Privatizing Water

Governance Failure and the World's Urban Water Crisis

Karen Bakker

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780801447235
• eBook ISBN: 9780801467004
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Ecology
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Water supply privatization was emblematic of the neoliberal turn in development policy in the 1990s. Proponents argued that the private sector could provide better services at lower costs than governments; opponents questioned the risks involved in delegating control over a life-sustaining resource to for-profit companies. Private-sector activity was most concentrated—and contested—in large cities in developing countries, where the widespread lack of access to networked water supplies was characterized as a global crisis.

In Privatizing Water, Karen Bakker focuses on three questions: Why did privatization emerge as a preferred alternative for managing urban water supply? Can privatization fulfill its proponents' expectations, particularly with respect to water supply to the urban poor? And, given the apparent shortcomings of both privatization and conventional approaches to government provision, what are the alternatives? In answering these questions, Bakker engages with broader debates over the role of the private sector in development, the role of urban communities in the provision of "public" services, and the governance of public goods. She introduces the concept of "governance failure" as a means of exploring the limitations facing both private companies and governments.

Critically examining a range of issues—including the transnational struggle over the human right to water, the "commons" as a water-supply-management strategy, and the environmental dimensions of water privatization—Privatizing Water is a balanced exploration of a critical issue that affects billions of people around the world.

I DEVELOPMENT, URBANIZATION, AND THE GOVERNANCE OF THIRST

1 GOVERNANCE FAILURE

REFRAMING THE URBAN WATER SUPPLY CRISIS

Consider the following story of three neighbors on the outskirts of one of the world’s megacities. It suggests that concepts like “public” and “private” are of little use in describing the reality of the daily struggle for water supply in much of the world. It also suggests that communities play an important role in the complicated web of relationships that mediate water supply access in cities.

Ani lives in a gated community, with a direct road connection to the highway that runs into the center of the city. Like her neighbors, she used to be connected to the municipal water supply system. But then she became frustrated by frequent cut-offs, low pressure, and the sometimes murky, smelly water. Several of her neighbors bought expensive booster pumps, but these helped only a little. So last year, her neighbors decided to create their own water cooperative and they drilled a series of deep wells. This was expensive, but the water is free and so plentiful that Ani has recently installed an imported whirlpool bathtub and plans on building a swimming pool in her backyard. Bottled water from a local company that taps several springs in the hills above the city (much to the distress of local farmers, who are thus deprived of their customary water sources) satisfies the family’s daily drinking water needs. For guests, and as a special treat, Ani buys mineral water imported from Europe.

Mira lives in a small house along the busy main road that passes by the gates of Ani’s neighborhood. Her family has converted the front of their home into a shop that sells snacks, cigarettes, and bottled drinks to passing drivers. She considers herself lucky to have a connection to the municipal water supply network, which few of her neighbors have. But she has experienced the same water problems as Ani. So although Mira uses tap water for washing dishes and doing laundry, every few days she buys bottled water for drinking. This requires strapping twenty-liter water jugs onto the back of the family scooter and driving to the private microtreatment plant that opened a couple of years ago down the road, where she waits in line for her turn at refills. Mira knows that the plant is unregulated, and she worries about the quality of the bottled water she buys, but since her husband lost his job during the last economic crisis, “local” bottled water is all her family can afford.

For additional income, Mira regularly fills water bottles from her kitchen tap and sells them to her poorer neighbors. Water runs for only a few hours a day, so the tap is left constantly open; when the water starts flowing, she rushes to fill buckets and other containers as quickly as possible, day or night. Mira charges her neighbors double the rate she pays, which is still much cheaper than “factory-made” bottled water. It is usually the local women who collect the water, some bringing empty plastic bottles they have scavenged from the nearby dump.

Alia is one of Mira’s regular customers. With her family, Alia lives in a small, self-built shack, illegally occupying the thin strip of land between Mira’s house and the river, one of the main sources for the city’s water supply network. As the city’s sewerage system does not extend to the neighborhood, and few houses have septic systems, the river functions as an open sewer. The most impoverished households scavenge wood scraps to construct “helicopter toilets” over the water to provide themselves with a bare minimum of privacy and comfort. Downstream, the water is so polluted that local farmers have had to stop using it. And the neighborhood’s groundwater is predictably polluted. Nonetheless, Alia uses her family’s shallow hand-dug well for washing and bathing water, as she can not afford to buy bottled water for all of their household needs.

When the dry season comes, or when Mira has no more tap water to sell (which happens often), Alia pays a water vendor to deliver water to her house. The vendor fills twenty-liter jugs at the nearest functioning public tap, which is over a mile away. He then delivers the jugs in a wheelbarrow. The drier the weather, the higher the prices demanded by the local “chief” in charge of the ostensibly public tap, and the more expensive the water. At the height of the dry season, Alia pays up to ten times more per liter than Mira pays for her tap water. This year, Alia’s husband installed a small cistern on the roof, in hopes that the rainwater they gather will help them reduce their water bills, which sometimes take up to one quarter of their family income. Many of Alia’s neighbors have recently installed illegal connections to the nearby municipal water pipe (the cause of the low pressure in the network), but Alia refuses to do so, because she is worried about being evicted by government inspectors.

No one expects that the situation will change any time soon. Government promises made over the years have not been kept. The recent transfer of the management of the municipal water supply system to a private water company, the source of much protest, has yet to have any impact. Ani has noticed that the local, name-brand bottled water that she buys has recently become more expensive, but doesn’t know why. In fact, the water bottling company, under recent government reforms that created a series of regional water markets, has now started purchasing water “rights” from local farmers in the watersheds surrounding the city. Ironically, it and other private bottled water companies outbid the city’s water supply department. Because it can’t afford to access other, new water supplies (which are far away and much more expensive), the government has put plans to expand the city’s water supply system on hold indefinitely.

The story of the three big-city neighbors mirrors the daily reality of many urban residents around the world. Both rich and poor households, on any given day, use several different types of water: groundwater for bathing, bottled water for drinking, and rainwater for washing laundry. They interact with a range of different water providers: the municipal water supply network, the tanker-truck driver, the local water vendor, and the bottled water seller. And they use a variety of supply technologies, from highly industrialized to artisanal: individual household wells or rainwater collection systems, reticulated water networks, water pumps, gravity-fed roof tanks. Acquiring water is a complex and time-consuming task, and it requires intimate knowledge of the political ecology of the city’s water: where it flows at different times of year, how much it costs and how those costs vary, how trustworthy different suppliers are, and how much water quality varies across time and space. This bears little resemblance to the “flush and forget” experience that many wealthy urban residents take for granted, predicated on a uniform, standardized, universal model of networked water supply provision that citizens of lower- and middle-income countries are presumed to aspire to.

As this suggests, the terms “informal” and “unserviced” are unhelpfully imprecise. Similarly, the term “network,” and the interconnectedness it evokes, is a poor descriptor of water supply systems in many cities. Government networks, if they exist, are limited in extent. Government and private networks coexist and compete with informal types of provision. So definitions of “public” and “private” are more complicated than we often realize, and this complexity is associated with the diverse types of technologies used for supplying water.

How can we explain this fragmentation, at the level of both the network (which weaves its way unevenly through communities) and the individual household (which relies on multiple types of water supplies)? What are its causes and its impacts? What does it suggest about the experience of modernity and urbanization? These questions are of direct relevance to the water privatization debate because both the private and public sectors are frequently blamed for the failure to achieve an integrated network. In subsequent chapters, I will return to a case study of patterns of fragmentation and the different processes of exclusion that create them. Meanwhile, in this chapter I want to set the stage for the analysis through an exploration of the multiple ways in which we govern urban water.

What follows below is a simple framework that describes the governance of urban water, on the one hand, and the technological approaches used to supply water, on the other. I identify three models of water management that exist in contemporary cities—private, state, and community-run—and explore how they overlap and interact with one another. As a means of introducing a conceptual framework for analyzing exclusion from access to public services, I discuss these models with respect to concepts of market failure, state failure, and governance failure. I argue that all of these failures—market, state, and governance—affect the provision of urban water supply and play a role in creating the contemporary urban water crisis. In subsequent chapters, I elaborate on these points, and trace the emergence and outcomes of these models; here, my discussion is more abstract and focuses on the mechanisms and pathways by which exclusion from urban services occurs, mediated by governments, private actors, and communities.

URBAN WATERSCAPES: NETWORKS VERSUS ARCHIPELAGOS

Understanding the diversity of types of urban water provision begins with the recognition that multiple modes of water supply coexist in many cities. For example, private and government provision coexist. Government networks circulate through the city, but private companies supply bottled water, and private water vendors deliver water (often taken from the public network) to people’s homes. Similarly, industrial and artisanal modes of production coexist in many cities. Many households will use, for example, rainwater, private wells, and networked water supply, sometimes simultaneously.

In many cities, then, water supply networks do not operate homogeneously over the urban landscape. Rather, they overlap with what policymakers term “alternative service delivery mechanisms” or “small-scale independent providers.” In this sense, the metaphor of the archipelago—spatially separated but linked “islands” of networked supply in the urban fabric—is more accurate than the term “network.” The distribution of this archipelago, as we shall see in subsequent chapters, is highly correlated with household income. Only a minority of urban residents in developing countries will have access to a networked water-supply connection within the home, and many of these residents will not rely exclusively on the network for all of their water supply needs. In nearly all cases, the local government typically fails to extend public services to socioeconomically marginal areas of the city. There, water pipes are thinly scattered and in many areas are completely absent. Poor neighborhoods are less likely to have water mains, and there is much less distribution (or “tertiary” pipes) even where primary mains are present. The sight of a large water main running through a poor community in which the adjacent homes do not have household or even neighborhood outlets is not unusual.

“Splintered” Urban Networks

Why is this fragmentation of urban water supply networks so persistent in cities in developing countries? This question presupposes a certain ideal: that of universal networks. When compared against this ideal, the provision of public services (water, electricity, telephones, etc.) in many cities is indeed fragmented. A casual observer might assume that this fragmentation is an aberrant and perhaps recent phenomenon. To cite an influential example, Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin argue in Splintering Urbanism that over the past two decades cities have suffered from a fragmentation of access, control, and pricing of network infrastructure, including water supply.1 This “splintering,” they assert, has occurred along with the restructuring of utility networks, embedded in wider changes in aid and financial flows, technological innovation, social attitudes, and governance—particularly the reconfiguration of citizens’ entitlements in light of new understandings of the appropriate role of the state in services provision.

Graham and Marvin conclude that this fragmentation is due to political economic processes—such as neoliberalism—that have changed the way cities are governed and services provided. Their analysis is representative of much conventional thinking about cities and public services, which holds that cities are splintering because of macroeconomic and political trends, such as high levels of debt, that reduce the fiscal capacity of the state to provide and extend government services. According to this view, these trends create the ideal conditions for “vulture capitalists” (in our case, private water companies from the North) to aggressively seek out new markets.

The counterargument, which dominated the discourse of mainstream development organizations in the 1990s, is the assertion that poor government management is the cause of fragmentation. Lack of incentives for efficient management, self-interested behavior on the part of politicians and workers (“rent seeking”), corruption, underinvestment, and a lack of necessary expertise are frequently offered as reasons for the poor performance of government-run water supply systems. The latter arguments have had the upper hand in international debates within the development community for the past two decades.

Networks as “Elite Archipelagos”

In both sets of arguments, the modernist ideal of large technical systems and integrated networks holds...

Table of contents

• Figures and Tables
• Preface
• Abbreviations and Acronyms
• Defining “Privatization”: A Note on Terminology
• Introduction
• Part I. Development, Urbanization, and the Governance of Thirst
• Part II. Beyond Privatization
• Conclusion
• Notes
• References