Nestlé and the Global Water Governance Arena

Abstract: The future of global water supply and availability is one of the most important questions facing life on earth today, and experts agree that the most pressing angle to approach the question from is its governance. However, water represents one of the worlds broadest and most complex fields of governance due to its cross thematic and cross-boundary reach, as well as an increase in new actors through privatisation and transnational corporate influence.  In order to actively implement new governance approaches the current system, its actors, connections and influence strategies must be identified. This study combines three theoretical and methodological approaches to study our current global water governance structure: Neo-Gramscian, Network analysis and Policy Entrepreneurship. The Neo-Gramscian influence theory is used to identify 3 types of connections between actors. The resulting data is then used for network analysis to identify the key actors within the field. Once these key actors have been identified, all Nestlé (as a case study for transnational corporations) connections to said actors and the field of water governance have been highlighted under the combined theoretical lenses of Neo-Gramscian influence and Policy Entrepreneurial strategies. These three theories are used in conjunction for several reasons: All three theories represent a different perspective of analysing the decentralised, large scale governance of a complex system. While network analysis allows for the visual representation of the governance “space” and for the identification of key actors and their connections, the Neo-Gramscian and policy entrepreneur approaches give insight into how these connections might be used and created in order to lead to a position of influence within the system. The results show a list of 42 key actors to whom Nestlé has a large number of self-reported connections across all 3 influence types. It further shows that Nestle actively uses at least 3 of the 4 entrepreneurial strategies on some of these connections. This suggests that Nestlé may have some significant influence in global water governance. The study is also a proof of concept for the synthesis of the three complementary theories.