Access Denied: A Critical Review of Water Service Shutoffs Under Financialized Capitalism

The denial of household access to running water through service shutoffs is a common practice among water providers, yet the scope and nature of the problem remain poorly understood. This article presents results of the first scoping review and critical analysis of peer‐reviewed research on water shutoffs at the global scale, with the goal of identifying key trends, gaps, and insights across the literature. The results indicate a striking concentration of research emerging from the discipline of geography and based on research in the USA—notably Detroit, Michigan. Drawing on thematic and critical discourse analysis, we identify three primary ways that scholars have understood water shutoffs: (1) as mechanisms for enforcing debt‐driven governance; (2) as technologies of racialization and social discipline; and (3) as sites of social organization and struggle. We argue for new research efforts that examine the production and persistence of water shutoffs in a wider range of geographic settings, and we insist that the problem must be understood within the context of financialized capitalism and its predatory reliance on household social reproduction—in effect, shutoffs produce a new waterless class. We conclude by outlining key priorities of a new research agenda, including the intersection of water shutoffs with health, housing, and climate change, and note the impossibility of achieving universal access to water (SDG 6) without reckoning with utility shutoffs. Ending water shutoffs, we argue, requires new models of infrastructure financing and governance combined with an institutionalized commitment to the human right to water. This article is categorized under: Human Water > Water Governance Human Water > Rights to Water