Grace Wright-Arora, University of Oxford
This article provides sociopolitical context for the in-progress 2025 Antipode Foundation Right to the Discipline research project “Critical Cartographies of Women’s Resistances to Urban Water Financialisation in Mexico City”, a collaborative project between academics and activists in Mexico, the UK, and Spain, which will investigate how women self-organise alternative water infrastructures in urban areas impacted by water financialisation projects.
Introduction
Only 58% of the Mexican population have daily access to running water, and this rises to around 70% in Mexico City. Despite close to 100% access to piped water for citizens in (formal) housing, the consistent reliability of water for citizens in certain poorer boroughs is dire. When the piped water system fails, citizens often buy expensive water from private water truck delivery companies, and collect rainwater to use for washing, further entrenching economic inequalities across the urban fabric. The historically intermittent and fragile water supply has worsened in recent years, to the extent that authorities fear a “Day Zero” where the whole 22-million-person city will run out of running water. This essay draws on ongoing field research to investigate how climate finance is reshaping water governance in Mexico City through its public-private water fund Agua Capital, and the consequences this has for corporate accountability and equitable water access.
Agua Capital
Agua Capital is the “Water Fund for Mexico City” that operates throughout the Valley of Mexico (see https://aguacapital.net/#donde_opera). It is a public-private partnership set up in 2015, that began operating in 2018 as one of 32 water funds created across Latin America as part of the Latin American Water Funds Partnership. This Partnership is a multi-stakeholder initiative, between the Interamerican Development Bank, Fundacion FEMSA, the Nature Conservancy, the Global Environment Facility, and the International Climate Initiative. Agua Capital’s aim is to provide water security for Mexico City, mobilising public and private capital to use largely for “blue infrastructures” such as rainwater catchment and soil infiltration of water to recharge overexploited aquifers. According to public materials, this fund alone aimed to mobilise $270 million over a five-year period, hoping to attract donations from various actors in the Mexican government, as well as international private investors. The stated mission of Agua Capital is “to contribute to the water security of the Valley of Mexico through actions based on knowledge and science with an emphasis on Nature-Based Solutions”, and they state on their Facebook page to be a non-partisan, independent and collaborative organization.
Water funds are framed as attractive for climate finance investment in both the public and private sector, because they involve infrastructural investment that often has relatively clear and profitable returns. As the Mexico City Water Fund Strategic Plan from 2018 states, the fund aims to “make a sound case for investment that is attractive to and targeted at different financial audiences”. The plan outlines an intention to demonstrate to stakeholders that the fund will be “a good investment as interventions and other initiatives have specific value propositions”, including targeting what they term “quick win Projects” in the first years.
According to publicly available materials, Agua Capital is funded by a mix of private, non-governmental and governmental actors including a key partnership with Fundacion FEMSA. This is the social impact foundation part of the FEMSA corporation—the Mexican multinational which runs both the largest Coca-Cola bottling group in the world, and OXXO, the corner shop ubiquitous in Mexico. According to field research and interviews with water justice activists in the Valley of Mexico area, FEMSA has been associated with water aquifer overexploitation in rural areas in the Valley of Mexico. During field research for this investigation, activists spoke about their concerns to publicly speak out against the organisation because of its powerful influence in the nation’s water economy. The company has also previously been connected to water pollution in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas. These claims raise questions about Fundacion FEMSA’s funding of Agua Capital, if the multinational is enmeshed with Mexican water politics. Taken together, interviews and publicly available data for this investigation warrant further investigation into the governance structure of Agua Capital.
Financial Opacity
Despite the publicly available plan for Mexico City’s Water Fund, dated from 2018, which declares the fund’s aim to mobilise $270 million between 2018 and 2023 to develop water security for the region, there is minimal information available online documenting what funding was eventually obtained, from which donors, or who contributed what amount. Press releases from Fundacion FEMSA, Procter & Gamble, and Water Action Hub, suggest that partnerships continue at least between FEMSA, P&G, and Orbia, but the details of what these entail remain publicly unavailable. Opacity in financial reporting is common, and does not necessarily indicate illegality, including for NGOs or multi-stakeholder partnerships which are not bound by the same transparency laws as the government. While the Mexican state has taken steps to increase transparency, particularly for the use of public funds, by setting up the National Transparency Platform for Mexico (the PNT) in 2015, different laws exist for public, corporate, foundation, and non-governmental funding disclosures. Multi-stakeholder partnerships like Agua Capital fall between the clearer public and private accountability regimes that are starting to emerge in Mexico. Government contracts, when they are publicly available, are not necessarily under the fund’s name or anything similar, and while FEMSA publishes its annual accounts, these do not have to state exact amounts invested in particular initiatives.
As a result, tracing the donations, investments and outputs and impacts for a fund like Agua Capital, which connects national and international governmental, corporate, and philanthropic actors, is slippery. For a fund attempting to both finance and govern the current water apocalypse that Mexico City is facing with $300 million, this lack of transparency raises accountability concerns, beyond the fund’s links to FEMSA and Coca-Cola. Agua Capital is gaining an increasingly high reputation in the water financing sphere, and so being able to publicly track their investments, donations, and supposed successes is crucial.
At present, it remains unclear how to verify claims made by Agua Capital about their project investments and outcomes. On their website and Instagram, for example, it states that their projects have led to 95 rainwater catchment systems in schools, benefitting 36,339 students. Their Instagram post about these “tangible impacts” gives the source as “Informe Anual Agua Capital 2024 — Páginas 7, 10 y 13”, yet trawling their website, and the internet, including by using Boolean searches, reveals no publicly available document with this name or anything similar.
As part of this research, staff at Agua Capital were repeatedly contacted, including the executive director Eduardo Vázquez both in person and via email, all of whom declined to comment. One of the most striking findings from this investigation so far has been the lack of both public transparency and corporate accountability for a fund which appears to be managing hundreds of millions of dollars in the name of public interest. The current governance model for water financialisation is suggestive of a dispersed authority between different actors while providing scant public access to financial or evaluative documentation, leaving only the most faint traces in its wake. While this does not indicate malpractice, it may speak to a wider issue about transparency in climate finance, which is increasingly becoming an investment priority for international institutions including the World Bank, the UN, and the European Union.
The Protection of Data and Knowledge
One water rights activist interviewed as part of this research, Andres (not his real name), suggested that the lack of financial and governance transparency within water governance in Mexico City could go beyond that of multi-stakeholder partnerships. He recounted his masters research at a local university, where he investigated inequalities in water use in marginalised areas of the city. Andres told me that when he requested information on water use by real-estate developers in Mexico City under Mexico’s Freedom of Information Act, the government refused to share the information with him on the basis of data protection laws – the data protection of the real estate development organisations themselves, that is.
When this is considered in conjunction with the dominant narrative put forward by both Agua Capital and the municipal government, something also echoed by government officials in 1-to-1 interviews, that Mexican citizens need to change their “water culture”, it raises questions about the dominance of blaming individual responsibility vs. structural forces for water scarcity in the city. It particularly constructs an image of a situation in which corporate protection may be seen as equally as, or more important than, equitable access to running water in what is already a highly economically and socially unequal city.
This picture of highly guarded water governance becomes even murkier when considering the entanglement of the government and Agua Capital not only with international non-governmental organizations and multinational corporations such as FEMSA, but also with academic institutions. Researchers and academics interviewed as part of this investigation described a situation where their ability to critique increasing privatisation and financialisation of the water system is limited by where their institutions’ funding comes from. This is not uncommon in academic and non-academic research institutions, but it does paint a picture of a narrowing political landscape in Mexico City where water financialisation is increasingly becoming seen as the best “solution” to the city’s water crisis. A similar concern about academia was brought up by Andres’ activist organization, which states on its website a strong scepticism of research coming out of UNAM (the National Autonomous University of Mexico)’s Water Network (Red del Agua) because of its ties to Agua Capital, specifically taking issue with who the partnership is funded by. Jorge Arriaga, the executive coordinator of UNAM’s Water Network, also declined to comment when contacted for this research.
These findings are suggestive of a water governance system that, with the increasing investment of climate finance, connects multiple national and international actors, yet exactly how this plays out in financial and decision-making terms, remains difficult to understand for the public. This, in turn, makes responsibility hard to attribute and financial flows hard to track. In a climate where increasing global capital is flowing towards adaptation and mitigation, and water is becoming an increasingly politicised resource, scrutiny of funding sources and of decision-making power is of increasing public importance yet appears to remain elusive.
Conclusion
This research into climate financing of the water crisis in Mexico City has raised questions about the entanglement of public, private, and philanthropic involvement in water financialisation. Funds like Agua Capital are currently hard to publicly scrutinise as they sit in a more “grey” regulatory area, between corporate and public transparency mechanisms in place in Mexico. The accountability for such funds thus remains, at present, fragmented. In light of the preliminary findings of this investigation, to further understand the impacts of the financialisation of water scarcity, this Right to the Discipline project turns its focus to the feminization of water scarcity and how this interacts with the “blue infrastructure” investments in nature-based solutions that Agua Capital supports. We intend to conduct research using radical mapping techniques with citizens directly implicated by water financialisation in Mexico City, with the aim of deepening the currently limited understanding of how climate finance projects impact citizens affected by the often highly stratified intermittent water supply.
As this present research highlights, climate financing of water scarcity in Mexico City currently often follows a financialised model which allows disperse corporate actors, including those which appear to depend heavily on water extraction, to play a key role in shaping water decision-making in the city. With the help of the Right to the Discipline grant, we hope to shed light on the often female-led alternative models of water governance that exist in Mexico City that challenge the opaque systems which often dominate in the present day.