to keep in sight how my interlocutors selectively activate certain histories and how docile they are in the face of dominant stories of the past (Berg¬ son 2002; Chakrabarty 2000). This temporal orientation also keeps us at¬ tuned to the contradiction and trepidation inherent in all technical acts. I will argue that this temporal orientation is necessary if we are to carefully interrogate the contradictory possibilities of all technical processes, and even more so at a time when water’s tendency to change material form dis¬ orients our inherited environmental, political, and economic categories. Under these temporal conditions, neither dreams of intimate access to peo¬ ple’s worlds nor the promise of distant structural diagnoses of historical developments can do the necessary analytic work. We need alternatives to this prevalent analytic dyad. I propose using the device as an one such analytic alternative. WATER, WORD, AND MATTER Because of its universal multiplicity and predisposition to vary its material and abstracted forms, water often confounds any attempt at fixity (Helm- reich 2015; Linton 2010). Water’s significance for the sustenance of life makes its symbolic meaning multiple (Strang 2006). But its material form is also multiple, destabilizing any schematic rendering of what a water body is. For one, water’s defining trait is its tendency toward the formless, its obses¬ sion with gravity, its material inclination to change. The French modernist poet Francis Ponge describes this condition by saying that “water collapses all the time, constantly sacrifices all form, tends only to humble itself, flat¬ tens itself onto ground” (Ponge and Brombert 1972: 50). Alternatively, we could say that it is not its lack of form but water’s magnificent capacity to take a huge variety of forms, the infinite metamorphoses it is capable of—spouts, streams, pools, fast or slow flowing, whipped into turbulence, pulled by the moon, soaking things, and finding its level at rest—that cre¬ ates the challenge of finding ways to engage its significance for life (Mar¬ ilyn Strathern, personal communication, April 6, 2018). This characteris¬ tic tendency toward morphological reinvention (Ballestero 2019)—water’s 13 INTRODUCTION INTRODUCTION proclivity to flow, freeze, and vaporize—confounds the institutional and organizational protocols we use for its scientific exploration and political organization. This kind of unstable relation between knowledge and material bodies is not unfamiliar to us. Feminist scholars of science and technology stud¬ ies (STS) have taught us to think about it in terms of the material-semiotic and to consider how corporeality is, at once, a force that shapes knowledge and a substance that is shaped by it. 6 Bodies, human or watery, are not pre¬ existing entities, nor are they purely ideological. They “are effected in the interactions among material-semiotic actors, human and not” (Haraway 1992: 298). Matter, as concept and thing, “is itself culturally and historically specific and, as such, contested terrain” (Willey 2016: 3). Feminist STS scholarship has helped us see how the types of knowledge and tools doing the morphological work of defining material bodies are scientific. But we sometimes forget that they are also legal and economic and that all of these forms of knowing can work together to specify what water is. Regimes of exchange, for instance, accord certain materials with some values and properties but not others. The water in a bottle bought at a grocery store is a different substance from the water poured into a bottle from a well on public lands. It looks different, and often tastes different (Spackman and Burlingame 2018). Take the case of Ceara, where people in the rural areas install fences made of wire and dry wooden branches to create property lines. These fences often cut across water bodies, small or large ponds. When the dry season sets in, most water bodies dry out slowly, revealing to landowners that their carefully placed fences hang in the air, clinging to the shores of a pond that was, might again be, but has disap¬ peared. These hanging fences now cut the air in two, as if mocking the fig¬ ure of property, at once showing the violence and absolute fragility of the separations they produce. These appearing and disappearing water bodies, and the fences that cut them through, not only shape everyday household and agricultural routines by demarcating where water is accessible and for whom, they also reveal the seasonal specificities of legal and economic re¬ lations forged around the presumed stability of a property regime that al¬ lows landowners to sell water for profit, commodifying its life-granting properties. These cyclical transformations of sociomaterial forms marked by hanging fences capriciously activate and mute obligations, the move¬ ment of cattle, amity and dispute between neighbors, political relations of debt, and the power of the state to move water in cases of emergency. Prop¬ erty lines attempt to define water morphologically. As this example reminds us, regimes of knowledge (science), obligation (law), and exchange (economy) constantly shape what we count as material. They determine the matter we enroll into relations of credit and debt, into the very definition of what a basic human need is, and into the categoriza¬ tion of nature as such. The point I wish to emphasize for us to keep in mind throughout this book is that in the making of matter, not only scientific word and measurement are entangled with substance (Barad 2003). Legal and economic forms of knowing also perform those kinds of material con¬ figurations and, more often than not, they do so from a distance. From this point of view, apprehending water materially cannot be lim¬ ited to a supposedly stable form of H 2 0 from which we can infer cultural or political consequences of its presence or absence. Thinking about the ma¬ teriality of water entails querying, first of all, what its corporeality might be, how something becomes a water body in a particular time and place, and how that body is always a technopolitical entity. It entails attending to how its contingent presence is brought about by much more than our scien¬ tific capacity to comprehend bonds between hydrogen and oxygen (Sawyer 2017). 7 As I will argue, we need to remain attentive to the capacity of tech- nolegal devices to implode the supposed material certainty of the molecu¬ lar. We need to trace water itself beyond pipes, dams, rivers, and oceans. Thus, in what follows, I focus less on watery scenes, fluid locations, and aquatic environments, and instead focus intentionally on water elsewhere, in places where we might not usually explore its material politics. Diagnosing the existence of such entanglements between legal, eco¬ nomic, and scientific word and matter is not enough, though. Stopping at this diagnosis would leave us at the point where we should just be starting. One of my central interests is to think about what comes after material- semiotic entanglements have been diagnosed. What do people do when en¬ tanglements are part and parcel of their sense of the world? As I show, one of the things people do is to reflexively separate that which they encounter and understand as already knotted. They try to undo the entanglements they encounter. This returns us to the issue of how people create bifurca¬ tions amid the intense relationality of word and matter. The devices I study in this book help people transform fusions into momentary separations; they allow people to create separations to cut and redirect relations so that 15 INTRODUCTION INTRODUCTION bifurcations can be effected. Furthermore, it is through their devices that people channel their efforts to theorize and organize the ethical responsi¬ bilities that emerge from the ontological surgeries they perform (Jasanoff 2011; Valverde 2009). Creating separations is sometimes the only ethical way out. HUMAN RIGHTS, COMMODITIES, AND THE SPACE BETWEEN During the first decade of the twenty-first century, the international estab¬ lishment saw the idea that water should be a human right as contentious. All sorts of interpretations circulated about its implications. A water pol¬ icy expert from the United Kingdom whom I met at the Stockholm Water Week in 2009 told me emphatically, “The problem is that those who want water to be a human right don’t understand that somebody needs to pay to bring it to people’s houses. They want water to be free. And that is just un- viable.” He was among the progressive proponents of universal access, yet he feared that such universalism could be made so profound that it would cause the financial collapse of the water sector. His worry was universal, to¬ talizing. I was surprised by his argument, in part because none of the Latin American activists with whom I had worked for years had ever suggested that water should be completely free. They had a nuanced understanding of the financial and physical challenges of moving liquids across vast open landscapes or packed urban conglomerates—the difficulties of controlling pressure, flow, and leakage, and the monitoring toil of keeping water mol¬ ecules as pure as possible. Yet the message that “activists” wanted water to be free carried a lot of weight and was mobilized by many to discredit the aspirations of those demanding more democratic access (see also Schmidt 2017). By 2015, only six years after my conversation at the Stockholm Water Week, the terms of the debate had changed drastically. The international establishment seemed much more accepting of using human rights lan¬ guage to make the politics of water speakable. Perhaps this was due to the fact that in 2010 the UN General Assembly officially recognized the exis¬ tence of a human right to water and sanitation through resolution 64/292, which cited multiple preceding declarations, events, and projects showing that this was a decision long in the making (see figure 1.3). Or maybe it was because eleven Latin American countries, among others around the world, had modified their constitutions or passed new water laws to formally rec- United Nations A/res/64/292 General Assembly Distr.: General 3 August 2010 Sixty-fourth session Agenda item 48 Resolution adopted by the General Assembly on 28 July 2010 [without reference to a Main Committee (A/64/L.63/Rev. 1 and Add. I)] 64/292. The human right to water and sanitation The General Assembly , Recalling its resolutions 54/175 of 17 December 1999 on the right to development, 55/196 of 20 December 2000, by which it proclaimed 2003 the International Year of Freshwater, 58/217 of 23 December 2003, by which it proclaimed the International Decade for Action, “Water for Life”, 2005-2015, 59/228 of 22 December 2004, 61/192 of 20 December 2006, by which it proclaimed 2008 the International Year of Sanitation, and 64/198 of 21 December 2009 regarding the midterm comprehensive review of the implementation of the International Decade for Action, “Water for Life”; Agenda 21 of June 1992; 1 the Habitat Agenda of 1996; 2 the Mar del Plata Action Plan of 1977 adopted by the United Nations Water Conference; 3 and the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development of June 1992, 4 Recalling also the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 5 the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, 6 the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, 6 the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, 7 the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, 8 the Convention on the Rights of the Child, 9 the Figure I.3. United Nations General Assembly resolution recognizingthe human right to water and its international law precedents. ognize the human right to water (Mora Portuguez and Dubois Cisneros 2015). News about the passing of each law or constitutional reform circu¬ lated through the activist and water policy circles I was part of as evidence of a better future that would soon arrive. Human rights offered something of a counterweight to both the privatizing efforts that had swept the region during the 1990s and the hype for public-private partnerships to modern¬ ize water management of the 2000s. A YouTube video of Nestles CEO, watched by thousands globally, pro¬ vides more evidence of how quickly things had changed. The video showed a 2005 interview conducted in German with, depending on the version of the video you saw, a slightly different translation of the CEOs words. In all versions, however, he claimed that water should be managed through mar¬ kets, like any other commodity, and should not be treated as a special right. 17 INTRODUCTION INTRODUCTION A few years later, Nestle’s CEO reversed his position. Explaining that his former comments were taken out of context, he began presenting himself in venues such as the World Economic Forum as an avid supporter of the human right to water. Reversals like this have led people to regard human rights as weak anticapitalist tools. If, during the 1990s and early 2000s, activists and some water policy experts had trust in what the recognition of the human right to water could accomplish, today, their commitment is more nuanced. The boundary between a human right and a commodity is blurrier than ever. Nevertheless, they continue to push for the human right to water but with much more modest expectations. 18 The widespread worry over the commodification of water among the activists and experts I worked with is far from unwarranted, despite the slowing down of the privatizing fad of the 1990s. In the early 2000s, for in¬ stance, Fortune magazine reported that only 5 percent of the global water industry was in private hands, leaving a great potential for untapped busi¬ ness opportunities for the expansion of private enterprise. Global banks such as HSBC advertised their services by posing questions about the finan¬ cial value of water, narrowing its existence to a luxury or a commodity (see figure 1.4). Supplying water to people and industry was at the beginning of the twenty-first century a $400 billion-per-year business, equivalent to 40 percent of the oil sector (Tully 2000). More recently, RobecoSAM (2015), a financial company based in Switzerland that focuses on environmental and sustainability financial investments, considered water “the market of the future” and described its current financial landscape in the following terms: “Recent estimates put the size of the global water market at about USD591 billion in 2014. This includes USD203 billion from municipal capi¬ tal expenditure, USD317 billion from municipal operating expenditure, USDi billion from industrial capital expenditure, USD 37 billion from in¬ dustrial operating expenditure, USD12 billion from point of use treatment and USD3.7 billion from irrigation. Market opportunities related to the wa¬ ter sector are expected to reach USDi trillion by 2025” (20). It is striking that of those US$591 billion that they calculated in 2015, US$500 billion are invested, allocated, or directly managed by municipal or public entities. While environmental analyses emphasize that most of the world’s water, between 70 and 85 percent, is used for irrigation, the over¬ whelming majority of the “market share” RobecoSAM is interested in is public or municipal provision for human consumption and industrial use. In other words, the distribution and structure of the financial universe h well by IISHC IMilingi /»/.. A basic essential? Or a more refined taste? At HSBC, we hear the views of over 125 million customers worldwide. And the subject of water is definitely hot. From farmers to fitness fanatics, everyone has different needs. It's our awareness of many different perspectives which helps us keep the debate flowing. yourpointofview.com HSBC1« 015 - HONTTS DK OCA 1501 D.I.A. LTDA T ^ Met ropoliC«ru» doolclllsr , * A dOMicllio XET9R Tlpo d* rnrto: rwludr.wtu^ 10/0»/200» I'oMadm ilabiUctraalH. INFORM ACION DELCONSUMO N*BTJ ll^rm»3T7 IaV> Aaferfcr L*u»r* Ctu! mi INFORM AC I ON FaCTLRACION DEL MES L*. iziir.. UHU10&2. H1STORICO DE CONSLMO Of«rrvoc De , wswrotfoiiic 9 MpWr*jj A>* rcura 0 write o« Coerc A-JO0 X'-tSOOnJwte A £>»' • Sarpc **'4 u"- irergo oar r>cn 30 ?% e>w«j0 n l>srmTOCOST.\RRKTN>» DE ACUEDICTOSY M.CAVTARILLaDOS r SALAVERRY PARDO, ARABItLA F112009091179474 FWttrrNr r ’ 1-015-015-00 6-0020 2-01300-001 L_ Q .3412125*01.10/QS/2QQ3.4-<'3 25 / 09/2909 MR: •• 10 , 680 . 00* 1 134121250110097000000000001008000041 II Figure 1.2. Water services paper bill from AyA. large parts of the economy has reduced the wiggle room people have when they visit pharmacies (many of which are chains headquartered in other Latin American countries), buy from large grocery stores (most of which are now subsidiaries of Walmart), or pay for public services, all of which are regulated by A R E s E p. Regulators at ARESEP cherish the prices they produce, in large part be¬ cause they see them as having important capabilities that people lack. 2 Prices have the ability to rank, order, and connect across scales and do¬ mains of social life (Guyer 2004). It would be impossible to imagine a per¬ son who could simultaneously affect how cash-flow projections are made in a water company, influence the decision about whether or not to replace a broken water meter in a poor neighborhood, foster conversations within families on how to maximize their monthly budget, allow credit card com¬ panies to add automatic payments to people’s accounts, and an infinite quantity of other daily practices and strategizing exercises. The promi¬ nence prices have in everyday life conceals the fact that, despite their solid image as a cohesive entity, they are constituted by myriad elements that tend to remain out of sight (Guyer 2009: 205). The patterns by which those elements are brought together and put in relation with each other tell us a lot about what is a political community, how the state intervenes in it, and what is a shared resource. As compositional entities, prices allow people to communicate the unsaid and they open spaces for unexpected reinvention. I began my journey to learn the elements that constitute the prices that Alex and Alvaro pass on to people in Codes by physically going to ARESEP. In 2008 I attended my first audiencia publica (public hearing) there. After meandering around the streets of San Jose to avoid traffic and make it to the 5:00 PM hearing, I finally arrived at the agency’s headquarters, located in the western part of the city. A security guard showed me the entryway to an auditorium that had been added to the building many years after its initial construction during one of the many remodels it had gone through. From its creation in the 1990s until shortly after 2010, ARESEP occupied that same apartment building. Over that period, its administrators per¬ formed all sorts of architectural modifications, not only to make space for the growing number of employees but also to match changing ideas of what a public office should look like. 3 In the auditorium, the hearing was about to start. With a capacity of about one hundred people, that afternoon there were no more than forty attendees between ARESEP employees, public servants, and utility person¬ nel. Public meetings like this are a central piece of modernist state-making. They allow public officials to assemble symbols of authority and citizens to perform their assigned roles (Li 2007). They are also strategic and care¬ fully crafted displays of knowledge and ignorance about technical issues (Mathews 2008). But these meetings can also turn into tournaments of political skill where people challenge their expected roles as they convene for information, consultation, or organization purposes (Alexander 2017). The lawmakers who created ARESEP imagined these meetings as a means to increase transparency and bring citizens closer to the state. This partic¬ ular audiencia publica was held to collect public feedback on the latest pe¬ tition by the largest water utility in the country, AyA, to increase the price they charge for water services by an alarming 40 percent. 4 From the front stage, a young man in a business suit formally guided the audience through a legal and administrative ritual whose high point was a presentation by Sofia, a member of what at the time was the Water and Environment Department (wed) of ARESEP . 5 Sofia is trained in business 43 FORMULA CHAPTER ONE administration and has worked at AR E SE P for close to two decades. When I met her, she was in her mid-thirties and was one of the few women holding technical positions in her department. At the meeting, Sofia was in charge of the PowerPoint presentation because she had been appointed to lead the evaluation of the latest price increase request received by the agency. Her presentation had been prerecorded, and while she sat in the audience, we saw her enlarged image onscreen giving a fifteen-minute introduction to price regulation. Sofia informed attendees about how the agency analyzes the legal and technical propriety of the petitions that water utilities, all of which are state or municipal entities, regularly submit. Most of her talk, as 44 one would expect, revolved around the regulatory methodologies her de¬ partment follows. But in between analyses of demand elasticity, deprecia¬ tion rates, and efficiency, Sofia insisted on the responsibility “all” people have to guarantee the implementation of the human right to water. This strong reference surprised me. My surprise came in part from the fact that it was only in 2010, two years after I met Sofia, that the United Nations General Assembly passed Resolu¬ tion 64/292 recognizing the right to safe and clean water for drinking and sanitation as an essential condition for the full enjoyment of life and all other human rights. What at the moment I had temporarily forgotten was that this recognition was the culmination of more than three decades of international discussions. And yet, while welcome, the official recognition of water as a human right by the UN General Assembly did not significantly alter the thinking of most regulators. They, and most Costa Ricans for that matter, already recognized the existence of a universal human right to wa¬ ter as something of a natural fact, a self-evident truth. One of the first formal definitnions of the right to water was adopted by the UN in 2003, well before the General Assembly resolution. That definition already used a term that was especially meaningful to Sofia and her colleagues. That definition noted that, among other things, if water is to be a human right it needs to be affordable. After her prerecorded presentation was over, Sofia walked to the stage and projected a slide with the regulatory formula WED uses to calculate wa¬ ter prices (see equation 1.1). ARESEP adopted this formula in the 1990s fol¬ lowing a recommendation by a consultant from the Pan-American Health Organization hired to modernize the methodologies the agency used. Ex¬ plaining how the variables in the formula made their humanitarian re¬ sponsibilities concrete, Sofia informed her audience about the possibilities X=0+A+D+R Equation 1.1. Formula used by Costa Rica’s public service regulation authority to set the price of water. she saw in the elements that make up the prices they produce. A human right to water was not something determined in courts, it was something that resided in their calculations. Their formula, as any equation, was in reality a story about the relations between different entities. And as any story does, this one had material effects in the world. Sofia’s braiding of the price formula with the affordability of human rights was neither romantic idealism nor superficial talk. As I later learned, she wholeheartedly embraces human rights as a powerful instrument for directing public attention to political and economic inequalities. 6 Yet, by drawing attention to how human rights infuse the relations between vari¬ ables she was also revealing that in these relations, as in any relation, there was tension—in this case, between two logics of political and technical intervention: financial capitalism and humanitarian ethics. On the one hand, moral sentiments and ethical concerns for the Other are intrinsic to the very idiom of human rights. These concerns are put at the center of governing regimes, particularly of those regimes designed to help the poor or the disadvantaged (Fassin 2012:1). On the other hand, there is the logic of finance, which includes “all aspects of the management of money, or other assets ... as a means of raising capital” (Maurer 2012:185). This logic extends well beyond the limits of financial markets into all sorts of economic relations organized around credit, debt, and revenue. And yet, the tension between these two logics is not necessarily a mis¬ match between two incompatible philosophies of value. For Sofia, it was more like a puzzle that challenged her and her colleagues to arrange their numbers appropriately, calculate them ethically, and organize them har¬ moniously. These are two different flows of ideas and preoccupations that coexist inseparably. Sofia’s job consists of giving the tension arising from their coexistence the right intensity so that their prices can stand an ethi- cality test, an assessment of how they will affect the lives of others. These tensions between different logics of technical intervention shape the relations between the variables in the pricing formula regulators use. 45 FORMULA CHAPTER ONE The variables allow for intertwining those logics but also for creating sepa¬ rations between them. Thus, as I will show, the humanitarian implications of financial theories do not have to be analyzed externally only, as when we go to the “real world” to document the effects the usage of those formulas have. We can also trace some of the implications of those logics inside the formula, through the relations between variables, just as regulators do. Such evaluations constitute a processual point of reference against which regulators redefine the limits of appropriate (technical) action (Faubion 2010). The worksheets, mathematical models, and legal resolutions peo¬ ple use when they calculate their variables are, on the one hand, means to reveal the humanitarian standing of water and, on the other, instru¬ ments to sharpen their own ethical awareness of the decisions they make (Keane 2010: 72). Worksheets, models, and legal resolutions connect the in¬ timacy of one’s ethical evaluation of everyday work to larger political and economic contexts. COSTA RICA AS AN OBJECT OF ECONOMIC AND REGULATORY HISTORY During its golden welfarist history (1950-80), Costa Rica’s activist state strongly participated in economic production matters and elevated the living standards of most of its population through universal social poli¬ cies (Martinez Franzoni and Sanchez-Ancochea 2013). The abolition of the army in the late 1940s, the nationalization of the banking system, and a constitutional reform making schooling through the ninth year man¬ datory, accompanied by strong labor protections and a payroll tax that funded the social security and public health systems, made Costa Rica, be¬ fore the 1980s oil crisis, the most universal and least stratified welfare re¬ gime in Latin America. 7 After its welfare heyday, starting in the 1980s, Costa Rica was caught by the global “neoliberal” wave. Understood as a preference for market mech¬ anisms to deal with collective issues, a push for opening the economy to foreign investment and a liberalization of currencies, the neoliberal man¬ tle wrapped the well-grounded core of social institutions that Costa Ri¬ ca’s population continues to depend on (Vargas Solis 2011). Part neolib¬ eral, part welfarist, Costa Rica’s technocratic cadres and political elites advanced a hybrid agenda that, despite not following a radical program, introduced enough reforms to widen the gap between the richest and poor- est citizens. By 2012, the formerly least stratified welfare regime of Latin America found its richest citizens with an income 14.5 times larger than its poorest citizens (CEPAL 2013). Despite the neoliberal hype of the 1990s, Costa Rica did not ultimately transfer its strategic public utilities—electricity, water, or telecommuni¬ cations—to private control, regardless of the many attempts by different administrations to do so. A series of citizens’ mobilizations, union dem¬ onstrations, and actions by some politicians who remained committed to the country’s “exceptionalism” as a welfare state contained the privatiz¬ ing hype that triumphed elsewhere in the region. Nevertheless, to keep with the economic fashion of the 1990s, and in characteristic Costa Rican fashion, the country’s Legislative Assembly created ARESEP as an autono¬ mous regulatory agency charged with regulating the state itself through its public utilities, as opposed to regulating private providers, as was the case in the rest of Latin America. 8 This power quickly turned ARESEP into a key player in the structuring of Costa Rica’s common resources and pub¬ lic sector. 9 ARESEP was created by law in 1996, at the height of the era of structural adjustment and regulatory capitalism. The agency matured along with the privatizing trend that swept Latin America during the 2000s, when the state was reimagined as a regulatory entity responsible for setting clear “rules of the game” for private players and for promoting “markets” as pre¬ ferred mechanisms for allocating resources and resolving social struggles. In that context, agencies like aresep were assigned the responsibility of mediating between corporations, citizens, and the state via “technical” decisions. It would be misguided, however, to assume that because all strategic utilities continue to be public in Costa Rica, the prices ARESEP sets for them automatically abide by principles of common economic welfare. Utili¬ ties have undergone a process of financialization due to the particular the¬ ories, accounting standards, and mathematical models that have become normative knowledge among economically trained personnel around the world (Thrift 2005). Hence, the public or private nature of a utility has lost traction as an index of distinct legal and economic logics. To understand the ideas of society and the values that undergird a utility, it is necessary to examine in detail its financial and administrative practices; its status as a public or private entity is no longer enough. 10 Following global pressures and due to their own creativity, regulators 47 FORMULA CHAPTER ONE in ARESEP have experimented with a variety of tweaks to their pricing methodologies. Some of these experiments have been based on the mate¬ rial and infrastructural transformations of the services being paid for. In water provision, an important shift occurred when utilities moved from charging fixed rates to a system of charges proportional to the quantity of water consumed following the installation of individual meters outside people’s homes (for insightful studies of the everyday experiences of ac¬ cessing and paying for water, see Anand 2017; von Schnitzler 2016). Other shifts in pricing logics do not correspond to infrastructural changes but to legal and economic shifts. For instance, in the 1990s there was a global 48 push toward full cost recovery, the idea that all costs utilities incur should be paid for, preferably by the consumer. This was for all practical purposes an attempt to turn away from subsidies. More recently, there has been a new shift toward humanitarianism and universal rights, whereby the at¬ tention goes into issues of universal access and affordability. But beyond their specific political implications, these historical shifts show the capac¬ ity of a pricing device, a formula that has remained constant, to braid a broad range of assumptions about society, the state, and justice, even as context shifts. TECHNOLEGAL METAPHYSICS: HARMONY AND EQUILIBRIUM In their daily work, regulators in ARESEP believe that, once formally ad¬ opted, the prices they calculate will disseminate through society the values imbued in them throughout the process of their creation. The first descrip¬ tion of this relation between prices and society I heard was given to me by Don Marcos, a former director of WED, temporarily reassigned to lead the “future projects” team while the agency was “reengineered” in 2009. Don Marcos is a long-standing public servant. Sofia describes him as the living history of regulation in Costa Rica. He started working on water issues in the 1970s when ARESEP was not even in the imagination of lawmakers and regulation was done from within utilities themselves. Don Marcos is affable. He embodies what Costa Ricans imagine as a good bureaucrat: a person who gives you confidence and knows what he is talking about but never makes you feel that he knows much more than you do. Don Marcos’s speech is measured; he never seems to rush. When he discussed with me the impact his work has on Costa Rica’s population, he referred to a conti- nuity between the two by saying, “We have in our hands the most social of all public services; that is why any change in our methods will be a change in society, mostly for the poorest users.” For him, the price on a bill is a performative encounter between citizens and utilities. 11 A bill is a way of summarizing people’s relations with society at a given time (Hart 2007). 12 People’s bills convey some of the values that organize the political and eco¬ nomic communities they live in. Regulators see prices as indices of social¬ ity and reject any reductive definition that presents them as simplistic re¬ flections of intrinsic value (cf. Kopytoff 1986). As Sofia put it, prices never capture the real value of water, but they approximate as closely as possible the economic dimension of the social relations that guarantee its access. A few weeks after Don Marcos shared his views on prices and society, Sofia and I had one of our first “interview-like” conversations. She came to the conference room where I was waiting for her with her arms full of gifts for me. She was carrying brochures, children’s books, a card game on water conservation, a calendar, and a few booklets explaining the mission of ARESEP. All the materials had been produced by the User Relations De¬ partment. That department regularly produces these kinds of materials so that regulators can distribute them during public meetings or other out¬ reach events they organize. The documents are effective pedagogical ar¬ tifacts that explain things like the agency’s mission and instruct citizens on how important it is to save water and pay your monthly bills on time. Among the documents Sofia handed me was a short booklet with blue cov¬ ers, a copy of the Ley de la Autoridad Reguladora de los Servicios Publi- cos Numero 7593 (Law of the Public Service Regulation Authority Number 7593). Passed in 1996, this law established ARESEP’s mission and to this day continues to be a source that regulators cite routinely, most of them from memory. Days later I sat again with Sofia, this time in her cubicle. We had sched¬ uled a follow-up conversation in which she was going to help me under¬ stand how their work at ARESEP unfolds. As we began she picked up a booklet like the one she had given me. Hers was overflowing with yellow Post-its marking the heavily used pages. She started flipping through the pages with the confidence afforded by having done so many times. Once she found the page she was searching for she looked up to confirm that I had also located it in my own copy. She turned her booklet toward me, pointed to the middle of the page, and said, “These are the reasons why we exist, this is what we have to do.” 49 FORMULA CHAPTER ONE Sofia was physically and conceptually pointing to the fundamental prin¬ ciples she and her colleagues use when dealing with their pricing formula. She proceeded to read Article 4 of the law, which mandates that ARESEP is responsible for “harmonizing the interests of consumers, users, and pro¬ viders of public services and for seeking equilibrium between the needs of users and the interests of providers.” She mentioned this without much emphasis, with the familiarity of something that has become unremark¬ able. But for me the obligation to create harmony and seek equilibrium was an enchanting task full of religious undertones and utopian desires. Her words brought together an assortment of accounting theories, economic belief systems, and metaphysical assumptions about relationality. In addition to the theological undertones, this fantastic injunction to create a world in harmony and equilibrium has two implications. On the one hand, it specifies the kinds of social relations that ARESEP is respon¬ sible for fostering—the ends of its work. On the other hand, it also estab¬ lishes harmony and equilibrium as properties that the agency’s mathemati¬ cal methods should also exhibit. Harmony and equilibrium are means to their ends. With this dual character, as means and as ends, harmony and equilibrium constitute a technolegal metaphysics of sociality that touches all calculative and pricing activity in ARESEP. As we continued discussing the numeric expression of the call to effect harmony and equilibrium in the world, Sofia scribbled in my notebook an explanation of the pricing formula she had presented at the public hear¬ ing where I first met her (see figure 1.3). This time, Sofia disaggregated the equation to explain how, in the search for harmony and equilibrium, the financial income and the expenses of a utility were her bottom-line con¬ cerns. The variables in the formula allowed her to trace different spheres of action in the utility: operations, investments, future plans, and so on. But most of these are usually fairly straightforward, even if they require verifi¬ cation. Where things get tricky is with the variable that captures that dif¬ ference between income and expenses, noted as R in the original equation. As I supplemented her notes with my own, Sofia led me through stories about the adjustments and tweaks regulators do to each variable in their “real-life” dealings with utilities. In contrast to her presentation of the for¬ mula during the public hearing, this time she told me about all sorts of contradictions and proposed changes. For each variable, there were long series of reformulations, waves of consultants recommending changes to computation methods, styles of exercising authority by new directors ap- - pcpi'o dU Dsl \juu . kCeucfO fofndo On’q&tA-. TbrmolQde -—- d—" - Mjpirh'n K i P M . _ 1. ft 055i - 1 A J)Wsjwle- q' us ’ A" \ 1 ~. ^ Vrr A - J \ ■ j / T “.T ~ “.■ J mefodolc-nA osadO| _ 1 / aouxu wau-ro a* to q 1 1 daw a tracer m uxiloict \mcu.o erueaUddd. defied dU [05 -fvncio^. !/• l 1 1 fx C A T. ... 7 * >r —» A 1 U^fl x* P/o I . . y / m/efa mefodolo^i'a ejuce -e/J'b’w/t udaudo J — ^oc* omile ^ohtdo dt £V/<5jew ___— Figure 1.3. Sofia’s new rendering of the pricing formula that emphasizes the question of profits. pointed to her department, and quibbles among coworkers about the role regulators played in society. The formula was a lively space. Despite its ap¬ parent continuity, since it was adopted in the 1990s, it was the space where a lot of changing ideas came to be discussed. As she continued, Sofia explained how she really worries about the prob¬ lem of profits. Sofia knows that for her fellow citizens profit-making marks the difference between a human right and a commodity. A commodity is something you can profit from; a human right is not. In Costa Rica, all utilities providing water services are prohibited by law from profiting from their activities. This prohibition comes from the legal principle of servi- cio al costo (not-for-profit-service), also included in Law 7593. This prin- FORMULA CHAPTER ONE ciple states that water prices should be designed only to recover costs and can never be used to generate profits. Sofia and her colleagues assume that without their policing of the application of the principle of servicio al costo, utilities would seek opportunities to accumulate surpluses, something that is not just legally prohibited but is viewed by most in the agency as unethi¬ cal. But there is a twist. The principle of servicio al costo does allow utilities to generate a “competitive” surplus to raise adequate resources to improve the quality of their services. Thus, servicio al costo precludes profits but not surplus, transforming the fundamental question of human rights into a very technical difference: the distinction between surplus and profits in 52 the calculation of a variable in a formula. To elucidate the difference between surplus and profit, Sofia spends a lot of energy wrestling with the financial difference between income and expense, and analyzing how that difference shapes the magnitude of R, the variable that stands for surplus in their pricing formula. That variable is technically called “development yield” to differentiate it from what for- profit operations call return on investment or ROI. These different names are necessary because the very same formula is used in other parts of the world to regulate private utilities. Thus, when utilities in Costa Rica request ARES EPs authorization to col¬ lect more income via increased prices, regulators carefully assess whether the request will create any surplus. If a surplus is produced, regulators have to apply the principle of servicio al costo to judge whether it is an accept¬ able R (development yield) or a form of disguised profits, an unacceptable R (ROI or profit). To know if R is one or the other, development yield or profit, it needs to be seen in the context of the other variables. That conditional dependence precludes the possibility of defining R in absolute terms, that is, by a fixed magnitude. Consider a hypothetical example: If they assessed the absolute magnitude of R, regulators could decide that a utility with a surplus of, say, 1,000,000 colones 13 is unethical and another utility with a surplus of 100,000 is ethical. In that case, the mere magnitude of the sur¬ plus, in and of itself, would guide the decision. But what if in the first case, 1,000,000 was a difference of 3 percent between income and expenses, and 100,000 a difference of 15 percent? We can see that the absolute magni¬ tude of the number is misleading. The proportion between income and expenses—that is, the relation between R and the other variables—is how regulators determine R’s ethical character. This lack of an absolute magnitude to assess R’s ethicality makes it un- wieldy and pliable. It creates the need for detailed policing of its magnitude on a case-by-case basis. For that reason, regulators always search for a hid¬ den surplus as a potential subterfuge for profits. The right magnitude of R—displaying the right proportionality—is a moving target for which a vigilant eye and a continuous implementation of the principles of harmony and equilibrium are necessary. These contests around the magnitude of R as the right proportionality are one of the very concrete numeric locations where regulators cyclically re-create the preconditions of the future his¬ tories of water. In those numeric locations they have to ponder the ability of utilities to collect enough financial resources to do their job and fulfill their obligation to protect users from being charged excessively. What to¬ day they classify as an appropriate R will shape what seems reasonable for utilities and users, or not, in the future when new requests to increase the price of water come in for evaluation. Via discussions about R’s magnitude, regulators create the preconditions that render harmony and equilibrium present. These conversations also determine both the present and future humanitarian (im)morality of a utility’s operations and their own place in securing said harmony and equilibrium in the social body. LEDGERS, THEOLOGIANS, AND MARKETS When scholars trace the origins of harmony and equilibrium as metaphysi¬ cal assumptions, they often turn to theological and legal principles (Agam- ben 2011). Theologically, harmony and equilibrium derive from heavenly order and godly omnipotence. Legally, harmony and equilibrium inspire the doctrines of checks and balances and rule of law behind liberal legal systems. But in the particular regulatory work unfolding in ARESEP, har¬ mony and equilibrium cannot be traced directly to God or exclusively to legal principles. Instead, they are mediated by the numeric relations that go into producing a price. In Latin America’s legal history, harmony and equilibrium have figured as paradigms of a legal ideology that has sometimes dismissed conflict and the language of rights and preferred the more benevolent language of agreements, trade-offs, and compromise (Nader 1990). As Nader noted a while ago, the quest for harmony is a search for balance that domesticates conflict and often reproduces the status quo. Recent innovations such as legal restitution, alternative conflict resolution, and truth commissions are also geared to restore a moral balance interrupted by illegalities and hor- 53 FORMULA CHAPTER ONE rors of different sorts. It is tempting to focus on legal practices and postco¬ lonial encounters to elucidate how harmony figures in the struggle for the human right to water in Costa Rica. I will sidestep that route, however, in order to trace another history of harmony and equilibrium, one that is less known but that shapes more directly the formula regulators use. That is the history of the relation between harmony and equilibrium, the ledger, and the market. This history is directly relevant because in 2009 the ledger and the market were at the center of a political controversy over the precise numeric form of the variable R. One of the most widespread histories of the ledger, the double-entry 54 bookkeeping technology, puts its invention in the Middle Ages, and ex¬ plains it as a key moment when the preoccupation with theological har¬ mony acquired numeric form. At first sight, the ledger was a document that recorded income and expenses and the differences between them. It was an accounting tool to track credits and debits, resolving them in a number that expressed the relation between them, whether they were balanced or one exceeded the other. But its meaning went further. The ledger was also taken as evidence of the virtue of economic exchanges. Theologians and religious officials rejected avarice and the excessive accumulation of wealth as challenges to godly authority and used the ledger to verify whether a merchant followed those principles or not. If a merchant accumulated large amounts of wealth, as shown in the final balance of the ledger, that person would be guilty of avarice and greed. If, on the other hand, the final balance between credits and debits in a merchant’s ledger was zero, that number “conjured up both the scales of justice and the symmetry of God’s world” (Poovey 1998: 54-55). This arithmetic offset of a number by its opposite, of credits by debits, was the embodiment of harmony and equilibrium proper. It was evidence of balance in God’s creation. At a larger scale, this godly symmetry was also expected of global mer¬ cantilist trade. Imbalances between imports and exports weakened the godly order colonial powers claimed justified their imperial excursions into Asia, Africa, and the Americas (Finkelstein 2000). Whether it was at the level of the individual merchant or at the level of global trade, the im¬ portance of a final numeric balance did not reside in its referential mean¬ ing, nor in its formal precision. What mattered was that said balance, the proportional offset of credits by debits, preserved the symmetry and order of God’s creation. Amid the concerns over harmony between virtuous merchants and global trade, there was another unit of economic activity that generated existen¬ tial debates around bookkeeping, equilibrium, and the future of Europe: the price. Medieval thinkers, such as Thomas Aquinas, elaborated the notion of a “just price.” For him, the adequacy of a just price was not deter¬ mined by how accurately that number captured the components—costs— behind the production of a particular good. Instead, prices were taken as a form of recompense (Hamouda and Price 1997) to be granted to those who aligned with God’s order in earth. Thus, as a measure, prices were everyday tools to harmonize faith and social reality. Later on, the Salamanca School of Economics in Spain, a group of theo¬ logians concerned with the virtue and fairness of economic action since the fifteenth century, argued that a just price could also emerge from mar¬ ket interactions (Mele 1999: 175). Their contribution was singular because they built their discussions of justice and morality on the separation of price-setting from the representatives of divine authority on earth. Their argument was that “natural” prices emerge out of the valuation that actors do of a certain good and that, as an extension of divine order, those prices are necessarily fair. They noted how pairing the value of a good to the cost of its production, something only knowable by the producer, opened space for the exploitation of poorer segments of the population. The necessary virtuous proportionality between cost of production and price, between producers and consumers, could easily be corrupted. To prevent such moral decay, the Salamanca School recommended disentangling kings, priests, and producers from price-setting and letting the “impersonal” forces of the market—which were, like everything else, ultimately godly forces—do the work of setting them (Elegido 2009). Classical economists such as Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and John Stuart Mill secularized and combined these views later on. They understood the composition of prices as a sum¬ mation of the costs of production of a good. Once publicized in the market¬ place those prices would take on a dynamic of their own (Cetina 2006: 554). The ideas of the Salamanca School are unexpectedly relevant to my dis¬ cussion of the formula regulators use to set the price of water. 14 For one, the resurgence of market-centric economics since the 1970s revived inter¬ est in the Salamanca School’s works by enthusiasts of political economic thought from the Austrian and Hayekian schools. Libertarian economists often invoke the Salamanca School’s belief in the market as the cradle of justice. The theologians were concerned with the monetarian impact of the influx of gold and silver from the colonies to Spain and with the status of 55 FORMULA CHAPTER ONE Amerindians, their bodies, labor, and property, in the new imperial land¬ scape. They argued for the recognition of people in the Americas as godly subjects and for free market relations, and not kingship, as the best way to organize property and wealth. Their thought is used today by believers in free markets and deregulation to explain the longue duree of the connec¬ tion between the market, freedom, and justice. Their revival is so strong that economic tourism agencies organize tours for market advocates to go to Salamanca and visit the chambers where theologians wrote about the market. And yet something that is lost in those celebratory tours and in the popularized version of market economics is that the school’s enchant¬ ment with the market was also an attempt to better understand its limits. Amid their analyses of the virtues of the market, the Salamanca theo¬ logians identified important exceptions. In particular, many theologians argued that goods that were considered “vital” or of “prime necessity” de¬ served a “legal price” fixed by public authorities (Mele 1999: 183). Thus, something else that connects the Salamanca School with Sofia’s interest in income and expenses six centuries later is a shared interest in goods that need to be priced by a public authority because of their fundamental role in sustaining life. These are goods that, in Sofia’s words, “need to be kept outside of the volatility of the market.” The foundations set by merchants, theologians, and moral and political philosophers through their theoriza¬ tions of ledgers, prices, profits, and markets figure directly, albeit implic¬ itly, in contemporary discussions around how equilibrium, harmony, and human rights shape the relations between R and the other variables in the pricing formula ARESEP uses. PRICES WITHOUT PROFITS “Prices are signals,” Martin categorically told me one morning when we were chatting. Martin is, without a doubt, the most polemical economist on the Water and Environment (wed) team at ARESEP. That morning he politely pulled a chair next to his desk so that I could sit in his cubicle to conduct our interview. As we conversed, he sipped water from a disposable bottle. He told me he had purchased that bottle before coming to work that morning. Martin was taking better care of his health, so he was drinking water more regularly during the day. As we continued talking, he turned his bottle into a pedagogical resource. “How much do you think this liter of water costs? Do you think it is cheap or expensive?” he asked me. I thought I could foresee his line of reasoning. I expected him to continue by referring to Adam Smith’s famous “diamond-water paradox.” Smith was famously perplexed by the fact that although humans cannot exist without water and we can easily exist without diamonds, when compared unit per unit, the value of diamonds was vastly greater than that of water. The paradox is one of those popularized pieces of Smith’s thought that travel widely across expert circles. Before I could respond, Martin quickly answered his own question by going in a different direction from what I had expected. “Too much!” he cried with the intensity that characterizes him. “This liter of water costs too much, it is as expensive as a liter of gasoline! And if you walk around this office you see people all have their bottle with them. Why, then, should public utilities not charge more for the water they supply? People are buy¬ ing bottled water, they can pay for it. Why should the state subsidize people that can pay for the luxury of bottled water?” I was somewhat stumped by Martin’s ideas. He was generally right. At the time, a liter of gasoline was about US$1.93 and a liter of bottled water US$1.90. The water that utili¬ ties provide is generally of good quality. There is no public health reason to avoid it except in some community aqueducts where water sources have been polluted or they are having problems with their chlorination process. And yet a large segment of the urban population purchases bottled water regularly (for the politics of bottled water consumption see Pacheco-Vega 2015; Wilk 2006). Martin is inspired by libertarian and neoliberal ideas, and when he shares his thoughts he often incites strong reactions. He is prone to create controversies and, as he readily admits, enjoys doing so. He once told me with a thick grin, “because of my beliefs, I am not the most popular person here.” I could see the basis for his reputation when, after explaining why he was utterly convinced that water should be managed for profit and through markets, he gave me two documents to study. One was from the Cato Insti¬ tute, the libertarian think tank based in Washington, D.C., and the other was from the World Bank. Both documents argued that subsidies were caus¬ ing the world’s water crisis and that privatized markets were the only solu¬ tion for securing the future of the infrastructures and utilities managed. Martin continued instructing me on his views on economy, society, and particularly prices. He believes there is no better communicative inven¬ tion than prices. Paraphrasing Hayekian thought on the problem of infor¬ mation in planned economies, Martin subscribes to a naturalized view in 57 FORMULA CHAPTER ONE mainstream economic circles: good prices come from markets. 15 From that context, they are able to perform their communicative magic. In Martin’s and Hayek’s view, the magic of prices is that they communicate informa¬ tion to large numbers of people in ways that centralized planning tools, such as regulations, never can. But this association between prices and markets that Martin is so fond of is far from being generally accepted. In the case of water, many regulators, along with most citizens, are suspicious of what market pricing can accomplish. I should note, however, that the general wariness of market prices among ARESEP employees and citizens is not a rejection of prices in general. In 58 Costa Rica, people readily accept that they should pay for water. What they are suspicious of are prices produced by markets, because people generally understand markets as spaces that conceal intentions to extract excessive profits. Here, mercantilizacion, a word I commonly heard from activists and water professionals, is relevant. As a term, mercantilizacion indexes mar¬ kets, commodities, and profits all at once. It refers to the exchange of a certain good through market transactions designed to extract excessive, and thus questionable, profits. Mercantilizacion goes beyond reciprocal ex¬ changes of value to signal an intention to extract wealth and exploit others with little consideration of their well-being. For regulators, however, mercantilizacion is a technically obscure con¬ cept. It has no specific meaning they can engage numerically, and thus they tend to not think about it in their daily calculative routines. Politically, the story is different. The meaning of mercantilizacion is clear. When activists and community organizations mobilize against the commodification of water and argue for its genuine treatment as a human right, they are in fact arguing against its mercantilizacion. They argue that the prices charged for water cannot follow market rationalities, take advantage of people, and generate profits for a utility. The notion of mercantilizacion captures all of this. It is so politically charged that regulators fear the possibility of the media reporting that their decisions are pushing water in that direction. Martin, however, is not scared of mercantilizacion. As a follower of his namesake, Martin Hayek, Martin believes the market is equipped to cor¬ rect for its own excesses. Yet, regardless of his heartfelt Hayekian proclivi¬ ties, by working at ARESE P Martin has no choice but to produce prices that are far from the free market semiotic wonders he admires. His prices are regulated entities, “legal prices” as Salamanca scholars called them, subject to strict regulations and administrative oversight by the bureaucracy. The where X — O + A+ D + R X = Cost of service delivery O = Operation costs A = Administration costs D = Devaluation R = Development yield (or return on investment) Equation 1.2. Formal mathematical expression of the formula, and its variables, that the Costa Rican public service regulation authority uses to set the price of water. irony was never lost on me. It is not surprising that Martin’s ideas do not go over smoothly among his colleagues, who for the most part steer away from Hayekian ideologies. Months later, I saw Martin representing the Water Department at an¬ other sparsely attended public hearing, this time held in Heredia’s local chapter of the Chamber of Commerce. 16 The chamber is located in a resi¬ dential house in the center of town. It has also been remodeled multiple times. The hearing was held in an atrium that at times served as a covered parking lot. That afternoon, rows of white plastic chairs had been put in place for the audience and a large projection screen set in the front next to a table with white and blue tablecloths. The same young man from ARESEP, with what seemed to me the same business suit, was again officiating at the ritual. Martin gave the main technical presentation, equivalent to the one Sofia had given previously. Martin was in charge of leading the team evaluating the price increase request that Heredia’s municipal utility had submitted a few weeks earlier. Just like Sofia, he began his presentation with wed’s pricing formula and a careful definition of each variable (see equation 1.2). He then explained how the relations between variables had to reflect harmony and equilibrium if the relations between utilities and users were to also embody those qualities. As he moved along, he cited dif¬ ferent articles of ARESEP’s law. Unlike Sofia, however, he never mentioned the human right to water. Through his disaggregation of the formula, the audience learned about the financial logic by which operation costs, admin¬ istrative costs, and depreciation rates are kept in equilibrium with a justifi¬ able surplus (development yield), represented by R. FORMULA CHAPTER ONE The development yield (R), that tricky mathematical difference that So¬ fia first presented at the public hearing and then scribbled on my field note¬ book, again occupied us. After Martin’s explanation, the financial manager of the utility requesting the price increase for which the hearing had been organized took the stage. She showed a series of slides with the financial projections the utility had submitted for ARES EPS evaluation. All of her tables had a red balance showing how, at current prices, the utility would soon fall into serious deficit. From the utility’s perspective, those red fig¬ ures embodied the imbalance that made it reasonable for ARESEP to in¬ crease the development yield (R), thereby authorizing an increase in the 60 price of water for Heredia’s neighborhoods. This imbalance, a red number that reflected a negative difference be¬ tween expenses and income, is an important symbol. Without further ar¬ ticulation it invokes an unjust situation, a challenge to (godly) harmony. Income and expenses are unbalanced. Following the logic of the ledger, this is the justification utilities generally need to convince ARESEP of the urgency of the price increase requests they are petitioning for. Regulators cannot take that red balance for granted, though. They are obliged to investigate its accuracy by looking at the accounting practices behind it. In Martin’s words that afternoon, regulators have the obliga¬ tion to verify the accuracy of these figures by scrutinizing their connec¬ tion to the “real world.” Throughout the efforts involved in that investiga¬ tion of the financial statements that utilities attach to their petitions to show their connection to the real world, regulators can adjust the intensity of their oversight. They can be more rigid or lax depending on how accurate they deem the connection between the statements and the real to be. As a result of that “reality” check, regulators can adjust the variable R up or down as long as they keep it between 3 and 7 percent. This variation grants utilities more or less income, as regulators see fit. To this day, utilities criti¬ cize ARESEP for being too rigid in their analyses and too bureaucratic in their procedures and for never understanding their real needs. Sometimes utilities even accuse regulators of being stuck in time, in the era of the wel¬ fare state, rather than adapting to the epoch of economic efficiency. After public hearings like this, and once they are back at their cubicles reviewing the utilities’ accounting practices, regulators begin evaluating the proportionality of R—to determine whether its magnitude reflects the ethical assessment they make of what a utility deserves. As we saw, R does not have an absolute magnitude that reflects harmony and permanently distinguishes between profit and surplus. To be ethical, its magnitude has to embody an acceptable proportion between income and expenses. Thus, there is always the risk of opening the door for mercantilizacion if R is not calculated correctly. But if regulators are too stringent and do not give utilities enough financial wiggle room by adopting a very narrow R, they run the risk of financially strangling them. So being overzealous can cause problems for water users as well. The ambiguity of R, as something that can create surplus without calling it profits, turns it into something of a nominalist trick, a variable whose determination is a game of names that requires constant assessment to establish the propriety of its magnitude in relation to the other variables in the formula: operation costs (O), ad¬ ministrative costs (A), and devaluation (D). R can tilt toward being an in¬ dicator of the virtuous efficiency of utilities or a covert form of profits that needs to be disciplined. Setting the numeric propriety of R is thus the very juncture where the human right to water, understood as something that cannot be profited from, takes numeric form. Regulators all over the world constantly face situations like this, junctures where a seemingly technical shift has the potential to push things over a certain boundary and change them radically, even if they mostly stay the same. These are moments when a difference needs to be effected, even if it is not absolute and everlasting. This is how effecting differences sets the preconditions of the future. PERFORMING SOCIETY Don Marcos, the former director of WED we met earlier, was the first to refer to the continuity existing between the work regulators do in their of¬ fices and the world that exists outside of those offices. Recall how Don Mar¬ cos told me that they had in their hands “the most social of all public ser¬ vices” and that any change in their formula was in fact a change in society, particularly in the lives of the poor. It is not difficult to see why he said that. WED sets the price all Costa Ricans pay for water. Remember how Alex and Alvaro’s work in Codes is ultimately shaped by ARESEP prices. The deci¬ sions regulators make literally touch everybody’s pockets. Allowing profit¬ making from water service provision would be a large-scale transforma¬ tion. But Don Marcos’s observation that a change in their formula was in fact a change in society had a deeper meaning. It was not only that regu¬ lators are aware of the consequences of their actions; he was conveying something about the intimacy between their formulas and the world they 61 FORMULA CHAPTER ONE live in. This became clear to me days later when Sofia, also in pedagogical mode, shared more materials with me. After getting some coffee and finding space in a meeting room, Sofia and I were talking about the connection between their methods and society— the real world, as Martin calls it. I recalled to her Don Marcos’s observation that any change in their regulatory methodologies is a change in the lives of people, particularly the poor, because they are affected more significantly by any change in water prices. At one point in our conversation Sofia thought it was best for me to do some reading before continuing our discussion and she proceeded to send me an electronic copy of a manual she had used for an e-learning course she had taken in 2008. The course was organized by the Asociacion de Entes Reguladores de Agua Potable y Saneamiento de las Americas (Latin American Association of Water and Sanitation Regu¬ latory Entities, or ADERASA). People in ARESEP often mentioned this as¬ sociation when comparing their accomplishments to regulatory innova¬ tions in other countries in Latin America. The association was created in 2001, with Costa Rica as one of its eight founding members. The group was tasked with organizing training events, convening political fora to iden¬ tify regional positions, and providing technical expertise to regulatory au¬ thorities throughout the continent. The course Sofia took was part of a broader distance-learning program led by economists that started in 2006. That night, in my apartment, I opened the document and was stumped by what I read. The first page of the document laid the foundations of the practice of economic regulation. In its first section, the manual began by stating that “the costs of a regulated company depend on the type of regu¬ lation established” (Asociacion de Entes Reguladores de Agua Potable y Saneamiento de las Americas 2007: 3). As I read this section, it was impos¬ sible not to smile. Pages and pages of sophisticated social studies of finance condensed into a matter-of-fact foundational statement for any regulator: economic facts are performed by the knowledge through which we pro¬ duce them (Callon 2007; Mitchell 2005). The statement bluntly expressed that the costs of any utility will always, and only, be those costs regulators choose, through their methodologies, to count as such. Later, when I commented on how striking that sentence was, Sofia un¬ derlined that even something like a cost is never an external fact preex¬ isting their calculations. Like so many other things in her job, a cost is brought into existence by the principles that agencies like ARESEP use to shape their formulas and the relations between their variables. Sofia re- mained a little amused by my fascination, and I don’t think I was ever able to explain clearly to her why I found this so interesting. In schooling me on the performativity of economic calculation, Sofia wanted me to understand the power regulators have in their hands. They reshape the world, even if they seldom step outside of their cubicles to do so. This understanding of their work is what fills the gap one might see be¬ tween regulatory circles and the lifeworlds that unfold elsewhere, in places like Codes. This understanding of the performativity of their methods ex¬ plains why for regulators creating harmony and equilibrium in a formula, as demanded by the law, can be seen as an act of creating a society in har¬ mony and equilibrium. In previous historical moments the connection be- 63 tween world and formula was provided by godly omnipotence and the pre¬ cepts of biblical scripture. In the present, the connection was effected by the performative, and taken for granted, power of accounting, economics, and the principles of economic regulation. Recognizing that one has this power is sobering. So it is not surprising that Sofia is cautious about any new directions that power could take them. Methodological changes are always risky terrain. FROM ACCOUNTING TO ECONOMICS The tasks involved in overseeing the work of utilities, and particularly the magnitude of R, open spaces to enact different regulatory temperaments. These are forms of calibrating how intense and detailed or lax and general their evaluations are. The regulatory approach ARESEP had followed for years required them to examine R in detail. Sofia explained the affective charge of this approach by saying that they had historically behaved like peseteros. This expression derives from the term peseta, which refers to the Costa Rican twenty-five-cent coin, removed from circulation in the 1980s because of its loss of value due to inflation. A person is called “pesetera” when she or he obsessively chases and wants to account for every single penny and how it has been used. In English, an equivalent term is “penny pincher.” The pesetera attitude is something Sofia confesses is a bit exces¬ sive, but also necessary when one is responsible for equilibrium and har¬ mony in society. The ethics of public service require one to think in those terms, and even more so in the case of water because it is a human right, she told me during one of our conversations. The pesetero temperament results from the historical particularities of the Costa Rican state as much as from FORMULA CHAPTER ONE the grip that economic ideologies hold on regulators’ everyday calculations. The tension between those ideologies and the state’s welfarist legacy be¬ came most visible when A R E S E P began considering a potential change from an accounting approach to an economic approach to regulation. The struggle around this change revealed how the long histories of the relation of prices to ledgers and markets that I mentioned before acquired renewed saliency. In 2009, the new director of the Water Department in ARESEP, Alfonso, proposed moving away from the old accounting approach and shifting to an economic approach to regulation. Despite being new to the agency, Al¬ fonso was assigned to Don Marcos’s position soon after he was hired. He arrived as part of the team of close collaborators the new head of ARE¬ SEP brought when he was appointed by Costa Rica’s president. The idea of moving from accounting to economics was part of a modernizing initiative launched by the new government. One of the consequences of that initia¬ tive was the relocation of aresep’s building. After heated controversy in the media, the agency moved from the old remodeled apartment building it owned to an expensive building they rented in the newest area of the city. Their new building had shiny white floors, a glass facade, and required one to pay a toll to get to it by taking the only highway in the country that has been privatized. Rumors about the impending methodological change that Alfonso was promoting compounded an already crisp political environment. In 2007, via a controversial referendum, the country ratified a free trade agreement with the United States and the rest of the Central American countries. The agreement divided the country and for many was a major hit to what was left of the welfarist state apparatus. Opponents were convinced the trade agreement would lead to the privatization of all utilities, flexibilization of the work force, erasure of labor protections, and bankruptcy of many ag¬ ricultural industries. One of the commitments the country made in the agreement was to open the telecommunications sector, which by law was a state monopoly, to private investment. For Costa Rica’s telecommunica¬ tions industry to be attractive to private corporations, Congress recatego¬ rized it from public service to regular commercial service. This classifica- tory shift exempted companies providing the service from the principle of servicio al costo that I explained earlier (see the Technolegal Metaphysics section). 1 This structural change implied that from 2007 onward private, for-profit corporations could offer cell phone, fixed phone, and internet services, all of which had previously been provided by a single state-owned utility. ARESEP remained in charge of regulating the newly born industry, though a semi-independent regulatory office was created. But, at the time, and from the perspective of Sofia’s team, it became impossible to ignore the telecom team’s efforts to figure the appropriate mechanisms to regu¬ late private and public entities simultaneously. A shift from an accounting to an economic approach to regulation would have similar effects in the regulation of water, even if it did not involve a full declassification of water as a public service. It would be a mathematical shift that would carry con¬ sequences for how society dealt with profits in water provision. The practical consequences of the change were clear. The shift from an accounting to an economic approach would tether regulators’ daily calcu- 65 lations of R to one of the basic assumptions behind the idea of markets: that they are aggregate entities. As a popular icon of the modern economic imaginary, even if an inaccurate one, the invisible hand of the market is taken as an aggregate of moral and economic forces counterbalancing each other (Smith 1966). According to this view, those forces engage in a rhyth¬ mic push-and-pull dynamic until they reach a form of equilibrium. In this view of the market there is an issue of quantity at stake. One consumer and one producer trading with each other do not constitute a market. Only the summation of multiple consumers and producers can be analytically ab¬ stracted into the geographic space, extended network of relations, or Car¬ tesian graph that we use to envision what markets are. What all of these images of the market share, however, is the vision of equilibrium as a result of the aggregate forces of supply and demand. The approach that dominated ARESEP’s methodological discussions up to that point followed the accounting logic of double-entry bookkeeping to track the magnitude of the balance and potential profits (R) in a single util¬ ity’s operations, not in the aggregate. Because it focuses on financial state¬ ments, people refer to this as an accounting approach. As we saw, when it was invented, the ledger offered insight into the virtue of a merchant’s practices and had the capacity to combine legal, economic, and theologi¬ cal traditions into numeric forms to appraise deference to godly harmony. In the ledger, the significance of the final numeric balance between credit and debit does not depend on the precise volume of income and expenses. Its ethical significance depends on whether credits and debits offset each other. If the final balance is zero, then the merchant’s activities have been virtuous. This arithmetic equilibrium between credit and debit is specific to an individual merchant, or in this case to an individual utility’s R. FORMULA CHAPTER ONE Something else that made the accounting approach particularly valuable for regulators was that, beyond assessing financial records, it created op¬ portunities to investigate the practices behind inscriptions of income and expenses (the ledger), the reality Martin mentioned. Regulators took it as their responsibility to talk to a utility’s personnel about their reports, look for cues of dangerously creative accounting, and make their regulatory acts an interpersonal affair. Phone conversations, email exchanges, and face-to- face meetings allowed them to gauge the virtue of a utility and its deference to its financial/humanitarian obligations. After decades following this accounting approach, meticulously policing the balance between a utility’s income and expenses and setting an R that did not allow for profits, the Water Department began to consider breaking with this established approach. Alfonso, the new director, wanted to move the agency toward aggregate analyses, toward thinking of all utilities as something of a "market” rather than continuing to focus on the numbers of individual utilities. The practical implication of the shift was a reori¬ entation of the attention previously given to accounting reports and bal¬ ance sheets. In the new approach they would determine a fixed “industry¬ wide” R that would apply to all utilities regardless of what their ledgers showed. In this new approach, an adequate R (development yield) would be standardized. Instead of regulators having the discretion to increase or decrease R according to a utility’s doings, its magnitude would be automati¬ cally and universally set. This example shows how the process of financial- ization of water unfolds, even as water remains a public good. In line with their pesetero attitude and with the accounting approach to regulation it represented, regulators historically controlled R and kept it somewhere between 3 and 7 percent. That variability allowed regulators to move up or down in order to keep the relations between variables equili¬ brated and the principle of servicio al costo alive, as expressed by this for¬ mula (see equation 1.3). In the formula, the size of R is proportional, math¬ ematically and aesthetically. It contributes to balance and equilibrium by being adjusted to the magnitude of other variables. If ARESEP moved to an economic approach to regulation, R would have X = 0 + A+ D + R (flexible between 3 and 7 percent) Equation 1.3. A harmonious and equilibrated water-pricing formula. X = 0 + A+ D+ R(fixed at 5 percent) Equation 1.4. The pricing formula in disharmony and lacking equilibrium. a fixed value standardized for all utilities, municipalities, and ASADAs. At the time, the magnitude that was discussed was 5 percent. In that scenario, R would be independent of any other variables in the formula, as shown (see equation 1.4). This change would render the equilibrium-infusing ef¬ fects of the pesetero attitude and the accounting approach moot. R would 67 stand on its own, unconnected, uninterested, and in defiance of what the magnitude of the other variables signaled. That could easily bring about a slippage of development yield into profits, as an automatic 5 percent R would be granted even when utilities had a surplus. Until 2009, a flexible R (between 3 and 7 percent) had been a crucial im- provisational space where regulators choreographed their intimate knowl¬ edge of a utility’s ledger. A flexible R had been critical for their capacity to imbue their formula with ethical qualities—harmony, equilibrium, and non-mercantilizacion. R allowed them to mold, according to that image, the relations among water users, utilities, and society, all from their cu¬ bicles. If the proposed change occurred, the contours of those ethical qual¬ ities would be radically transformed. The nonharmonious and unequili¬ brated formula would also manifest in a society in disequilibrium. With this possible change to R came a wealth of rumors about major ide¬ ological changes in regulatory calculation grammars. Sofia was especially concerned that the discretion to control utilities they had enjoyed in the past would cease to exist. The space they had in the past to evaluate the con¬ nection of financial accounts to the real world would shrink. Many regula¬ tors connected the rumors to their fear of losing control over the public na¬ ture of water. Stories about veiled mercantilizacion circulated, and activist groups, community aqueduct organizations, and users started voicing their apprehension in meetings, workshops, and public hearings. Furthermore, publications in the media and discussions on social networking sites con¬ nected these possible changes with the demands of the free trade agreement with the United States and Central America ratified in 2007. Opponents argued that one of the objectives of that agreement was to privatize water and open the water export business to supply countries in the Global North. FORMULA CHAPTER ONE But the emotional and political turbulence inside and outside WED did not diminish Alfonso’s enthusiasm for transitioning from an accounting approach, following the aesthetic of the balanced ledger, to an economic approach guided by the idealized logic of market aggregation. A new future seemed to be on the horizon. One member of Sofia’s team conceptualized the shift as an attempt to move from accounting as evidence of prudence to aggregate measures as indications of efficiency. R would become a sym¬ bol of financial freedom for utilities. Finally, Costa Rica would catch up with countries that people like Don Marcos saw as much more advanced in regulatory issues, such as Chile and Argentina. 18 Other regulators spoke of the change as a “neoliberalizing” measure that would introduce disguised profits and fracture their long-standing commitment to servicio al costo and affordable water access consistent with human rights obligations. The economic approach would decouple yield (R) from balance sheets, closing off possibilities for steering, correcting, and rewarding utilities in their dynamic search for harmony and equilibrium and creating a standardized financial rent. The formula would no longer be producing a bifurcation be¬ tween two prices on the basis of whether they generated profits or not. Their previous tactic to preclude profiting at all costs would no longer be the point of separation between a price that aligned with a commodity and a price that aligned with a human right. Or at least that tactic could no longer focus on R. Their formula, while staying the same, would be differ¬ ent. As a device it would braid different histories and as a result shape the world in different ways. While the shift from an accounting to an economic approach was not to the liking of many regulators, those who enthusiastically supported it jus¬ tified its merits in terms of standardized responsibility. Alfonso thought the shift would transfer the obligation to self-police financial sustainabil¬ ity to the utilities, freeing regulators to focus on issues of service qual¬ ity, another fundamental characteristic of the human right to water. This responsibility rationale was based on a financial habit they had detected in utilities’ accountings. Through the years, water companies had grown accustomed to operating very close to, or sometimes in, deficit as a way to justify their petitions to augment their development yield (R). Recall how, during the hearing that Martin led, the financial manager of the util¬ ity requesting the price increase showed a series of financial projections painting a dire future in which the company would fall into deficit. She was not the only one using that tactic. Almost all of the files that petition for a price increase have similar figures. This perpetual proximity to defi¬ cit also was, as Sofia’s e-learning manual noted, the performative effect of how regulators used their formula to account for costs and police profits. It was the world-making effect of the capacity of this device to entice cer¬ tain responses. Transcending the representational value of numbers and interlacing calculative pasts and futures had historically resulted in a cho¬ reography of equilibrium, harmony, and not-for-profit pricing that valued unbalanced financial statements and in some ways made deficits desir¬ able. The promoters of the change argued that a standardized R would fi¬ nally break this pattern and force utilities to adopt a more entrepreneurial attitude—to be “less paternalistic,” as one of them said. 69 Sofia was not pleased with the implications of the change. She frequently explained that within her team she was known as a champion of users, es¬ pecially the poorest segments of the population. Arguments of fairness, for her, were significant as long as they considered how “the poorest of the poor” were affected by technical decisions. She saw in the new approach a disguised pull away from regulators’ substantive commitment to afford¬ ability and low prices. Their inability to adjust the development yield in each specific case would, Sofia contended, inevitably increase the price charged to users, something they had been very careful about, since high prices were one of the biggest threats to securing universal access to the human right to water. Martin, unsurprisingly, welcomed the new approach. He thought it was about time water utilities grew out of their habit of being policed and started being more responsible for their own actions. For him, utilities needed to become “financially smarter,” catch up with their obligation to manage themselves more efficiently, and stop relying on Papa Estado (Father State) to guide their decisions. “It is a good idea to move toward a fixed develop¬ ment yield and let financial balance be something that companies worry about, not us,” he said. Rather than state-making projects, for Martin, util¬ ities had to be rethought as entrepreneurial entities resembling subjects whose ingenuity, creativity, and market initiative have to be encouraged. His equality argument followed the rationale that, if all utilities are operat¬ ing in roughly the same conditions, for some utilities to have certain things recognized as costs while others do not is unfair. The logic should be that all utilities are granted the same level of working capital. That move would include fixing R in the aggregate. Not doing so discriminates against some utilities, making some seem more efficient than others even if they are not. FORMULA CHAPTER ONE Resembling the 1990s atmosphere of infatuation with neoliberal eco¬ nomics among mainstream economists and politicians throughout Latin America, at the end of the first decade of the 2000s, a profit-friendly man¬ tle was enveloping regulators’ work. New ideas were loosening regulators’ historical commitment to the prevention, at any cost, of profits. Discus¬ sions on the nature of a fixed R deepened the ideological differences be¬ tween regulators, exemplified by Martin and Sofia, especially when they addressed how households were going to be affected by the price increases, how companies would suffer if they did not have freedom to invest, and what this redefinition of equilibrium and harmony between elements in 70 the formula would mean for human rights. A CHANGE THAT NEVER WAS What for a while seemed an imminent change, eliciting all sorts of anxiet¬ ies and hopes, never came to fruition. The move from accounting to eco¬ nomics, from a flexible R to a fixed R, never happened. The shift was a quasi-event, not completely unleashing its intended effects, as it was never adopted, and yet it impacted the everyday affects, histories, and practices of people in regulatory offices. In April of 2013, four years after the discus¬ sion of the shift started, the front page of the largest newspaper in Costa Rica reported that AyA had accumulated a staggering surplus of about $415 million dollars. The head of AyA explained that delays in an infrastruc¬ ture renewal program were responsible for this surplus. Yet, on the basis of that surplus, AyA’s petition to increase water prices was flatly denied. A RE SEP was still steering utilities toward humanitarian and financial vir¬ tue through their pesetero approach to ensure harmony and equilibrium between variables. The difference between income and expenses in the led¬ ger still commanded the metaphysics of harmony and equilibrium. It would be a mistake to completely disregard the rumored change in R, and its lack of adoption, as an exceptional and inconsequential occurrence. Unrealized changes occur regularly in A R E s E P as people consider new tech¬ nical possibilities. The density of preoccupations, calculative experiments, and reflexive assessments among regulators during those periods is not unusual. On the contrary, that intensity constitutes the liveliness and unpredictability of calculation as people use their numbers to shape the worlds they want to live in. Ideas of new theories and methods constantly come through the agency. Consultants, distance learning courses, and new authorities help bring them into regulatory offices. The threads that the pricing formula weaves are constantly being tested. People like Sofia are always attentive to how unrealized changes in the past are unexpectedly picked up later. Despite its apparent stability, the formula is a lively device of the ethical, financial, and legal explorations of profits and of financial humanitarian- ism. At the end of the day, those explorations take a specific form, they settle on a distinction, they effect a bifurcation between humanitarian and nonhumanitarian prices that is temporarily emplaced until new ideas seep through and regulators realize that new variables and their relations with other variables need to be revised. In my most recent meeting with the new director of WED, the third di¬ rector I have met since starting this research, the focus had changed. Now they are not focusing on R, but on the quality of the services utilities pro¬ vide. This is unleashing a whole new set of speculations, innovations, and differentiations that deserve an analysis similar to the one I have con¬ ducted here. Their commitment to making water universally accessible at an affordable rate but also in the right quality is bringing new questions to their pricing formula, to the story it embodies, and to the effects it un¬ leashes in the world. CONCLUSION Alvaro and Alex, the people we met in Codes, know very little about what happens inside ARE SEP. When the agency announces changes in the prices they have to charge to their neighbors, they just get an email detailing the increase and instructing them to inform water users. To comply with that obligation, Alex prints and tapes the email to the office’s main door. But since people no longer have to come to the office to pay their bill—they can do so in commercial establishments or banks—very few neighbors no¬ tice the announcement. As a result, the first time Codes residents, or most Costa Ricans for that matter, notice that the price of their human right to water has increased is when they make their monthly payment. This cleavage between what happens in a community aqueduct and ARESEP’s decision making is striking. As we saw throughout this chapter, this is not the case for AyA and the larger utilities, which regulators audit much more closely. But in both cases what is interesting to me about this configuration is that intimate fieldwork in the Codes community aqueduct 71 FORMULA CHAPTER ONE or in AyA would not reveal much about how exactly those changes come into being. By focusing on regulators we see how ideological changes take technical form through the variables in a formula. Those variables, and the relations between them, embody particular theories about institutions, be¬ haviors, and matter. By changing a variable in a formula, regulators help unleash a series of events that can reshape the flow of water through pipes, its timely chlorination, repairs to leaks, and myriad “materially” tractable happenings. That change is the intensification of historical threads, insti¬ tutional contexts, and even personal desires. I have argued that by looking at how regulators wrestle with their numeric formulas, we can precisely 72 trace how broader ideological trends sculpt financial structures of public services and, through them, social collectives. Those changes are the ones we then gloss under greater categories such as structural adjustment and austerity. To confront those macro changes, we need to know how they come about. The pricing formula regulators use is a device that determines the con¬ tents of the bills that 1.7 million Costa Rican households pay every month. It numerically determines a price that can be said to stand for their human right to water. But this is far from being solely a Costa Rican issue. The approach to regulation that ARESEP follows, focusing on controlling the return that utilities get from their operations, is the most traditional and widely used regulatory methodology around the world. Most countries in the Americas, including the United States, follow some variation of this methodology. Throughout regulatory commissions, authorities, agencies, and committees, experts discuss what is an appropriate return for a public service. Not in all cases is return used as a proxy for a human right, but in all cases it helps assess the morality of what the public nature of a service means, and how the frontier between private and public constantly shifts. If the prices in people’s bills account for the relations between individu¬ als and society at a given time, it is important to ask how those in charge of designing numeric figures make sense of those relations. And, more im¬ portantly, how do the instruments they use shape those prices? My em¬ phasis on the formula regulators use, rather than on citizens’ experiences, intends to highlight the labor regulators perform when they mobilize their methodologies. I have shown the often-overlooked openness and instabil¬ ity of those practices. Unlike accounts of law and finance that black-box technical decisions as obscure, complex, and somewhat mechanical proce¬ dures, I have shown how technicality is constituted by ethical, cultural, and mathematical sets of relations in a constant state of potential change. Seen in this light, Sofia’s and Martin’s engagements with aresep’s formula re¬ quires an ethnographic account that, despite its intensely specific explora¬ tions, cannot be reduced to the micro-local. Their everyday work demands an ethnography that engages both the indivisibility of the historical lega¬ cies of the formula and their future-making potential. That type of eth¬ nography attends to historical predecessors and the effects of the formula as preconditions of the future. ARESEP’s pricing formula entails the everyday preoccupations, rules, and transgressions through which regulators make sense of ideas that at points seem competing injunctions and at other points seem two sides of the same coin. On the one hand, most regulators have deeply felt commit¬ ments to a humanitarian obligation to keep water affordable by exclud¬ ing profits. On the other hand, they understand that they are setting a price following the logic of finance and in order to generate revenue to keep utilities and community aqueducts running. While competing, these in¬ junctions also coexist, sometimes seeming inseparable, and for that rea¬ son inviting people to attempt to separate them. And yet ARESEP’s pricing formula allows regulators to make that difference emerge by tilting their methodologies to one side or the other. The relations between variables in the formula is the space where their views on society, the fundamental role of water, and the place of the state in contemporary capitalist formations can be visualized. Their formula is their social theory, and a performative one at that. This chapter has taken us through the vicissitudes of living and work¬ ing with a pricing formula and through it putting one’s social theory to the test. Those tests include moments of mathematical determination when the difference between a flexible R (3-7 percent) and a fixed R (5 percent) is the difference between a price that is guided by harmony and equilib¬ rium in society and a price that is not. That moment helps people make sense of the difference between a price that precludes profits, thereby help¬ ing achieve affordability, and a price that does not. As I have shown, that moment of differentiation might seem trivial as we consider the magni¬ tude of the water struggles and transformations people fight for. But in fact, it is an expansive space where theological histories, economic theo¬ ries, personal relations between regulators, and international free trade agreements come to matter. Thus, while magnifying the bifurcation this formula produces, I have also described the broader historical and political 73 FORMULA CHAPTER ONE contexts that come to matter at the precise technical moment regulators effect their differentiations. Mapping the expansive threads that come to matter at that juncture has taken us on a circuitous tour through ant-filled water meters, legal prin¬ ciples, economic theory, public hearings, and bureaucratic cubicles, so that I can argue for the importance of understanding how potential shifts in the humanitarian and financial worlds we live in are assessed. The apparently unconsummated change of R I have described is one example of the many unrealized modifications that regulators consider and try out. I have sug¬ gested that, given its unsuccessful transformation, the change of R is not a full event, yet it is not a nonevent either. The intense discussions, rumors, arguments, and hypothetical numerical exercises to understand a possible change in R are all preconditions of the future. They are happenings that could become significant antecedents; we just cannot know yet if they will. Ultimately, the point is that discarding their significance because we can¬ not see their effects in the present erases from our analyses the subjunctive worlds in which people live most of their lives in spaces like Costa Rica’s public agencies, but also elsewhere. This is exactly what I mean by doing a type of ethnography that engages the indivisibility of historical legacies from their future-making potential. But the process of creating bifurcations has not stopped. New iterations continue. In this chapter I focused on the very definition of the variables involved in pricing. Once those variables are defined, change comes from elsewhere. The price of water does not remain stable, and other technical questions need to be addressed. A crucial one is how to update those prices to match the changing value of money and economic conditions. The next chapter takes us again to Costa Rica, where another precise technical deci¬ sion that brings in another set of historical and contextual threads needs to be made. This time, the question is how to think of affordability as a temporal problem. 2 INDEX El costo de la vida, literally the cost of life, is a funda¬ mental worry for people in Costa Rica and elsewhere. El costo de la vida is an economic concern, but that does not mean it is limited to exchange via money, especially because such exchange is always more than just a finan¬ cial transaction. El costo de la vida entails one’s preoccupations about bud¬ gets, decisions to prioritize spending, ways to meet obligations to care for others, and the allocation of time and resources for play. How one uses one’s money, how it is distributed, and what it accounts for captures all sorts of emotional, political, and social relations and obligations. Where water fig¬ ures in the distribution of one’s income and how that expense relates to other items is another way to understand water relationally. As I do with the other devices I trace in this book, in this chapter I ex¬ plore the ways in which people engage the world once they know that it is relational and entangled. How do they create separations between cate¬ gories that resist them, and how do their devices help them do so? In this chapter I am particularly interested in what the passage of time does to the work of creating such distinctions when setting the price of water. How do regulators attend to changing financial value and how do they think of those changes as they consider collectives, large numbers of people shar¬ ing a common infrastructure and a watery environment? As in the previ¬ ous chapter, I begin with an ethnographic vignette that gives you a taste of how that preoccupation with affordability is expressed by people working on a community aqueduct. I then take you back to ARE SEP, and later to the National Statistics Institute, to examine how an index is used to affirm the humanitarian nature of water, as opposed to its commodified character. In our examinations of this particular index, the consumer price index (CPI), we travel in history to learn some of its technical precedents and then follow its production and usage in Costa Rica. Those travels show how CHAPTER TWO the consumer price index is a device that creates a difference between hu¬ man rights and commodities in a surprising way, by displacing the subject of rights and giving primacy to the household of goods. Here we see how a society that is squarely organized around a liberal understanding of the hu¬ man, as a bearer of rights and a citizen of the republic, relies on purchased goods to determine the humanity of its subjects. This emphasis on objects, particularly purchased ones, requires that we expand our imaginaries of subjectivity and open the door to the multiple ways in which material ob¬ jects are crucial for the definition of humanitarian reason. 1 In this new imaginary of humanitarian reason, subjects and objects are blurred, not because of religious beliefs or ontological experiments, but be¬ cause what counts as the human right to water is answered by looking into what objects inhabit people’s houses. This operation of blurring object and subject is one that is numerically accomplished and is organized around the mandate of calculating the affordability of water. Thus, another way of thinking about the work regulators do is as the enactment of the numeri¬ cal and material ontology of rights. The rest of this chapter explores how this unexpected, though not uncommon, configuration of humanity and rights is brought about. But let’s begin this exploration at a workshop with representatives of community aqueducts and water-related NGOs, where affordability is understood as the fundamental humanitarian worry. WATER: A GIFT OF NATURE AND GOD While waiting to take the floor at the workshop she was attending, Ana had become unsettled by the words just uttered by her colleagues, a group of community aqueduct and local NGO representatives who had gathered to discuss the meaning of transparency in the implementation of the human right to water. Convened in San Jose, the capital of Costa Rica, the group met at the headquarters of an NGO founded by a former foreign relations minister who now worked to promote peace and sustainable development internationally. The workshop was called to validar (validate) the initial results of a survey that workshop attendees had participated in a couple of months earlier. Among other things, the survey evaluated how thor¬ oughly respondents understood the economic implications of recognizing water as a human right. According to the slide on the screen, 83 percent of the organizations “agreed” to one degree or another that water was an eco¬ nomic good. An air of awkwardness permeated the room. The attendees found themselves embracing economic concepts usually espoused by poli¬ ticians they distrusted. Even though the attendees dealt with costs, debts, and bank interest rates in their daily activities, speaking about economic goods at a meeting where they normally discussed mobilization tactics was unorthodox. Ana’s turn to speak came after a man from Guanacaste, the driest prov¬ ince in Costa Rica, finished his remarks. In response to the slide on the screen and the idea that most understood that “water is an economic good,” he had reminded us that water was also a gift from Nature and ultimately God, a sacred substance that belonged to all, a human right. When Ana stood up to address the group, she said passionately, maybe even with a lit¬ tle bit of irritation, “Yes, el companero [our colleague] is right. God and Na¬ ture gave us water. It is a human right. I agree, but it is too bad God didn’t put it in all of your houses. Somebody has to bring it there and that has a cost.” She continued, “There is no question people have to pay for water. Our ASADAs [community aqueduct associations] cannot work otherwise. The issue is whether people can pay, whether they can afford their bills.” 2 Ana’s opinions were legitimized by the fact that she works as a volunteer with an ASADA, a type of community organization responsible for manag¬ ing small-scale aqueducts under the legal supervision of AyA, Costa Rica’s largest public water utility. Her ASADA is located in a small town in Costa Rica’s central mountain range, about two hours west of San Jose. But the notion of volunteering is misleading here. Although she is not paid for her work, Ana is available any day, at any time, to deal with the constant issues that emerge in her asada. Her firsthand knowledge about how asadas work made her anxious about the pressing economic problems these com¬ munity organizations face. In order to keep their infrastructure running, buy chemical treatments, and pay for fontaneros (plumbers) to maintain pipes in acceptable condition, managers of asadas throughout Costa Rica use creative means to keep alive a sociotechnical system many deem finan¬ cially unviable. A newspaper article published in July 2015 in La Nation, the country’s largest newspaper, for example, called attention to how AS ASDAs supposedly operated en completo descontrol (completely uncontrolled) be¬ cause AyA, the entity legally responsible for their oversight, had little knowl¬ edge about their finances. But despite the journalist’s attempt to discredit ASADAs as particularly disordered exceptions in an otherwise healthy and organized economic landscape, the financial situation of ASADAs reflects the state of contemporary financial capitalism. ASADAs, like corporations 77 INDEX CHAPTER TWO and state agencies, operate under conditions of perennial debt, unbalanced accounts, and accounting innovations. But unlike those larger organiza¬ tions, ASADAs also depend on the sheer commitment and volunteerism of community members. Plumbers, neighbors, and local committees contrib¬ ute, out of a sense of duty, an immense amount of unpaid labor that never enters the organizations’ accounting records. Ana’s comment about the need to pay for the infrastructure that delivers water to people’s homes was met with caution. People with Ana’s sensibil¬ ity, particularly if they are women, are often considered too defiant, prob¬ lematic. Instead of offering suggestions about how to deal with particular 78 situations, people like Ana pose questions that do not seem to have appar¬ ent answers. They expand the parameters of discussion, maybe too much, bringing up the recalcitrance of the structures people want to, but seldom can, transform. Most of the time, people like Ana are dismissed as being too idealistic or radical. But Ana’s comment that morning was more pragmatic. Her invocation of God, water, and affordability was an honest and frank reminder to all of us that, first, bringing water to our homes does involve an unimaginable number of seemingly unrelated economic decisions that turn a godly gift into a worldly concern. Second, it reminded us that affordability continues to be a crucial concern for people as they go about their everyday lives. Ana was inviting those present at the workshop to reconsider carefully the eco¬ nomic implications of implementing a human right to water, to think about people’s capacity to pay for it. Her ideas disrupted what had been a fairly purified discussion hinging on the distinction between the “authentic” value of water and its financial value after commodification. References to the iconic Bolivian “water war” of the early 2000s served as a reminder of the perils of privatization and other ways of opening the door to the mercantilizacion of water, as we saw in chapter 1. 3 By introducing some friction in our conversation, Ana recast a discussion worthy of any philosophical salon as a concern with the nitty- gritty of billing options. Denaturalizing the monthly routines by which the ASADAs collect their income, Ana created space to wonder about why things were this way. How could a sense of affordability entangle God and Nature with water users and their unpaid bills? How were conflicting moral allegiances interlaced with practical demands to secure people’s ability to take showers, cook, and have a glass of water when thirsty? Not surprisingly, people at the workshop were drawn to Ana, myself in- eluded. During the coffee break, a group of us surrounded her while she spoke about the multiple dimensions of affordability, expanding on how the complexity of the issue could leave one paralyzed. She was clear that af¬ fordability could mean many things to many people. For a poor household, for example, affordability could mean deciding between paying their water or electricity bill. For a rich household, it could mean paying for an illegal connection to fill their swimming pool. For an ASADA, it could determine whether a plumber is paid to fix a broken pipe or is asked to do so as a per¬ sonal favor. For large utilities, affordability could result in higher or lower delinquency rates. For regulators in ARESEP (the Public Service Regulation Authority), it could result in highlighting or downplaying the financial via¬ bility of ASADAs when regulators assess their methodologies. But recogniz¬ ing such multiplicity of meanings was not enough for Ana. Just comparing different senses of affordability did not suffice. That was just a first step to survey a landscape, something like an act of setting a context so that a fo¬ cus can emerge. What Ana saw as the necessary next step was identifying a point of entry into that multiplicity, an intervention that was not caught up by the conservative effects that documenting multiplicity can have as it overwhelms the senses with its excesses. Knowing this, she posed another question: What can we do if affordability means so many things at once? She then recommended, “I think that you should focus on prices, on how to keep them affordable. You should look into ARESEP and the prices they set for all of us.” I want to take Ana’s injunction as the starting point of this ethnographic incursion into the technical twists that shape the affordability of water prices over time. Ana directed our attention to one specific place that morning: ARESEP, the regulatory agency responsible for setting the price all Costa Ricans pay for water. We were there in chapter 1 when we saw how regulators assess a utility’s request for a price increase by interrogating their financial practices. Ana was signaling another dimension of regula¬ tory work, noting how regulators also need to bring the subjects of rights, and not only utilities, into their calculative routines. In this chapter I show how, with an index, economists and statisticians record and reconstitute subjects in relation to the objects found in their households. This is how the affordability of a human right is produced and updated. 79 INDEX CHAPTER TWO AFFORDABILITY AS PERCENTAGE The affordability of public services has long been a concern for economic regulators in Costa Rica’s public service regulatory agency, aresep regula¬ tors channel their preoccupation into experiments with different techni¬ cal measures such as cross subsidies and tariff structures to make water cheaper. These measures are never as targeted or efficacious as they would want them to be; nevertheless, their attempts have helped expand water access to about 97 percent of Costa Rica’s population. Their decisions have contributed to the creation of a state that shows how it “cares” for its popu¬ lation in this particular way (Foucault 2009; Mosse 2003). But in the 2000s, the work regulators do to keep water affordable went from being a national concern to an international benchmark, a quantified goal determined by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). Intended to prevent price escalations such as the ones that followed the global water privatization wave that characterized the end of the twen¬ tieth century, in the twenty-first century affordability became a crucial component of the definition of a human right. In 2003, in what has come to be known in international law circles as Commentary 15, the Commit¬ tee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights of the office of the High Com¬ missioner for Human Rights produced a definition of the right to water that would become normative. The Commentary states that “The human right to water entitles everyone to sufficient, safe, acceptable, physically ac¬ cessible and affordable water for personal and domestic uses. An adequate amount of safe water is necessary to prevent death from dehydration, to reduce the risk of water-related disease and to provide for consumption, cooking, personal and domestic hygienic requirements” (Office of the High Commissioner 2003; emphasis added). Of course, any of the adjectives used in the Commentary to specify the right to water can be subjected to a thorough analysis to understand its actual scope. But it is the question of what constitutes affordability that continues to garner considerable attention, in part because of its unstable meaning. To address the ambiguities implicit in the definition, the inter¬ national establishment has produced a variety of guidelines, although one has become widely accepted despite its weak legal legitimacy. In a techni¬ cal document disseminated widely across international networks of water- concerned professionals and activists, the United Nations Development Programme determined that if the human right to water was to be afford- able, households should not spend more than 3 percent of their income to pay for it (United Nations Development Programme 2008). When I learned about the UNDP’s benchmark, I was surprised by its pre¬ cision. Sofia, theARESEP regulator we met in chapter 1, had explained that a percentage was not the best way to deal with a complex concept like af¬ fordability. Nevertheless, she considered the 3 percent figure helpful be¬ cause it allowed people interested in human rights within ARESEP to have more focused discussions with colleagues and supervisors. The 3 percent figure helped concretize a general principle; it staked a numeric claim on a world that regulators can only engage through the tangible abstractness of their mathematical figures. Without a specific number, affordability could easily be brushed aside as a worthy but unworkable aspiration, something impossible to engage mathematically. It could become a general principle that everybody agrees upon but no one commits to in their daily work. With all its limitations, arbitrariness, and concrete vagueness, 3 percent was a number that ARESEP employees could engage with. National statistics tell us that Costa Rican households use between 1 and 3 percent of their monthly income to pay for water. The households serviced by large utilities like AyA find themselves in a fixed payment regi¬ men, meaning they receive their bills once a month, something that is now a metaphor since in 2012 an electronic system replaced paper bills. Once a bill is due, people no longer have a grace period to make their payment. If you fail to do so by the due date, the next day a private contractor stops by your home, opens the metal lid that covers your connection to the main line, and disconnects you. He “cuts your water” (corta el agua), people com¬ monly say. There is no room for negotiation in this situation. To restore your connection, you can pay your bill at any of the small stores, pharma¬ cies, or grocery stores now connected to the online payment system. One to three days later, depending on your neighborhood, the same contractor shows up to reconnect you to the water line. If you carefully read your next bill, you will see charges for the quantity of water used, as well as a “recon¬ nection fee” plus the amount of interest charged based on how late the payment was. If you do not have a computer, or the patience to analyze the message, the details of these penalites remain invisible. This strict policy was instituted by large utilities in the late 1990s as a way to discipline the population’s payment practices. Up to that point, be¬ ing late paying for your public services—water, electricity, telephone—was not cause for suspension. Households and businesses could be two, even 81 INDEX CHAPTER TWO three months late with their payment and continue to use those services. As part of the modernization of the public sector and the consolidation of the citizen into a consumer, public utilities and other state agencies ad¬ opted strict payment policies, resulting in a drastic transformation of peo¬ ple’s relations with state agencies. Today, many of those relations look very similar to those based on transactions with private businesses. The rural neighborhoods serviced by ASADAs have more flexibility in their billing and payment practices. In many of them, networks of informal subsidy allocation and lenience with late payments structure the rhythms and routines of monthly billing. Yet, in those areas, it is not uncommon for 82 households to spend up to 10 percent of their income on water services. In Codes, a small coastal community on the Caribbean coast, for example, I met Cristina, a mother of five and head of household who had recently lost her job at a nearby hotel and whose only income was a government subsidy of approximately $70 a month. Her monthly water bill was about $6, close to 8.5 percent of her income. But, as Alvaro, the fontanero with whom I was doing the rounds and reading people’s meters told me (see chapter 1), the ASADA is very lenient with people like Cristina. “If you are a good per¬ son, you could never deny water. We know water is a human right and we respect that.” Regardless of whether it is an ASADA or a large utility like AyA that pro¬ vides a household with water, aresep determines the prices people will pay and adjusts them cyclically. As Ana implied, sometimes it is possible to find a juncture, a particular location where certain people make decisions that make a big difference. One technical decision about the meaning of affordability can affect all sorts of practical questions about the material configuration of collective life. This technical decision has cascading con¬ sequences that activate certain genealogies and not others, creating certain preconditions for the future and not others. The price adjustments ARESEP makes are one such technical decision that has cascading consequences for whether households can live within their budgets, whether corporations decide to lobby the administration to get a new water extraction permit, whether a public school has enough money to add fruit to the meals they offer to their students, and an unimaginable number of other implications. MARKET SURROGACY Fewer than twenty people worked in the Water and Environment Depart¬ ment (wed) of ARESEP when I began having conversations with them in 2008. 4 wed was rather small compared to the other three departments in the authority—telecommunications, energy, and transportation. Think¬ ing that they had a much greater workload, experts from other depart¬ ments were a bit dismissive of WED. They felt that regulating bus and taxi fares or oil and electricity prices was a “much more technically and quan¬ titatively demanding” task than setting the price of water. This attitude became more extreme in years of oil-price roller-coasters, like 2008. That 83 year, regulators received one petition after another to increase the price of the services most tightly connected to international oil prices: public trans¬ portation and gas. As we saw in chapter 1, each of those petitions triggers an administrative process that requires a lot of financial data collecting, mathematical analysis, and paper. As more petitions come in, the workload of regulators increases. In 2008, ARESEP received only one water price increase request from AyA. During the previous three years the utility had not petitioned any increases, something very unusual. Thus, when they made their request they asked for an increase of close to 40 percent. AyA declared that without that increase, they would be bankrupt by the end of the year. That could be avoided, they argued, if their price increase was approved. With this peti¬ tion, aresep’s responsibility to keep water affordable was, once again, ac¬ tivated. Within WED they had developed a system so that each incoming petition was assigned to a lead expert who would be responsible for mov¬ ing the process forward. That lead expert ultimately wrote up the technical recommendation that went to the head of ARESEP, a person whom tech¬ nical personnel refer to as “the regulator.” Ultimately, it was the regulator who signed the resolutions that all departments, including WED, drafted for him or her. That signature brought into legal existence the decision to accept, partially accept, or deny a utility’s request. Don Marcos was still in charge of WED during part of 2008. His position reported directly to the regulator. Don Marcos directed WED for more than thirteen years before he was relieved of his supervisory duties due to major organizational reforms. We often talked about what exactly regulation was all about. Once he explained to me that the job of a regulator is to act in the name of something else. He said, “We have to solve the absence of a mar- INDEX CHAPTER TWO ket with a methodology. Because there are no natural water markets where suppliers compete for customers, our job is to produce the effect of compe¬ tition with something else. We re-create the market effect for a public ser¬ vice with a methodology. In a way, we are the market.” After finishing this statement, Don Marcos chuckled softly, as if acknowledging the strange¬ ness of the responsibility of replicating the market effect with a mathemat¬ ical pricing methodology. His chuckle was tied to a commonly held belief in Costa Rica. If something is “public,” a good or service, it cannot be subject to what people imagine as market laws of supply and demand. The market dynamics that popular economic imaginaries see determining the fate of regular commodities are considered inappropriate for public goods. In the absence of the competition implied by supply and demand ideolo¬ gies, Don Marcos and his team are granted the legal authority to create an analogous effect. According to many of the theories they abide by, market dynamics have the effect of lowering prices and increasing quality. Even if personally they have questions about this established idea, the instru¬ ments they use have that belief embedded in their models, formulas, and principles. Therefore, WED regulators see themselves as doing two things. One is compensating for the market’s shortcomings when it comes to set¬ ting the price and quality of public services. The other is producing the market effect through the design and supervision, one could even say care, of the social life of prices. This extraordinary dual responsibility has a clear name in regulatory theory: it is referred to as the surrogacy function of reg¬ ulation (Jouravlev 2001). For Don Marcos and other regulators at ARESEP, this is not a metaphor; they see themselves as literal surrogates of the mar¬ ket while believing that water should not be regulated by the market in the first place. SURROGACY IN THE FLOW OF TIME The everyday work of surrogacy is not particularly spectacular. It requires a constant assessment of the traces left behind by history and the signs that anticipate a wealth of future events that regulators never get to witness. All that supervision, analysis, and decision making refers to events that occur outside of ARESEP’s walls, beyond their immediate purview. What is left for them to work with are financial, accounting, and statistical state¬ ments that are taken as traces of past events and as projections of future happenings. In making everyday regulatory decisions about those traces and projections, WED follows two clearly determined procedures: ordinary and extraordinary price reviews. While theoretically these reviews can re¬ sult in price increases or decreases, without exception, utilities use them to request increases. The technical specificities of those reviews turn what might otherwise seem mechanized bureaucratic routines into intense mo¬ ments where the financial life of a human right is determined. Extraordinary price reviews begin with a utility’s request to reassess the components of the prices they charge due to major contextual changes—for example, environmental disasters, the adoption of new technical stan¬ dards that require significant investments, and so on. Water providers do not experience major contextual changes of this kind often; nevertheless, 85 they regularly request extraordinary price adjustments. Most often, they argue that unexpected costs are producing budget deficits that will ulti¬ mately result in bankruptcy. On most occasions, however, regulators de¬ termine that circumstances are not as serious as utilities claim them to be and do not warrant price increases of the magnitude that utilities request. But this does not mean that the utilities’ petitions are flatly denied. On the contrary, when there are no special circumstances to justify an extraordi¬ nary price augmentation, regulators examine the effects of inflation on the “cost structure” of utilities and often grant some type of increase. They at least authorize petitioners to increase their prices by an amount equal to the inflation rate. Often this is the maximum amount regulators feel ethi¬ cally authorized to grant. The second type of review regulators perform is known as an ordinary price review, an annual reevaluation that is required by law. This review is designed to adjust prices according to factors that can be expected to vary regularly such as foreign exchange rates, oil prices, minimum wage regula¬ tions, and interest rates. Since regulators and other professionals in this field expect the cost of these factors to increase over time, they are pre¬ disposed to adjust prices upward. They calculate how much relevant costs have increased based on current data and use the inflation rate to supple¬ ment any gaps in information. The results of these ordinary reviews con¬ tribute to people’s sense that fundamental services, and more generally the cost of living, do nothing but incessantly go up. Both types of review, ordinary and extraordinary, are intensive exercises in temporal determination; they are opportunities for interpreting pasts and futures at once. Regulators interpret the past by requesting that the utility produce records of its recent history in the form of financial state- INDEX CHAPTER TWO ments. When regulators review these records, they view them as histori¬ cal evidence of two things: of the utility’s due diligence and efficiency and of the utility’s potential need to collect more income via higher prices. In their interpretations of the future, regulators rely on even fewer sources of information. Because future income and expenses have not occurred, regulators use the available records of the past and project them into the future. They create a future image of a utility’s operations for a period of three to five years. These projections are traces of the future, notations of a time that regulators and water suppliers have a feel for but can never pre¬ dict with absolute precision. These projections produced out of past records 86 allow regulators to fold past and future into the present. They generate a speculative futurity that includes singular events such as, for instance, the negotiation of a new international loan or the purchase of major equip¬ ment. These kinds of future events can be anticipated through commit¬ ments from financial institutions or offers from machinery dealers. But the largest component of that speculative futurity consists of events that cannot be easily singled out. These happenings are a massive number of daily actions and transactions that make the flow of water through pipes possible—equipment maintenance, purchase of new parts and chemicals, salaries and benefits, electricity costs, communications expenses, public relations campaigns, gas for utility trucks, and so on. For a utility employ¬ ing thousands of people, as AyA does, precisely anticipating those events is impossible. Thus, even though their connection to a financial history makes future projections seem precise, the sheer quantity of the actions that those projections claim to predict precludes any precise calculation. Rather, those projected actions and transactions can be better imagined as massive waves, enormous accumulations of dynamic events that con¬ tinue in time and for which only mass groupings, traces in the form of bud¬ get lines or broad accounting categories, can be consulted. Within ARESEP, this futurity is regarded as an approximation, and a speculative one at that. This folded temporality gives Don Marcos and the rest of the WED team a very sophisticated working relationship with time. They know that the world is in constant change, and that such fluidity changes the economic significance of the factors on which utilities depend to keep water of ac¬ ceptable quality moving through pipes at the right pressure. Thus, to be able to rely on accounting records and projections, despite their uncer¬ tainty, regulators require an instrument with the capacity to simultane¬ ously adjust pasts and remain sensitive to futures. They need a tool with the capacity to counteract the sense of indeterminacy that their calcula¬ tions always possess. They need a device with sufficient ontological and moral legitimacy to adjust a price without breaking its coherence with the 3 percent humanitarian ideal. The numeric instrument deemed capable of performing all that techni¬ cal and moral work is the inflation rate, that macroeconomic figure that holds the capacity to accelerate or decelerate economies, classify a nation as dynamic or stagnant, and explode or implode the number of calculations people perform daily as the value of their money deflates or inflates. The inflation rate is a cornerstone of economic thought and practice globally. When other economic concepts are deemed untrustworthy, people turn to 87 inflation as a solid indicator to base decisions on. Take, for instance, dis¬ cussions over the situation of the U.S. economy at the end of 2017. After questioning the reliability of concepts such as “natural rate of unemploy¬ ment or neutral real rate of interest,” a former member of the board of the Federal Reserve affirmed that the only trustworthy source of information was inflation (Fleming 2017). The inflation rate has a very precise function in the methodology regu¬ lators at ARESEP use. If no other justification can be found to increase the price of water service provision, but they still believe the companies are en¬ titled to an adjustment in their price, they increase it by the inflation rate of the previous year or the projected rate over the next year. Inflation is the mathematical factor regulators, and economists more broadly, trust with the capacity to make past traces current and future occurrences present. In a strict sense, inflation is the measure of decreases in the value of money due to increases in the prices of goods and services. The more infla¬ tion there is, the fewer commodities a given quantity of money can pur¬ chase. The enormous trust regulators place in the inflation rate stems from two sources. First, there is the power of a figure that has been agreed to be a fundamental economic indicator. For decades, textbooks, policy makers, and central banks have used the inflation rate to represent the health of a national economy. Over time, the power of this figure has become taken for granted, creating a sense of inertia that privileges its use across spe¬ cialized groups, including regulators and many everyday citizens. Second, the regulatory procedures, and more generally the rationalities and meth¬ odologies that go into the inflation rate, imbue it with a kind of specificity and concreteness. By using the inflation rate in their calculation, regula¬ tors make an analytic leap. They use the inflation rate as a mechanism to INDEX CHAPTER TWO incorporate into their pricing formula all those things that are counted in the production of the rate itself—the intimacy of households, the things that are brought into them, the services people choose. All of these very household-specific and highly intimate factors are intertwined through a calculative process I describe below and which economists believe has the power to channel all these hyper-context-specific relations. As we can see, with the act of taking the financial statements and pro¬ jected cash flows of utilities and multiplying them by the inflation rate, regulators are doing a lot more than merely augmenting their magnitude. They are in practice responding to Ana’s question about how affordability 88 is determined in the flow of time. They are also turning the ideological and methodological meaning of inflation into an unexpected space for the elucidation of humanitarian reason. Regulators’ reliance on inflation, and the numerical index on which it depends, expands the scope of humanitar¬ ian logics usually enacted through courts and emergency aid. The inflation rate brings these logics into the everyday action of accounting and finan¬ cial modeling. In this surprising way, the inflation rate comes to matter as regulators attempt to bring about the difference a human right can make in people’s lives. MATERIAL-S EM I OTIC MULTIPLICATION: FROM GOLD TO COMMODITIES Puzzled by the fact that money can lose and gain value without seeming to change its nature, economists have developed multiple techniques to track and predict those variations and the effects they have on employ¬ ment, investment, and growth (Neiburg 2006). The inflation rate is with¬ out a doubt the most important tool for tracking those variations; it is so central to economic life that in Costa Rica landlords use it to update the rents they charge, national authorities compare the adequacy of minimum wage to it, and regulators take it as the only irrefutable justification for up¬ dating the prices of all public services including electricity and water. Not even the threat of bankruptcy enjoys such power in their analyses. Because of its impact on so many dimensions of economic life, the inflation rate is a “machinery of relating” (Holmes 2009: 6), a figure capable of “articulat¬ ing policy in relation to both the distinctive and shared circumstances of individuals . . . who are continually modeling and transacting economic relations” (6). And while its role in turbulent political and economic life has been carefully examined (Holmes 2009; Roitman 2005), the power of inflation to shape social life in unexceptional times remains for the most part invisible. Broadly, the inflation rate is a percentage that tracks the fluctuation of the level of prices on an annual basis. But from the point of view of its mathematic production, the inflation rate is nothing more than the recal¬ culation of the consumer price index (CPl). The CPI is a figure that quanti¬ fies the relation between money (prices) and things (commodities) at two points in time, usually from one month to the next. The CPI is the vehi¬ cle for two important pieces of information. First, it includes a particular group of commodities, referred to as the consumption basket. This basket 89 comes to signify an idealized household; it is a set of commodities that stands for what one can find in a home that represents the “Costa Rican household” as a general category. The other piece of information the CPI carries is a historical record of change. The final numeric form of the C PI is a percentage that indicates how much the prices of the goods in that basket have changed from one month to the next. The CPI carries this informa¬ tion, a collection of goods and a change in time, into the heart of the infla¬ tion rate, which in very simple terms is nothing more than the summation of the findings of the CPI over the period of a year. Originally inspired by the labor theory of value, the CPI can be taken as a historical account that stands for the “public consideration of what is involved in making a living” (Guyer 2013: 13). The CPI is an intensely his¬ torical articulation of the things people purchase, their presence within the household, and the quantity of money people have available to satisfy both their needs and desires. For economists, the combination of all of that information into a single figure is very powerful. Not surprisingly, the CPI has been used to answer moral questions about what is entailed in mak¬ ing an acceptable living, what is the place of one nation—as an economic entity—in comparison to other nations, and how healthy or weak both figurations, the nation and people’s capacity to make a living, are (Neiburg 2010). In Euro-America, one of the first documented uses of a construction like the CPI goes back to 1707 with the bishop of Fleetwood’s publication of a book titled Chronicum Preciousum (Kendall 1969). In that book, alongside his concerns with miracles and sermons, the bishop developed his ideas about the changing value of money, gold, and silver. His analysis was a response to a very practical moral problem presented to him. As it turned INDEX CHAPTER TWO out, a college founded in the 1400s required its fellows to take an oath that if they accumulated an estate of more than £5 they would vacate the college premises. In the early 1700s, a fellow of that college was worried about the current moral value of the oath. He asked the bishop whether he thought it reasonable to take such an oath considering how the value of money had fallen since the 1400s. The bishop embarked on a study of the previous three hundred years by comparing how much “corn, meat, drink and cloth,” items he thought were the only necessities of an academic, could be bought with £5. He concluded that £5 in the 1400s were equivalent to between £25 and £35 in the 1700s, and recommended that the fellows’ oath be updated to reflect that value. Despite their practical importance, explorations like the bishop’s were deemed comparatively unworthy endeavors in relation to philosophical ex¬ aminations of the metaphysical nature of value and its transformations. The lower status given to those wonderings was due to their closeness to the concerns of the domestic space and its worldly nature, as opposed to the public sphere of intellectual work and to questions of theological importance, which were considered of “higher order.” Authors doing those kinds of mundane mathematical musings feared appearing “to descend below the dignity of philosophy, in such oeconomical researches” (Evelyn 1798: 176) and often agonized about how their “voluntary pursuits should be directed to higher purposes than worldly objects, whatever temporary importance may attend them” (Arthur Young, cited in Kendall 1969: 5). And yet, despite being described as a “descent” to the level of worldly ob¬ jects, the preoccupation with how many things money can buy has sur¬ vived for centuries. Today, the inflation rate and the CPI are central indica¬ tors not only of the economic health of the nation, but also, as it turns out, of the everyday life of humanitarian concerns. 5 My own joyful “descent” from the philosophical exploration of the mean¬ ing of humanitarianism into water as a “worldly object” also took me to the CPI. The relation between people, prices, and things quickly became central as I encountered a new iteration of the consumer price index developed by Etienne Laspeyres in the nineteenth century. Sofia, the regulator we met in the previous chapter, directed me to this index when she explained the significance of inflation in their price reviews. I first saw its mathematical expression in a booklet produced by Costa Rica’s Statistics Institute to dis¬ seminate information about the index and how it is produced. where |t In I=\ = 9 =' t *W 9 9 W n lg = General index of the month being monitored Ij = Index of group to which an item belongs in the month being monitored and in relation to the reference period w g = Group weighting W- = lOO Cj Equation 2.1. Laspeyeres’s index as used to calculate Costa Rica’s monthly cpi. 91 Etienne Laspeyres was a Dutch economist and statistics scholar who in the 1800s, unlike others at his time, was convinced that the problem of understanding inflation demanded a study not only of changes in the availability of gold but of the changes in the prices of everyday goods. He argued that changes in the value of money were caused by peculiarities in people’s material needs and desires and did not exclusively reflect the value of gold (von der Lippe 2012: 338). To show the relevance of everyday things to larger economic questions, Laspeyres considered the quantity of objects people purchased, their importance in relation to the total number of goods and services a household acquired, and the proportion of money they used for acquiring them. He thought relationally, putting goods side by side, and he also thought proportionally, comparing the cost of one good to total income. By following Laspeyres’s formula we learn, for instance, that in 2015 people in Costa Rica used more of their income to pay for rice than to pay for a belt, and that both of those items take more of a family’s income than a mattress (Instituto Nacional de Estadistica y Censos 2016). In other words, Laspeyres realized that not all things are created equal and that the quantity purchased and the proportion of a household’s bud¬ get allocated for the consumption of an item were all important indicators of the different significance that objects have in people’s lives. Laspeyres’s original formulation has inspired virtually all the equations used around the world to calculate a CPI. INDEX CHAPTER TWO INDICES As economy-making devices, “index numbers [such as the CPl] encapsulate the entire dynamics and circularity of relations between economic theory and economic cultures” (Neiburg 2006: 615). While they are described as in¬ dicators of a preexisting reality, economic indices are performative instru¬ ments, devices that bring into existence the reality they claim to merely de¬ scribe (Callon 1998; Mitchell 2005). In their use, their proclaimed function as trackers of economic practices (consumption ones in this case) turns in¬ dices into devices with the capacity to create connections and separations 92 that differ from those originally foreseen by their creators. Laspeyres, for instance, could not even conceive of a connection between his index and the quantification of the affordability of a human right. Part of the expan¬ sive power that allows indices to participate in such diverse world events comes from their semiotic capacity to stretch across time and space. That capacity to stand for multiple events at multiple moments in time is so broad that some indices are interpreted as being the very embodiment of markets and even of the “economy” as a whole (De Goede 2005). Interest¬ ingly, that all-encompassing capacity is not concealed in any way. To the contrary, people are drawn to indices precisely because they openly present themselves as multiplicities, as relations between other entities, as combi¬ nations of multiple things and world-events. They are never taken for sin¬ gularities. For their users, the power of indices resides in their composite character. That is one of the main reasons why regulators and other eco¬ nomic actors like to work with indices such as the CPI, because they are self-evident combinations of other things that give a sense of concreteness and context specificity. Numeric indices accomplish this semiotic relationality by way of their multiplicative logic. A multiplicative number has the ability to embody the relative weight of each of its factors and pass it on to the final calculation. It is a trace of relations that are not homogenous. In the CPI, each compo¬ nent is weighted differently, and for that reason its relation with the final number has a particular, rather than a standardized, significance. For in¬ stance, in Costa Rica’s 2015 CPI, “water services” accounted for 1.41 percent of the cost of the consumption basket, while “drill” accounted for 0.05 per¬ cent, “birth control” for 0.11 percent, and “pizza” for 0.35 percent (Insti¬ tute Nacional de Estadistica y Censos 2016). Sofia and Don Marcos do not think of those difference in terms of their concrete magnitude. They un- derstand them as relations of different intensity, as textured and concrete representations of the financial aspects of people’s everyday lives. In that sense, what matters about the CPI is the proportional relations between the cost of a specific object and the set of all other objects being purchased, as represented by the consumer basket. Don Marcos and Sofia take these proportions as evidence of the relation between people’s everyday needs and their purchasing decisions. These proportional relations are the spe¬ cific moments at which the concrete needs of life—eating, drinking, caring for others, having the luxury of enjoying leisurely goods—meet specific fi¬ nancial conditions of possibility. For that reason, as the relations between water, income, and the other commodities change in time, regulators rely on the CPI as the only legitimate proxy for the changing conditions of the Costa Rican household that they can use in their calculations. Thanks to that sense of specificity, the CPI and the inflation rate work as depictions of some empirical realm that justifies their numeric association into some¬ thing as fundamental to life as water. THE SLOW INDEXICAL DiSSi PATION OF SUBJECTS By 2016, Costa Rican statistical and economic agencies had produced seven iterations of the CPI. The names given to each effort provide a historical record of the changing economic and political rationales behind them. The very first CPI on record was calculated in 1936, and was named “the cost of life index.” The next one, in 1952, was said to measure consumption “by middle-class consumers and working-class citizens.” In 1964 and 1975, the index was described as a measure of the “purchasing power of middle- and low-income consumers.” And in 2004, the Statistics Institute began de¬ scribing its calculation of the CPI as a “generic consumer index,” without any reference to people or their economic class. Thus, at the beginning of the twenty-first century the CPI became a sign of an abstract consumer. Cost of living, working citizens, and middle- and low-income consumers were replaced by an unmarked collective of commodities undergirded by a human entity whose existence is only asserted by the purchases it makes. But these nominal changes were more than changes in labels. They were based on methodological innovations in the statistical parameters used to define the household whose things and income the CPI measured. 6 And while these changes were statistically explained as a way to produce a more accurate image of the country, conceptually the shifts mark an important 93 INDEX CHAPTER TWO transition from humans to things, the gradual numeric effacing of the hu¬ man as a parameter defining a household and ultimately, for my purposes here, a human right. 1930s: cost of life —» 1950s: middle-class consumer and working-class citizen —» 1960s and 1970s: middle- and low-income consumers —» 2000s: unmarked consumer -» unnamed and unmarked human 7 Until 2004, the CPI statistically included households with between two and twelve residents. Households with more or fewer residents were ex¬ cluded as statistical outliers. That 2004 calculation of the CPI was the last to include in its defining parameters any explicit reference to number of in¬ dividuals occupying a household. From that point onward, the mathemati¬ cal design of the surveys on which the CPI is based included households of any size, regardless of the number or economic situation of the individuals in them. The only information incorporated into the calculation was goods and services consumed; people dissipated as statistical figures defining what a household is. From one point of view, this seems a welcome shift. No longer was the state deciding what counts as a household using traditional and heteronormative ideas of what kinship is. From another point of view, however, this shift also marks a change in how relevant people are to the definition of the household in comparison to the goods and services they purchase. While this shift from people to purchases might seem a small technical change, it is more than that. It is the statistical culmination of a trend for which the specific conditions of kin and class relations, with their historical particularity, are pushed into the background. Instead, we see the statistical emergence of the person in the household as an unmarked potential consumer. In this scenario, small human collectives, kin groups, become equal to their potential purchases. The household as an important unit of sociality is transformed into an empty signifier—no assumptions of a nuclear family, a heterosexual reproductive nucleus, or an extended system of relations of care are necessary. The household becomes a statisti¬ cally determined collection of things and services, the accumulation of the material traces left by transactions and, only by association, a trace of the people who happen to be connected to those things and services. In this new landscape, the objects and services included in the consump¬ tion basket are the parameters that define what a household is. This shift is expressed as follows in the statistical method currently used to calculate the CPI. To be part of the basket the CPI traces, a good or service must ful¬ fill at least one of two requirements. It must consume 0.5 percent or more of the monthly expenditures of a household, and/or it must be consumed by at least 5 percent of the surveyed households. In the last twenty years, the collection of items put together by applying those rules has grown from 264 items in 1995 to 315 in 2015. In tables 2.1 and 2.2, we can see a selected list of items that were added into and removed from the consumption basket in 2004 and 2016. In the 2000s, households introduced into their homes more “expensive” objects, changing in the process the very “nature” of this imag¬ inary Costa Rican household. Things like candles, liquid floor wax, beets, and pantyhose were no longer part of the basket. Instead, new goods and services such as cable TV, internet service, ultrasound, yogurt, car wash, and cell phone service were included in the basket. Further, in 2015, “bot¬ tled water” made it into the CPI, for the first time. Each of these 315 items deserves a cultural history of its own. For in¬ stance, the changing preferences among younger generations of women toward wearing pants instead of skirts or even the increasing desire for “exposed women’s skin” might explain the disappearance of pantyhose from the basket. Changing preferences in the Costa Rican palate, maybe the growing interest in fast food or changes in the allocation of subsidies for farmers, could explain why beets disappeared. But individually, each of the hundreds of objects and services in the index has only a minor impact on the CPI and ultimately on water affordability. For purposes of the cal¬ culation of the price of water, their individual significance is subordinated to their mere inclusion in the index. What matters is not a single item, but the articulation of 315 of them as a unique set of proportional relations that change month to month. These idiosyncratic relations, translated into the CPI and later into inflation, have the power to shape the future of a utility and of water when such a future cannot be accounted for with precision. But there is another element that confounds the significance of the CPI as a set of concrete and context-specific relations. Because of its statisti¬ cal composition, there is no single household where one could find the 315 items the CPI accounts for. The CPI is only a statistical image of a house¬ hold that is in reality distributed throughout the more than 7,000 house¬ holds surveyed to determine the contents of the consumption basket. The CPI household is an abstraction designed to provide specificity and con¬ creteness. It is a figure regulators use to create a context, to explicitly link 95 INDEX Table 2.1 Changes in the 2004 Consumer Price Index ITEMS EXCLUDED ■ ITEMS INCLUDED ; 1 Liver 2 Sardines 3 Fresh milk 4 Processed cheese 5 Green celery 6 Green pumpkin 7 Cauliflower 8 Beet 9 Sweet potato 10 Unprocessed sugar 11 Dry stock cubes 12 Powder cacao : 13 Achiote 14 Pepper 15 Pantyhose 16 Women’s dress 17 Skirt 18 Short sleeve shirt for child 19 Women’s blouse 20 Boy brief 21 Girl panty 22 Girl’s dress 23 Baby plastic pant 24 Baby sock 25 Boots 26 Shoe hill sole exchange 27 Shoe sole exchange 28 Cotton 29 Thin cotton fabric 30 Linen 31 Silk 32 Blanket 33 Electric buffer 34 Blender 35 Ceramic tableware 36 Liquid shoe polish 37 Paste shoe polish 1 Baked goods 2 Hotel services 3 Ink cartridge 4 Pork ribs 5 Rice cooker 6 Magnetic backup unit 7 Chicken wings 8 Iron 9 Videogame 10 Breaded chicken 11 Coffee maker 12 CableTV 13 Sausages 14 Screwdriver 15 Touristic packages 16 Condensed milk 17 Body lotion 18 Cream cheese 19 Internet service 20 Movie rental 21 Yogurt 22 Cloth softener 23 Book 24 Avocado 25 Trash bags 26 Veterinary services 27 Mattress 28 Foreign language classes 29 Grapes 30 Airfreshener 31 Computer literacy course 32 Sweet corn 33 High blood pressure medication 34 Dictionary 35 Mushrooms 36 Vitamins 37 White paper Table 2.1 Changes in the 2004 Consumer Price Index continued ITEMS EXCLUDED ITEMS INCLUDED 38 Light bulb 38 Peas 39 Scouring pad 39 Anti-allergy medication 40 Candle 40 Photocopies 41 Liquid floor wax 41 Refried beans 42 Solid floorwax 42 Cough medicine 44 Matches 44 Chewing gum 45 Broom 45 Ultrasound 46 Soap bar (for washing clothes) 46 Photocopy 47 Effervescent analgesic 47 Gallo Pinto (rice and beans dish) 48 Antacid 48 Stock 49 Fortifying food supplement 49 X-rays 50 Alcohol 50 Photographic camera 51 Pain relief icy cream 51 Lawyer fees 52 Tire alignment 52 Watermelon 53 Tire balancing 53 Funerary services 54 Tape recorder 54 Ironing table 55 Tricycle 55 Printer 56 Photographic film 56 CD 57 Film developing service 57 Party service 58 Hair spray 58 Furniture repair their work with the household of Costa Rican water consumers, despite its inexistence in space and time as a brick-and-mortar household. This is no surprise to regulators, nor do they make apologies for this fact. In ARESEP they recognize this as a trade-off, one of the insurmountable constraints they confront every day to keep open space for humanitarian affordability within their calculative routines until they can find a better way to enact the difference they want to make in the world. The CPI is the closest regu¬ lators can get to mathematically representing the citizen as they adjust the price of water to the passing of time. As we can see, in the process of selecting the goods and services in the consumption basket, the Statistics Institute that calculates the CPI does much more than track changes in the value of money. It also produces an image of the material form of the household, a literal objectification of kin relations through prevailing economic and statistical orthodoxies. For na¬ tional economic policymakers, the basket of goods and services operates as INDEX Table 2.2 Changes in the 2016 Consumer Price Index ITEMS EXCLUDED 1 Whole fish 2 Mushrooms 3 Peas 4 Chewing gum 5 Fruit sauce 6 Women’s socks 7 Drycleaning 8 Cement 9 Glass 10 Masonry service 11 Computerdesk 12 Furniture repair 13 Ironing board 14 Sheets 15 Microwave oven 16 Pressure cooker 17 Hammer 18 Pliers 19 Rinsingaid 20 Cough medicine 21 Carwax 22 Car clutch 23 Car battery 24 DVD player 25 Photographic camera 26 Printer 27 Movie rental 28 Magazine 29 Dictionary 30 Lipstick 31 Nail polish ITEMS INCLUDED 1 Pre-prepared rice 2 Insurance 3 Snacks or appetizers 4 Financial services 5 Engine repair 6 Hair coloring 7 Hospital fees 8 Pre-prepared pasta 9 Soups 10 Women’s dress 11 Natural flowers 12 Surgery 13 Women’s bag 14 Cake 15 Zinc sheet 16 Served fish filet 17 Motorcycle 18 Served dessert 19 Diabetes medication 20 Served salad 21 Gastritis medication 22 Shift-stick repair 23 Medication for nerves 24 Shock absorbers 25 Bottled water 26 Drill 27 Birth control 28 Mobile electronic device 29 Kid’s coordinate dress 30 Light bulb 31 Passport fees a summary of the lifestyle of any household in Costa Rica, even if in reality most households are not able to afford it. It is an image that is normative and contextual at once. It is implicitly normative about the material foun¬ dation of the nation, the concrete meaning of a “Costa Rican household.” It is contextual to the extent that, for example, it links the 3 percent afford¬ ability benchmark set by the UN with the “specificities” of households in Costa Rica. The kinds of relations between people and objects that the CPI stands for are not new to anthropology. Since the early days of anthropological in¬ quiry, scholars have turned their attention to the role objects play in shap¬ ing our (non)humanity (Evans-Pritchard 1940; Malinowski 1935; Mauss 1967). This literature has taught us to not misrecognize objects as passive receptacles of meaning, and instead see them as active participants in our world-making endeavors (Henare, Holbraad, and Wasted 2007; Latour 2005; Pottage 2001). What is remarkable in the case of the human right to water is how things, in the form of commodities, not only co-inhabit the world but have come to numerically stand for humans when we locate them in their households. Further, these relations between people and things are used to numerically qualify a fundamental right. This displacement of the subject by objects happens not in “alternative ontologies” but at the very core of a liberal society. Here, the subject of rights is mathematically rendered by the things we find in our household, and further, by gendered fashion trends, farming subsidies, and myriad sets of relations underpin¬ ning people’s choices about the things and services they buy. 8 In an inter¬ esting statistical twist, objects push humans to the background as regula¬ tors attempt to keep water prices as affordable as possible. It is as if in the world where people try to make the human right to water into something concrete, things have emerged as a primordial and reliable substrate to account for the humanitarian subject. Things have become trustworthy, countable, and retrievable evidence of our existence. Instead of thinking about the human rights of subjects, we might have to start thinking about the rights of human objects. This development seems even more odd when we remember that this is a world where people understand themselves as individuals relating to other individuals, as subjects commanding over the passive things that surround them. In this context, making the household of objects deter¬ mine the affordability of a human right is an interesting transgression of 99 INDEX CHAPTER TWO secular separations of subjects and objects. Although not intentionally pro¬ moted by regulators or international human rights officials, this transgres¬ sion is nevertheless statistically produced—it is made possible by the op¬ erations behind the CPI. One should not think of this transgression as an exclusively Costa Rican development, though. Inflation and the CPI are used worldwide to make all sorts of decisions about collectives. They are mobilized to evaluate debates over the morality of the economy, the convenience of increasing interest rates, the magnitude of the minimum wage, the legal yearly increase in rent, the risk factor of a construction loan, and many others. Thus, by ask¬ ing how and where the cpi is used to settle collective concerns about rights that take the form of a technical economic decision, we can see the ways in which objects in households, statistically aggregated into a mathemati¬ cal index, have become a major indicator of our humanity. It is not that, as many critiques of capitalism claim, these economic indicators rob us of our humanity. Rather, what they do is change how we count as humans. They imbue the rights that make us human with commodities all the way down. Understanding how this happens sheds light on how economic logics, hu¬ manitarian and humanist commitments, and material ontologies coalesce into the numeric creation of the preconditions for the future. HUMANITARIAN HOUSEHOLDS AND THEIR THINGS The associations and creative forms of reasoning that I have followed here happen across a variety of centers of calculation. They are part of a forma¬ tion akin to what, in his analysis of climate change, Paul Edwards (2010: 8 ) calls a vast machine: a sociotechnical system that collects data, models processes, tests theories, and ultimately generates widely shared under¬ standings. There are many such vast machines; one of the most familiar to us is the census-making international machinery with its historically multiple objectives of creating commensurable units, making colonial con¬ trol possible, and inventing the population. In Costa Rica, the raw data for the C PI is collected by the same entity responsible for the national census: the National Institute of Statistics and Census, or Instituto Nacional de Estadistica y Censos (iNEC). 9 This institute belongs to a network of similar institutions throughout Latin America, and really throughout the world, that not only produce statistical data but also, and importantly, help dis¬ seminate and regularly “modernize” statistical techniques. These statis- tical centers are the original “Big Data” collectors whose categories and counting techniques continue to have quiet but far-reaching consequences. In 2012, Costa Rica’s statistical machinery almost halted. Due to a con¬ flict with the central budget authority, the positions of 462 of its public servants were nearly lost. When the director of INEC went public to gather support for his agency, he remarked that “a country without statistics can¬ not make good decisions.” His comment was an affirmation of the positiv¬ ist legacy of the elites of nineteenth-century Latin America who promoted political reforms inspired by their experiences of being educated in Europe. Today, INEC faces many problems. One of its major difficulties is that once it hires statisticians and trains them for years, they often move to pri¬ vate corporations in search of better salaries. To address this situation, and to stabilize its professional cadres, INEC has been working toward mod¬ ernization, both attempting to increase the salaries it pays and launching new statistical projects to satisfy the increased “statistical demand” of the country. And it has certainly done so. For this research I requested data for the three most recent recalculations of the CPI, and the data was sent to me electronically in less than two days, likely a record for Costa Rica’s slow-moving bureaucracy. Rolando, a member of the permanent statistics office of INEC, is part of the team that every ten years conducts the Encuesta Nacional de In- gresos y Gastos de los Hogares (National Survey of Household Income and Expenditure), commonly referred to as la Encuesta de Hogares. INEC pro¬ duces a variety of outreach materials to inform the citizenry that the En¬ cuesta is about to take place and that it is their obligation as residents of the country to provide the information INEC requests. These flyers are dis¬ tributed in supermarkets, in gated communities, and in other public spaces (figure 2.1). They target class and gender differentially and are accompa¬ nied by TV ads, newspaper communiques, and information capsules on the radio. This survey identifies the items included in the consumption basket and the CPI. No one is more aware than Rolando of the methodological changes that the CPI has undergone. And yet he continues to see the Encuesta de Hogares as a human-centered effort. One afternoon, as we discussed how the Encuesta is organized, he described the process by referring to the en¬ counter between the people conducting the survey and the residents of a household. Out of our conversation and a short informational video on YouTube Rolando recommended, I put together the following image of the INDEX CHAPTER TWO 102 AI faalitar la information de los bienes y servicios que consumo a la ENCUE 5 TA NACIONAL DE INGRESOS Y GASTOS ENIGH 2018-2019 DELOS HOGARES ( contnbu*o a dar a conocr la r?*i«Jad del pas. iriec YORESPONDO POR u: Costa Rica mec N 050 TR 05 RE 5 P 0 NDEM 05 POR « AI Fadlitar la mformaobn de los bienes y servitios que consumimos a la ENCUE5TA NACIONAL DE INGRESOS Y GASTOS DE LOS HOGARES ENIGH 2018-2019 contntiu«nos a dar a conocer la realidad del pars. En los prtximos dias, entrevistadores del IHEC yisifar&n algunas viviendas de esta comumdad. Agradecemos su colaboraciftn. . INFOOTAD&H. KCJDEES DECISIONS PAIS. niDTfT.TPil Wc^iSr. 22SM2Ml»t.324 >l2?/2243 1ft'» • lorrn MadrtMs:teqhOiMtyur l-rfoon*c*6n: 2210 VKUt IK 6127/2243-1SS3 • Carrw<- Figure 2.i Metamorphoses ofthe human in relation to the household and the cpi. routine data collection visits behind the making of the object-based statis¬ tical household: Door knock. Door opens. Buenos dias Senora (Good morning, ma’am). I am from IN EC. We are doing a survey; may I speak with you for a moment? While waiting for an answer, the surveyor imagines what things might be inside the house. How long will this survey take? Secretly she hopes there is not much in the house. She considers closets, pantries, bookcases, appliance stands. All sorts of structures that hold, protect, or hide from view the numerous things that inhabit this home along with its human and nonhuman dwellers. In this first encounter the surveyor is somewhat un¬ comfortable, although the more interviews she does, the more mechanical the initial exchange becomes. She has gone through training, mostly about how to complete the questionnaire appropriately, how to record answers, and where to hold the surveys. She is between twenty and thirty years old, without a stable job, and is about to finish her university degree in sociol¬ ogy. She responded to a newspaper ad calling for encuestadores (poll takers) to be temporarily hired to collect the data for the Encuesta de Hogares. Most times, but not all, the people who open the door are cautious women, elderly persons, or domestic workers. Rolando reminded me that increasing rates of property crime have turned what used to be warm welcomes into quick assessments of the credibility and possible dangerousness of the person knocking on the door. Is she re¬ ally from the institute? Is that ID real? Are there other people around her? While initially concerned with security, residents usually soften and most times invite the surveyor to come in and sit in the living room or kitchen and offer her something to drink—maybe un fresquito (a fruit juice), coffee, or at least un vasito de agua (a glass of water). 10 This scene is multiplied by the thousands every ten years when I NEC conducts the Encuesta. In the same way that Don Marcos visualizes concrete households pay¬ ing water bills as they use the inflation rate to update their prices, with this hypothetical image, Rolando wanted to imagine the CPI calculation through the specific conversations and handshakes from which their sta¬ tistical information is drawn. This link between statistical data and the concreteness of the day-to-day human interactions that make the Encuesta happen is a way of keeping the relation between people and things active, a way of entangling that which numerically they will disentangle. In other words, what in people’s imaginary is an intricate relation between people and things, in their statistical decisions is the slow erasure of the specifici¬ ties of the human—for example, gender, class, or kin relations—until she becomes a statistical nonissue. This oscillation between that which they numerically claim and that which they visualize as the justification of their work is symptomatic of a tension between numbers as abstractions and counting as place-specific practices. Regulators and statisticians often confront this tension when everyday people compare their personal experiences to the economic fig¬ ures that I NEC and ARESEP present to the public. Brian Rotman (1997) ar¬ gues that this tension is the result of the implicit numerical assumptions of Western mathematics. He argues that the material reality of counting does not allow for the abstracted infinity people presume is intrinsic to numbers. That abstract infinity is only possible in a Platonic tradition where numbers are taken as “an already existent, infinitely extended se¬ ries of objects, each different from its neighbor by an identical unit” (36). But counting things in the world is not a process of identifying infinite and self-evident units. It is a social practice that requires different numerical 103 INDEX CHAPTER TWO logics according to the particular context where it unfolds. As Helen Verran (2001) notes, numbers and counting are practical accomplishments “em¬ bodied in collective goings-on in specific times and places” (220). Don Mar¬ cos and Rolando conduct their everyday work by interlacing these two log¬ ics: an abstract infinitude of Platonic numbering and place-specific regimes of counting and calculating. Reflecting on the historical antecedents of the calculation techniques they used at the moment, Don Marcos, who was known among his cowork¬ ers for his good humor and storytelling abilities, recalled an anecdote from the 1970s when he worked for the regulatory body that preceded ARESEP. The story is another instance of the coexistence of these two forms of nu¬ meration, Platonic-abstract and place-specific. At the time, any price in¬ crease in public services had to be approved by the country’s president. During the last government of Jose Figueres (1970-74), the president who in his first term in the 1940s nationalized banks, abolished the army, rec¬ ognized the voting rights of women and black citizens, and also persecuted communists, there was a request for a substantial water price increase. Don Marcos couldn’t remember the exact numbers, but he narrated the story of how they went to see Don Pepe, the affectionate name people still use to refer to Figueres. Don Marcos prefaced the story by saying, “The man was very funny and a little atarantado [a combination of amusing and inatten¬ tive].” After listening to all the technicalities of the request to increase wa¬ ter prices the president responded, “Very well, boys, but tell me something, how much is a beer these days?” Don Marcos and his colleague looked at each other and tentatively answered, “x amount.” To which Figueres re¬ sponded, “How many beers fit in a cubic meter and how much would that cost?” They did a quick calculation and told him how much it would be. The president then asked, “And how much are you asking to increase water by?” After they replied, Don Pepe thought for a moment and then said, “Okay! One hundred pesos, versus one thousand that the cubic meter of beer is worth? No problem. Go ahead with the increase.” Besides its amusing tone, Don Marcos’s anecdote provides a broader his¬ torical context to the calculative relations between people and commodi¬ ties, and their place in the definition of collective life. It shows how afford¬ ability has for a long time been about the place of water in relation to other purchased things. This is the kind of lateral association people make when they compare water to other things they pay for. It is also the kind of as¬ sociation that embeds the idea of a human right to water with the physical objects that make our material-semiotic lives livable. When used in tech¬ nocratic spaces such as ARESEP, the CPI and the inflation rate provide a powerful answer to fundamental moral and political questions about how universal rights acquire concrete forms. In this case we see how changes in the CPI diminish the statistical prominence of the human in the definition of the household that ARESEP uses to make their economic measures con¬ textually specific. Where the state used to care about workers, lower- and middle-class citizens, and even consumers, we now find an invisible per¬ son, an unclassifiable potential purchaser of goods and services. Propor¬ tionally to the fading of the historically and class-specific human, we can trace the ascendancy of purchased things and services, all the way to the definition of a human right to water. In 2014, Nancy Fraser posed the question of whether societies can be commodities all the way down. Her question was framed by the environ¬ mental and economic crises that she sees unfolding globally. In this case we might ask a parallel question, one that Sofia, Rolando, and Don Marcos struggle with every day: Can human rights be commodities all the way down? In the case of the human right to water, it very well might have been statistically made so, if only provisionally, until the next calculation happens, the next methodological innovation is developed, and the next international benchmark is adopted. CONCLUSION Putting in place numerical and statistical structures for responsibility for the future, in this case the future affordability of water, requires regula¬ tors to contextualize a price in a household despite the inadequacy of their instruments for doing so appropriately. Here the CPI, in relation to the 3 percent benchmark, is a placeholder to create a distinction between a hu¬ manitarian and a nonhumanitarian price. The CPI is a device that creates a distinction; it makes a difference in a field fraught with logistical chal¬ lenges and political opposition. Despite the acceptance by most everyone in Costa Rica that one should pay for water, the precise task of translating the human right to water into a very specific price unleashes all sorts of questions and doubts. Being a surrogate for the market, when you believe the market should not be dictating the price of a human right, requires this kind of inventive technique to make a difference in a world that constantly pressures people to keep things as they are. 105 INDEX CHAPTER TWO Every price adjustment regulators perform is a temporary accomplish¬ ment followed by a new demand to incorporate new ideas and method¬ ologies in their work and ultimately to adjust their prices according to the most recent inflation calculations. Thus, regulators know that as soon as they adjust a price, time is already creating the need for a new adjustment, for a new calculation, which is ultimately a new opportunity to create an¬ other ephemeral distinction between the human right to water and its commodification. By tracing the calculations regulators make to try to keep water afford¬ able, I ended with the CPI at the center of my analysis. The CPI is a number 106 that accounts for the things and objects found in a statistical depiction of a Costa Rican household. The capacity of that abstracted household to purchase objects and services is transmorphed into an inflation rate that adjusts the periodic efforts of regulators to make water affordable for all, especially for the poor. Regulators acknowledge the fluctuations of pur¬ chasing practices and income among Costa Rican households and strive to align their prices to those fluctuations. Over time, the CPI and the infla¬ tion rate slowly become one of the last humanitarian devices regulators can use as their decisions become more and more embedded in financial logics. But regulators’ reliance on the CPI has further implications. As I have shown, the calculation of the CPI entangles things, persons, and water as a gift from God and Nature, challenging the purity of any separation be¬ tween a right and a commodity. The CPI recasts the separation between persons and things, a fundamental distinction to liberalism, by making commodities the units that quantitatively shape the humanitarian char¬ acter of subjects and their right to water. Through these extended connec¬ tions, the CPI gives water an extended materiality that is much more than pipes, valves, and H 2 0. Water, in its social life as a right, is a numeric cho¬ reography of familiar hydraulic infrastructures along with TVs, cooking implements, computer literacy lessons, bottled water, and the more than 300 items currently tracked by the CPI. Thinking with this index moves us away from individual subjects, if we take them as self-evident units of rights or as the self-evident ethnographic “objects” that need to be traced. Through the history I have traced, the individual—that cherished subject of rights—went from being an entity with particularly classed histories and existing in a small collective that we call a household, to being a distributed entity only recognizable mathe¬ matically through the goods and services she has collectively purchased. In this household, the individual is dissipated into her consumption practices. In their thinking, people like Sofia, Don Marcos, and Rolando are avowed humanitarians and humanists, working for the well-being of others, com¬ mitted to the human as a figure of concern. In their practices, however, the technicality of their procedures makes them apologists for things, even against their intentions. But this move toward households as a way to ethically classify and ex¬ plain humans is not new in any way. The household appears in the West¬ ern legal imaginary as early as Roman times, when the rights-bearing citi¬ zen was in fact the head of the household, not as an individual but in his hierarchical relation to the collective he represented (Arendt 1959). That household was undergirded by kinship, gender, status, and political rela¬ tions of many sorts, including those of slavery. The household at the center of the human right to water in Costa Rica is different. It is not determined by the number of family members, their gender, genealogy, age distribu¬ tion, or socioeconomic status. The household of the human right to water is the household of things, an unexpected actor in the political ecologies of rights. This household has the power to quantitatively and temporar¬ ily determine the affordability of water in Costa Rica, despite multiple ef¬ forts to address affordability through legal arguments about dignity and citizenship. Neither Laspeyres nor developmentalist economists would likely have anticipated that the CPI would end up working as a nexus between the so¬ cial struggles for the human right to water and the responsibility of con¬ trolling prices in a nostalgic holding on to the principles of the welfare state in Costa Rica. But Sofia and her colleagues afford the consumer price index this new life. By limiting any price increase in water to the infla¬ tion rate, regulators affirm the imagined lifestyle of a generic household, marked by its consumption, and insert it into the calculation of a human right. But as we have seen, that household and that consumptive lifestyle is only a statistical purification; it cannot be found in any one Costa Rican household. With this statistical shift, regulators and international bureaucrats go to the core of liberal philosophy. They first merge human rights and com¬ modities. They determine one through the other when they rely on afford¬ ability; a human right is a right to an affordable commodity. And then, af¬ ter having performed that fusion, they insert a bifurcation, they re-create a distinction by saying that if priced under the 3 percent benchmark, water 107 INDEX CHAPTER TWO is indeed a human right and not a commodity—despite being both at the same time. In this context, the price of water (via households) becomes, on the one hand, a contemporary form of humanitarian reason, and, on the other, a way to claim the remnants of mid-twentieth-century welfare ide¬ ologies of a state’s responsibility to care for its population. Ana’s original demand that we pay attention to the multiple ways in which water is made (un)affordable, while acknowledging it as a gift from Nature and God, has the effect of revealing how the substrate of objects de¬ termines the meaning of a human right. Today, humanitarianism depends on floor wax, computer desks, software lessons, and cable TV subscriptions, 108 regardless of their humans. If in Roman times the head of the household represented all of its inhabitants, in the twenty-first century, the collection of purchased things represents all of its humans. Rivers, rivers where women do laundry, lakes, reservoirs, aquifers, channeled water, ocean water, freshwater, brackish water, water used for irrigation, ice cubes, clouds, waste water. Items in the water taxonomy produced by Libertarian congressional representatives in Costa Rica between 2002 and 2015 3 LIST The previous two chapters have examined the ways in which numerical devices, a formula and an index, help create differences that shape the form of water as a political object, as a material concern of large groups of people. In this chapter I move outside of mathematical worlds to examine another type of device, a list. I also move away from regula¬ tory and statistical agencies to Costa Rica’s Congress. At stake is a legal reform to introduce into Costa Rica’s constitution wording that explicitly recognizes water as a human right and a public good. Made possible by an entangled congressional procedure, the list that I focus on is a device that turns the recognition of the human right to water into an opportunity to dwell on questions about its materiality. Here, the bifurcation happens in unexpected terms. It hinges upon water’s material definition. For con¬ gressional opponents of the reform, mainly Libertarian representatives, if water is to be a human right and a public good, its materiality needs to be specified. What substances count as a public good and which do not needs to be taxonomically determined. For supporters of the reform, the specific material form of water is a matter of common sense that does not need to be taxonomically determined. What is interesting here is how, thanks to procedural maneuvers, the discussion of what counts as the materiality of water results in a list produced piecemeal over years. This list inhabits the borders of liberal legal imaginaries as it denaturalizes water as a substance that is subject to property regimes. More broadly, it reveals how ideas about generality/specificity and material stability/instability help clarify what is serious political argument and what is farce. Which ideas count as each is, of course, hotly contested among those involved in the struggle. To understand the water taxonomy the Libertarians created, I have orga¬ nized this chapter in two main parts, each with a distinct tone. In the first part, I narrate the procedural life of the constitutional reforms that have CHAPTER THREE been attempted since 2002 to recognize water as a human right in Costa Rica. I also trace the peculiar political place and ethical orientation of Lib¬ ertarians in Costa Rican politics by providing an abbreviated history of the Libertarian party, examining its origins in 1994, the metamorphoses it has experienced since that time, and ultimately its dissolution. In the second part of the chapter, I return to the constitutional reform procedures to re¬ read them through the words, gestures, tones, and objects the Libertarians have used in their mission to hijack procedure, expand time, and ultimately trouble the material order. The result is a rereading of congressional activ¬ ity full of ice cubes, clouds, and puddles—a journey through legislative 110 speeches that address new materialist concerns in a manner that is remi¬ niscent of discussions in philosophical salons. ENLISTING WATER What is the power of a list? As a display of carefully collected or casually assembled items (humans, countries, songs, foods, species, etc.), how does it affect the world? As precursors of typologies or the culmination of tax¬ onomic desires, lists help organize the world. They punctuate our atten¬ tion, granting us the possibility of creating simultaneously open and closed groupings. Lists have the capacity to foreclose by delimiting a category, and yet they cannot help but insinuate the possibility of new elements joining, of remaining open. I am interested here in one peculiar list: a water tax¬ onomy. Consisting of thirty-one items, this watery taxonomy revealed the limits of constitutionally designating water a public good. It worked as a device that punctuated the ontological order that congressional represen¬ tatives and activists rely upon to create a fundamental political separation between a human right and a commodity. It took congressional represen¬ tatives more than ten years to unwittingly produce this list, a few items at a time. As can be expected, the list’s coming to life was wrapped in layers of political spectacle, legal wrangling, activist tactics, and, unexpectedly for me, materialist wonderings. The list was a device that engaged water in a larger battle over what Libertarians frame as state overreach and the threat to the fundamental right to own property. I began hearing about the items in this list from Eric, an activist friend with a background in philosophy and law who works with one of the oldest environmental law NGOs in Costa Rica. He and his colleagues had spent the previous twelve years stymied by the Libertarian obstruction of their attempts to change Costa Rica’s constitution so that water would be recog¬ nized as a public good and a human right. Eric’s feelings about the Libertar¬ ian obstructionism oscillated between shock, revulsion, and anger. Only diputados (congressional representatives), he told me, could utter the non¬ sense the country had been forced to put up with. In Costa Rica, as in many other parts of the world, representatives have a terrible reputation: unin¬ formed and always legislating for their own and their friends’ economic benefit. Knowing that if the amendment were put to a vote they would lose, the Libertarian diputados hijacked legislative procedure to make a fundamental point. They were amenable to the idea of a human right to water. But making water a public good and putting it into the constitution m represented a “core ideological” issue they were going to oppose at all costs. For them, the state should not own property because “what belongs to ev¬ erybody, belongs to nobody” and therefore is never cared for appropriately. This reference to the problem of things that belong to nobody is not original to Costa Rica’s political circles. It is a rearticulation of a 1968 ar¬ ticle by Garret Hardin titled “The Tragedy of the Commons”—an academic hit published in Science magazine to address so-called overpopulation that traveled beyond the academy like few other ideas have. Using the example of pastures and herdsmen, the article makes the argument that common resources (something Hardin defines as resources that are open to all be¬ cause they have not been clearly bounded as belonging to individual actors) are doomed to be overexploited. This leads to a decrease in the wealth and well-being of those who enjoyed its use without any limitation, but also of society, or the “system” as he calls it, overall. Since its publication Hardin’s article has been used to support all sorts of privatization projects across the world. Academics and critical scholars have challenged his argument, noting how the only empirical evidence the article relies upon is an ahistor- ical understanding of medieval transitions into capitalism (Maurer 1997). Others have documented multiple examples of how common property re¬ gimes are structured around explicit and implicit rules that organize re¬ source access and utilization, in many circumstances avoiding depletion and exhaustion of resources (Ostrom 1990; Wutich 2009). In the twenty- first century, the idea of the commons has been revitalized, but the as¬ sumptions behind Hardin’s arguments are also widely accepted in main¬ stream legal and economic circles around the world, including Costa Rica’s legislative assembly. This revitalization has also resulted in a slippage. Al¬ though technically, political scientists, economists, and other social com- isn CHAPTER THREE mentators define public goods, common goods, and collective goods differ¬ ently, in public parlance the terms are used interchangeably. When Eric spoke of the history of the struggle to recognize water as a human right and a public good, he referred to attempts to bring about a constitutional reform, in the singular. But in reality, the activists and rep¬ resentatives promoting the legal change had attempted a series of reforms. Three different amendments had been introduced in the last two decades, each taking up years of legislative procedure. The amendments had the support of many and heterogeneous political groups. Moreover, most ev¬ eryday people in Costa Rica agree with the idea that in order to secure the human right to water, it must be a public good. I have never heard anybody openly advocate for its privatization. But people do not prefer the notion of a public good because they trust that the state always does an outstanding job managing public goods; they do so because the alternative seems worse. Private appropriation is seen as tied to commodification, profit-making, and mercantilizacion (commercialization), something that, as we saw in chapter 1, people reject in the case of water. The determination of whether water constitutes a public good is not a new question in Costa Rica’s legal system. Water has been legally recog¬ nized as public property by constitutional jurisprudence, by the General Comptroller’s Office, and, since 1982, by the Mining Code. And yet activists like Eric and many water professionals continue to fight for enshrining this classification in the constitution. They believe doing so would "reinforce,” as a lawyer put it, the public property regime under which water exists. The reform would move the protection of water to a foundational level, preclud¬ ing any future attempts to challenge its public character. This manner of reinforcing the future is a common tactic used by ngos and activists in Costa Rica. It is one of the most direct ways in which they shape the future even if they do not have a comprehensive vision of it. They believe chang¬ ing an article in the constitution here and another there can create the pre¬ conditions for the yet to come. But using the constitution to intervene in the future has generated an intense debate about the meaning of farce in public debate and about the role of procedural guarantees in a liberal democracy. Amid these political fireworks emerged the curious list/taxonomy of water that captured my attention. This list, a product of congressional speechmaking and political debate, is difficult to place; at times people found it hard to take seriously, yet impossible to ignore. As a political device with the potential to reinforce the future and allocate collective legal responsibilities, the list has been extremely powerful. And at the same time, the list was only a quasi-event; it never became a full legal taxonomy because it was never adopted, trans¬ lated into law, or taken up by citizens. In a way, despite being inscribed in congressional records, the list is ephemeral. And yet it was extremely con¬ sequential not only for the legal aspirations of the promoters of the reform but also to a more diffuse understanding of water politics among activists and water professionals. I learned about the list piecemeal, the same way it was constructed. Dif¬ ferent people told me about different items at different moments. But af¬ ter Eric described parts of it in detail, I committed myself to reviewing the congressional records in search of what he and many others saw as a ridiculous and reprehensible maneuver. Reading the speeches given be¬ tween 2002 and 2013 took me on a rich journey, from depositions given by the foremost constitutional legal scholars and practitioners all the way to raw expressions of embodied disgust leveled by one representative at an¬ other. In that journey, however, I found that despite being viewed by many as absurd, the Libertarian list was staged as a “coming together of things that are generally considered parts of different ontological orders (part of nature, part of the self, part of society)” (Thompson 2005: 8). In this com¬ ing together, the list became a watery choreography that transgressed the borders that keep things as separate individual entities. The Libertarians put together a wondrous list of types of water that illustrated what they saw as a nonsensical idea: that water could be bounded as public property. To that purpose, the items in their list intentionally combined “technical scientific, gendered, emotional, legal, political and financial aspects” of wa¬ ter to undo any self-evident idea or consensus about what water as a sub¬ stance is in the first place (Thompson 2005). Overall, their taxonomic list was a curious assemblage that tested its audience’s capacity for ontological wonderings, in many cases so aggressively that it shut down the possibil¬ ity of any engagement between proponents and opponents of the reforms. Another reason this list caught my attention was its uncanny resem¬ blance to academic concerns of the last decade, which can be glossed un¬ der the “new materialist” category. This new materialist literature can be broadly understood as an academic rediscovery of the weight and effect of matter on its supposed own terms, before symbolic meaning. 1 When not re¬ citing their primary talking points—the state’s infringement on personal liberties, opposition to the expansion of the state apparatus and to new 113 LIST CHAPTER THREE taxes—the Libertarians crafted an astonishing image of the fluid form of water, a vision of processual nature in constant morphological transition. In a less-than-inspired lyrical moment in Congress, one of the Libertarian representatives told his audience, for example, that el agua se escapa de los dedos, como el agua en un canasto (water escapes your fingers, just like water in a basket). But this fluidity was tied to more than human fingers. Liber¬ tarians drew on the movement of water across creeks, clouds, the atmo¬ sphere, and underground to oppose the possibility of its fixation through the figure of public property. They attuned congressional politics to an un¬ usual heightened awareness of an expanded and fluid sense of materiality. 114 They literally wondered what water is, where its borders lie, and how it can be made discrete so that it can be owned. In addition to their material wonderings, something else made the Liber¬ tarian list and its effects intriguing. The congressional tactics Libertarians used interrupted the linear and forward-moving procedure that character¬ izes law-making imaginaries. Their list robbed participants in the legisla¬ tive process of a sense of righteous sequence leading to a future event, to a vote on the proposed amendment. Congressional representatives and ob¬ servers are aware that the legislative process is flawed and that representa¬ tive democracy often falls short of its promises, yet the radical disruption of process the Libertarians achieved effected a traumatic break. By inter¬ rupting the sequential order of conventional lawmaking procedures, its anticipated temporal and causal linearity, the Libertarians turned a highly ritualized legislative practice into, at best, a quasi-event. They recast it as an occurrence, the historical significance of which was up for grabs, despite seeming to have the direct effect of preventing a vote from occurring in the present. The next section narrates that procedural history. CONSTITUTIONAL REFORMS Since 2002, three legislative projects have been proposed to explicitly rec¬ ognize water as a human right and a public good. Each project had its own peculiar history, and yet they were all under the umbrella of a global hu¬ manitarian turn toward human rights as resources for national politics. As we have seen, during the first decade of the twenty-first century, water became a political concern not only for environmentalists, but also for pol¬ iticians and corporations. And yet, despite that momentum and the con¬ siderable international praise Costa Rica’s commitments to human rights continue to garner, these constitutional amendments have never been put up for a vote. Given their symbolic and interpretive weight, constitutional texts are difficult to change. In Latin America, the judicialization of politics that be¬ gan in the 1980s has resulted in a return to the constitution as a strategic site for the reimagination of life in collectivity. 2 What once were somewhat sacred and inert texts became sets of guiding principles for the elucidation of controversies that everyday people invoke. 3 Not surprisingly, given their impact on legal, economic, and social life, the standards for what counts as a good constitutional text also became the object of broad discussions lead¬ ing to many partial reforms or complete constitutional overhauls in Latin America at the end of the twentieth century. Legal scholars and practitioners consider a constitutional text to be of good quality if, among other things, it exhibits the right balance between generality and specificity. A constitutional text has to be general enough to encompass the imaginaries of the present and the future of the political ac¬ tors involved in its creation—congressional representatives, NGOs, career politicians, civil servants, judges, and some everyday citizens. And, at the same time, it has to be concrete enough so that people can recognize in it enough of a prescriptive program, a set of maxims to guide the fluid “iden¬ tity” of a collective. As a matter of good legislative technique (tecnica ju- ridica), constitutional experts argue for striking the right balance between those two contradictory demands: generality and specificity. In 2012, Cesar Hines, a public law professor at the University of Costa Ri¬ ca’s (ucr) law school, testified before the congressional committee study¬ ing one of the reforms that sought to recognize water as a public good. When a committee member asked Hines to “orient” them about the reform, he responded with an explication of good legislative technique: “The con¬ stitutional norm, due to its changing historic context, has to have an open texture, the constitution is a law that cannot be modified every now and then. ... It must have an open texture so that the legislators can adapt the ordinary laws to the historical context in which they are being developed” (September 24, 2012). At the same hearing, Manrique Jimenez, another constitutional scholar and also a professor at UCR, stated that, “In producing constitutional norms one has to avoid juridical tautologies, an unnecessary repetition of texts that might lead to confusion. The least room for interpretation a [constitutional] text offers the better it is because, regardless, there are LIST CHAPTER THREE always going to be many opportunities for interpretation and those op¬ portunities need to be narrowed. It is much better to speak of a right, as something that is in the text, consolidated toward the future, than speak¬ ing about something like a solidarity principle, which is too loose, too ro¬ mantic, more sociological than juridical.” Hines and Jimenez posed two competing demands for lawmakers. They asked congressional representatives to not be too romantic or sociological and to produce a text with sufficient precision. They also recommended that the constitutional text should have an open texture, leaving enough interpretive space so that it could adapt to the unexpected circumstances 116 of the future. Given the interpretive significance of a constitutional text, both in terms of the future and in terms of how it influences the application of any legal norm, it is not surprising that the procedure to modify the contents of the constitution is a complex one. In Costa Rica it requires all sorts of negotiations and alliances to guarantee the support of at least two-thirds of congressional members and to secure the approval of the executive branch. The steps include plenary discussions, committee approvals, vot¬ ing sessions requiring absolute and compound majorities, as well as mul¬ tiple “readings’” and discussions of the proposed text across at least two legislative years (May l-April 30). The set of procedures that guide constitutional amendments also have to embody important democratic principles. In Costa Rica those principles were translated into a procedural rule that puts no limit on the number of motions or revisions a diputado can request to the text of a proposed con¬ stitutional amendment. This opens the door for a type of procedural ob¬ structionism that is often used and that, in one memorable case, led to hun¬ dreds of motions to revise being presented to the press in a wheelbarrow. The first water-related constitutional amendment, which initiated this complicated procedural journey, was introduced in 2002. One of its lead sponsors was Quirico Jimenez, an internationally known dendrologist and conservationist. Most students at the universities where Quirico taught biodiversity conservation knew him well, as did park rangers and conserva¬ tion managers. He had widely disseminated his knowledge of Costa Rica’s trees and their relations within forests. Years of leading workshops, NGO seminars, and publishing scientific papers and popular education docu¬ ments had spread his name across a broad array of communities. Quirico had never been formally involved in electoral politics. But in 2002 he be- came a diputado with the Citizens Action Party, the first political group to break the long two-party control over national politics that followed the 1949 constitution. After his work in the Asamblea between 2002 and 2006, Quirico left electoral politics. He returned to his academic and conserva¬ tion activities, first working on environmental programs for a water utility and ultimately joining the National Institute of Biodiversity, an organiza¬ tion set up in the 1990s to catalogue all of Costa Rica’s plant and animal species in preparation for the dream of financing its conservation efforts through bioprospecting contracts with global pharmaceutical companies. The other congressional member who sponsored the amendment was Joyce Zurcher, a philosophy professor and mainstream politician from the National Liberation Party (the same party whose president abolished the army in 1949, as described in chapter 2, and one of the two parties that alternated control over Costa Rica’s electoral politics for nearly fifty years). For years, Joyce taught a required philosophy course for incoming students at the University of Costa Rica. Her subsequent political life also included the positions of national deputy ombudsman [sic] and mayor of the third largest city in the country, Alajuela. She belonged to the coun¬ try’s economic elite, and despite being at the center of a number of public controversies, Joyce was one of the first mainstream politicians outside of environmental institutions and NGOs to speak about sustainability, water conservation, and climate change. To date, she continues to be an active member of her political party. Joyce and Quirico, with the backing of NGOs, activists, and other repre¬ sentatives, decided that focusing on the property designation, and thereby reinforcing water’s character as a public good, was a more realistic and ef¬ fective strategy than simply declaring it a human right. They believed that if water was recognized in the constitution as a public good, activists and the state could resist its commodification and privatization more effec¬ tively. Following these political instincts, they worked to include text in the constitution to classify water as a bien demanial. A bien demanial is a legal classification used to denote a good whose existence and utilization must benefit the “common good.” In this type of property, what matters is whether a political community believes certain objects or institutions should be tied to “public and collective well-being,” as opposed to “private and individual profits.” In principle, this means that once an object or legal institution, like a public corporation, has been des¬ ignated a bien demanial it cannot be traded or transferred via regular com- 117 LIST CHAPTER THREE mercial transactions. If at some point the state considers that the common good would benefit from privatizing a bien demanial, it can follow a strict procedure to do so. This is what the process of privatization in the heyday of neoliberal reforms in Latin America consisted of. Utilities, television channels, transportation infrastructure, oil reserves, land, and factories were sold to private actors using this kind of legal reclassification. While the authority to lead this process can be deposited in the executive branch, in Costa Rica, only Congress has the authority to move a bien demanial into el comercio de los hombres [sic] (the realm of commerce of men). An extensive body of literature in policy studies, political science, and 118 economics, as well as in anthropology, geography, and cognate fields, has examined the configuration of public goods. Scholars have theorized their social lives from alter-globalization, anarchist, communist, community- based, and state-based perspectives (Bakker 2007; Hardin 1968; Olson 1971; Ostrom 1990; Wutich 2009). What is important for my discussion here, however, is that in legal doctrine the character of a public good is derived from its relational activation through sociomaterial patterns of activity, its significance for collective life as evaluated by congressional representatives. Inherited from a distinction that goes back to Roman law, public goods (bienes demaniales) stand in opposition to private goods (bienes patrimo- niales ); 4 the latter are goods that are available for private appropriation and regular commercial transactions. This distinction is one of the first classifications lawyers in Costa Rica learn when they begin their training. The distinction is also one that many non-legally trained people, includ¬ ing congressional representatives, feel comfortable attacking or defend¬ ing because it fits a vernacular sense of what the state should safeguard for its inhabitants and what it should refrain from intervening in. Joyce and Quirico’s purpose in working with that very fundamental distinction between bienes demaniales and bienes patrimoniales was to situate wa¬ ter in the very foundation of the legal imaginary. Making water a consti¬ tutional bien demanial was the kind of reform that, they thought, would impact all future legal interpretation. Without necessarily foreseeing its concrete consequences, the way a planner, an economist, or a soothsayer would, this measure would nevertheless inform any upcoming legal and policy measures. It would set an important precondition for the future. The reform would help activists and state officials openly defy any attempt at privatized commodification and would also create opportunities to rectify wrongs. But despite their commitment, they were not naive. They did not foresee a future devoid of water conflicts in the country, such as already existing struggles over scarcity in Guanacaste, pollution of aquifers in cit¬ ies, and pesticide contamination of rural community aqueducts (Ballestero 2019). In fact, the need for reform grew out of the rapid multiplication of those water conflicts in both urban and rural areas of Costa Rica. Given their limited power as diputados, all Joyce, Quirico, and their supporters could do was think about the legal conditions they could set up to help address the problems they saw growing but could not precisely solve. To achieve this objective, they focused their reform on Article 121 of Costa Rica’s constitution. The wording of the law and the placement of an article in a particular section of a legal text have important interpretive implications. Diputa¬ dos in Costa Rica are made aware of this by the nonpartisan congressional staff, who check whether proposed new laws fit with the general princi¬ ples of tecnica juridica (legal technique). Based on those principles, and the training they receive, diputados know that the text physically contiguous to a particular word shapes its legal meaning. This awareness of the impli¬ cations of the contiguity of words is enshrined in legal interpretation prin¬ ciples such as noscitur asociis, a Latin phrase that has been translated as “a word is known by its fellows” (Tiersma 2005: 121). This principle dictates that when the meaning of a word is unclear, its significance can be deter¬ mined by looking at the text that surrounds it—its neighboring words. Thus, the contents of an article in a statute or in a constitutional text can be seen as fellowships of words, contiguities that organize exclusions and distinctions in specific ways. Considering their awareness of the significance of word fellowships in the law, Joyce and Quirico’s selection of Article 121 was not inconsequen¬ tial. The article is a foundational piece of the division of power and checks and balances of the country’s democratic architecture. Article 121 trans¬ lates ideals of sovereignty into concrete functions, jurisdictions, and in¬ stitutions for Costa Rica’s legislative assembly. It states that Congress is responsible for passing and reforming laws, appointing magistrates, ap¬ proving international agreements, authorizing military troops or vessels to enter the country, suspending individual rights and civil liberties in cases of national emergency, and, among other responsibilities, decreeing the “alienation or application to public use” of the nation’s public goods, its bienes demaniales. 11 9 LIST CHAPTER THREE As I mentioned before, in Costa Rica the authority to convert a bien de- manial into something else, a bien patrimonial, is limited to Congress, al¬ though that authority has some gradations. Congress can reclassify most public goods by passing a regular law. There are a few bienes demaniales, however, that not even Congress has the authority to reclassify as private goods. Article 121 of Costa Rica’s constitution, the article Joyce and Quirico were targeting for their reform, lists the extremely select group of goods that are beyond congressional reach and can only be privatized by follow¬ ing the complex procedure of a constitutional reform—a process that takes many years to unfold. That group of select goods is buried in the text of 120 Article 121, an article that has grown too long for the taste of legal scholars and judges. There, we find three types of bienes demaniales: (1) all forms of hydropower; (2) coal, sources and deposits of petroleum, along with any hydrocarbons or radioactive minerals; and (3) railways, ports, and airports. If there is any secular way for the state to establish an inalienable pos¬ session, the type of “transcendent treasure to be guarded against all the exigencies that might force its loss” (Weiner 1992: 33), Article 121 is what this looks like. Joyce and Quirico wanted this group of inalienable goods in Article 121 to include water itself. If successful, their reform would prevent water from being moved outside of state control except by a constitutional reform; water would become one of the state’s few inalienable possessions. Once the amendment began its procedural life, its proponents assumed it would sail through the rest of the process. With their optimism, Quirico, Joyce, and all of the NGos, politicians, and academics that supported them took for granted two things. First, they assumed that “water” was a self- explanatory category. They presumed that anybody could understand, without need of clarification, that stating that water is a public good ap¬ plied to large bodies of water such as rivers, lakes, and aquifers. They did not think it necessary to dwell on the exact meaning of the word water. After all, hydropower and petroleum deposits were also ambiguous cate¬ gories; their ratios of generality to specificity—openness to precision as Hines and Jimenez explained—could not be easily evaluated. Thinking with Costa Rican legal scholars, we could ask about these categories: Are they too romantic? Too sociological? Closed enough? And yet those kinds of ambiguous categories were already in Article 121. Their second miscal¬ culation was assuming that because many specific laws and jurisprudential sources already recognized water as a public good, the reform would not encounter any significant opposition. HAY DIPUTADOS QUE TIEN"""*" EL Mil EMBOTEL 121 Un reducido grupo de dipulados no peimile que se discuta en democracia la refonria const'rtucional que declara el agua como un bien de dominio publico iPor que un pequeno grupo de diputados nos niega el derecho humano al ague? iPor qu 6 una minon'a le cieira el tubo a la vida? En la Asamblea Legislativa hay ademAs dos propuestas de ley que buscan garantizar el derecho al agua en la cantidad y calidad que necesitamos para vivir sanamente, pero no avanzan porque esle grupito no lo permits Llogd la horn do que I03 roprosentantes del pueblo decidan a lavor de la vida *9 voces nuesTros «*