Escaping the Capitalist Black Hole: dethroning Mammon and liberating water

Colonial legacies and neoliberal capitalism continue to underpin and intensify global water insecurity. Drawing on five years of research from the UK-funded Water Security and Sustainable Development Hub across Colombia, Ethiopia, India and Malaysia, this Research Note identifies consistent patterns of water dispossession linked to capital accumulation. Despite divergent local contexts, our findings point to a common dynamic: a ‘Capitalist Black Hole’ that draws water towards profit-driven activities through the actions of both global and local elites. We conceptualise this black hole not as a neutral or natural system but as one animated by ideology and agency. We use this metaphor to illuminate how entrenched systems of greed and wealth accumulation – what we term the throne of Mammon, the symbolic ‘ruler’ of this black hole – operate through Western-centric political and ideological frameworks that commodify water, prioritise growth and capital over equity and nature, and marginalise alternative knowledges. Here, ‘Mammon’ personifies the worship of capital and the moral–cultural logic that sustains the black hole’s gravitational pull. We argue that under current geopolitical and economic conditions, existing institutional structures are structurally inadequate to achieve just and sustainable water futures. Transformative responses must directly confront the deep-rooted power structures that govern global water security.