Can the human right to water disrupt neoliberal water policies in the era of corporate policy-making?

This article contributes to the academic debate surrounding the use of the human right to water in campaigns against neoliberal water policy. It examines overlaps between human rights discourse and corporate discourses aimed at legitimizing accumulation by dispossession through content analysis and critical discourse analysis (CDA) of the policy documents published by the 2030 Water Resources Group, a powerful corporate policy consortium spearheaded by the World Bank's International Finance Corporation (IFC), Nestle, Coca-Cola and other multinational corporations. It argues that in contexts of fierce competition over freshwater supplies, human rights mechanisms have the potential to disrupt the role of the neoliberal state in facilitating strategies of accumulation by dispossession by holding it accountable to the role of duty-bearer.