Making Public in a Privatized World: The Struggle for Essential Services 9781350221239, 9781783604838, 9781783604821, 9781783604852

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FIGURE S A ND T A B LES

Figures 5.1 CEGSS community monitoring system, 2008–2011 . . . . . . . . . . 89 8.1 Distribution of health units between the public and private sectors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 134 Tables 1.1 Normative criteria for evaluating the publicness of a service provider . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.1 Key roles of CEGSS partners. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.1 ‘Willingness to pay’ for legal electricity services . . . . . . . 11.1 Estimated technical potential for renewable energy across sub-Saharan Africa . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11.2 Different ownership models for mini-hydro projects in Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Malawi . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12.1 Public commercial banks in the early Turkish Republic . . . 13.1 Reasons for contracting back in. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13.2 Matrix of service delivery dynamics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13.3 Composition of US government contracting by type and contract partner . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14.1 Public investment (executed) by economic sector. . . . . . 14.2 Access to water and sanitation in Bolivia . . . . . . . . . . .

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ACK N OW L E D G EM EN T S

All books are a product of many people’s labour but this one deserves particular thanks to Madeleine Bélanger Dumontier, the project manager of the Municipal Services Project (MSP). Madeleine was the central organizer of the MSP conference that served as the basis for this collection – ‘Putting Public in Public Services: Research, Action and Equity in the Global South’, held in Cape Town 13–16 April 2014 – featuring 59 speakers from 22 countries and more than 150 participants. She was involved in decisions around the selection and organization of papers for the volume, provided indispensable editorial support, and was a lead writer and researcher on one of the chapters. One could not ask for a more accomplished and effective co-worker. Of course, it would not be a collection without all of the other contributors as well, and strong thanks also go out to them, all of whom share a commitment not only to the academic enterprise but to the realization of actual change on the ground in terms of what we want from our public services. It is this kind of conscious commitment to scholarly activism that keeps me interested in academic research, and has been a hallmark of all my colleagues at the MSP over the years. I would also like to thank Ken Barlow at Zed Books who has been a supportive and thoughtful liaison, and to the anonymous peer reviewers. Finally, I would like to acknowledge the invaluable financial support of the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) of Canada, which has been the MSP’s central funder for this and many other research initiatives, and especially the long-standing support of Qamar Mahmood and Sharmila Mhatre.

ABB RE VI A T I O N S A N D A C R O N Y MS

Acuavalle SA

AEC ANC ARB BDT CBO CEGSS

CLTS COSATU CVC

DSK DWASA EPM FBO ICMA INR IPP KKPKP MAS MHT

Sociedad de Acueductos y Alcantarillados del Valle del Cauca (Aqueduct and Sewerage Enterprise of Valle del Cauca, Colombia) Ahmedabad Electricity Company (India) African National Congress (South Africa) Asociación de Recicladores de Bogotá (Association of Bogota Recyclers, Colombia) Bangladeshi taka community-based organization Centro de Estudios para la Equidad y Gobernanza en los Sistemas de Salud (Research Centre for Equity and Governance in Health Systems, Guatemala) Community-Led Total Sanitation Congress of South African Trade Unions Corporación Autonoma Regional del Valle del Cauca (Autonomous Corporation of the Cauca Valley Region, Colombia) Dushtha Shasthya Kendra (Bangladesh) Dhaka Water Supply and Sewerage Authority (Bangladesh) Empresas Públicas de Medellín (Public Enterprises of Medellín, Colombia) faith-based organization International City/County Management Association Indian rupee independent power producer Kagad Kach Patra Kashtakari Panchayat (Trade Union of Waste Pickers and Itinerant Buyers, Pune, India) Movimiento al Socialismo (Movement toward Socialism, Bolivia) Mahila Housing SEWA Trust (Gujarat, India)

x | abbreviations and ac ronyms

MNCR

Movimento Nacional dos Catadores de Materiais Recicláveis (National Movement of Collectors of Recyclable Materials, Brazil) NUMSA National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa PAR participatory action-research PuP public–public partnership ROA returns on assets SACP South African Communist Party SAMWU South African Municipal Workers’ Union SDCEA South Durban Community Environmental Alliance (South Africa) SENASBA Servicio Nacional para la Sostenabilidad de Servicios en Saneamiento Básico (National Service for the Sustainability of Sanitation Services, Bolivia) SEWA Self-Employed Women’s Association (India) Sintracuavalle Sindicato de Trabajadores de Acuavalle (Workers’ Union of Acuavalle, Colombia) Sintrambiente Sindicato de Trabajadores del Sistema Nacional Ambiental (Workers’ Union of the National Environmental System, Colombia) SME small and medium enterprise SWaCH Solid Waste Collection and Handling Cooperative (Pune, India) TRY Turkish lira UCMB Uganda Catholic Medical Bureau UDF United Democratic Front (South Africa) UGX Ugandan shilling UMMB Uganda Muslim Medical Bureau UPMB Uganda Protestant Medical Bureau

1 | I N TROD U C T I O N : T H E W O N D E RFUL WORLD S OF M A K I N G P UB L I C David A. McDonald

What is a public? It is a curiously obscure question, considering that few things have been more important in the development of modernity. Michael Warner (2002, 49)

After more than three decades of privatization, the world has begun to see a revival of public provision of essential services such as water, energy and healthcare (Chavez and Torres 2014; Clò et al. 2013; Florio 2013; Wollmann 2011). The reasons for this trend are as varied as the people and places involved, and much work remains to be done in coming to grips with the complexity and diversity of what is happening on the ground. This book is an attempt to advance our understanding of presentday efforts to (re)make public services, through case studies and an effort to conceptualize what bonds them together. With a focus on countries in the South, and a broad cross-section of actors and sectors, the chapters range from Colombia to Uganda, from bureaucrats to trade unionists, and from waste management to electricity. The people and institutions surveyed here represent a mere fraction of a much larger international reality, but they exemplify the varied – if tensionladen – ways in which essential public services are being (re)construed and (re)constructed around the world. In some cases these initiatives are a response to failed privatization. In others they are a reaction to weak or non-existent state-delivered services. Some are about latent possibilities awaiting realization. In all cases, the chapters go beyond a mere critique of what is wrong with privatization to an assessment of what constitutes ‘good’ services, how people ‘make’ them in the face of ongoing neoliberalization, and what it means to be ‘public’. Although it is important to keep a close eye on the ever-shifting nature of private sector engagement in service

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provision, fulfilling the promise of building alternatives requires more than just criticism. Following Ferguson (2009, 167), the chapters in this book ask what happens if politics is not just about ‘expressing indignation or denouncing the powerful? What if it is, instead, about getting what you want? Then we progressives must ask: what do we want? This is a quite different question (and a far more difficult question) than: what are we against?’ What do we want? There are no easy answers to this query, and the examples in this book serve to demonstrate just how far we are from a coherent, collective response to what constitutes a good public service. Some chapters highlight the potential of revitalizing state resources while others focus on the need to build capacity among quasi-public, nonstate actors. Some authors are universalistic in their approach while others emphasize the context-specific nature of change. In some cases the outcomes are the result of long-term, high-profile struggles for a different world view, while in others they are more pragmatic – even accidental. Often they represent little more than people scrambling for something better than the private enclosures they find themselves in, but these too can represent seeds of a new public imagination. It is these commonplace expressions of public service reform that constitute the majority of cases in this book, and arguably the bulk of pro-public-service movements in the world today. They are not always as dramatic as one might expect from such a highly politicized topic, but they reveal the daily grind of making change, and the nerve-wracking ups and downs of progress. From indigenous communities holding states accountable for better public health services in rural Guatemala, to locally controlled solar electricity in Kenya, to incorporating informal reclaimers into a public waste management system in India, the cases shine light on the complex, often incongruous and always interesting ways in which people are building actually existing alternatives to privatization. The case studies also help shake up conventional understandings of our landscapes of choice. Many anti-privatization movements have called for state ownership and management of services as a response to the ills of privatization. But what happens when the state does not act in the broader public interest (Budds and McGranahan 2003; Cumbers

mcdonal d | 3 2012; Grugel and Riggirozzi 2012)? Although states have extended water, healthcare and other important public services to vast swathes of the world’s population (at various levels), they have never been as universal or equitable as sometimes claimed. Many have been topdown, paternalistic systems that could not adequately accommodate for diversity, often intended to address the crises of capital accumulation (via the extension of a commodified mass consumption society) as opposed to any moral commitment to universal access (EspingAnderson 1990; Offe 1972). Better resources for strong and more accountable state services should be fought for where appropriate, but we must not wax nostalgic about public management models that have at times been exclusionary, opaque and blindly productivist in their orientation (Newman and Clarke 2009). As Ferguson (2009, 169) notes in the African context, ‘calls for reinstating old-style developmental states … are understandable in the wake of neoliberal restructuring … but I am skeptical that this is an adequate response – partly because the supposedly developmental states I know from the 1970s in Africa were pretty awful, and partly because I doubt that you can run history backward.’ And what of the trend toward corporatization? In these cases, services are fully owned and operated by the state, but they are financially and managerially ring-fenced from government and increasingly run on market-oriented principles such as full cost recovery and performancebased remuneration (Kickert 2001; OECD 2005; Shirley 1999). As part of a broader set of neoliberal reforms brought about by ‘new public management’, corporatization has arguably affected a much larger proportion and range of public services around the world than direct private sector involvement, often serving to achieve the same aims (such as reducing taxes, creating multi-tiered levels of service, and introducing labour flexibility) without the political controversies (Aivazian, Ge and Qui 2005; Blum and Ullman 2012; van Rooyen and Hall 2007). Not all corporatized services have been run on these principles (McDonald 2014), but three decades of neoliberal restructuring have fundamentally transformed state-led services in ideological and organizational terms around the world, making calls for an expansion of – or return to – state ownership of public services problematic. And what happens when the state simply does not exist or is too weak to provide services, as is the case in many parts of the South?

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Capacity building and additional financing are essential, but in many places it will take years, perhaps decades, to create the organizational and fiscal capacities to extend state-owned and state-operated services at scale. In some cases this governance vacuum has been filled by nongovernmental organizations, community associations, labour unions, faith assemblies and others operating on a not-for-profit basis. These groups are private in the sense that they function on behalf of a clearly defined population (based on geographic, ethnic, employment or other designations) but can operate in the interests of a broader public. They can also operate in partnership with one another (sometimes across municipal and national jurisdictions), or with the state, in what are referred to as community–community partnerships or public– community partnerships (Allen 2012; Maurer and Smith 2012). The case studies in this book are illustrative of all these possibilities, demonstrating the growing diversity of new forms of public services that fall somewhere between the extremes of privatization and the monolith of the developmental state. There is much to be celebrated in this burgeoning public service praxis. Struggles for new and different public models are rich in their variety and vigorous in their grassroots deliberation. For some, this is a necessary development, insisting that there should be no universalistic, pre-determined notion of what it means to be public: ‘Democratic conceptions of the common good will always be partial and provisional, never universal or static … the common good can never be specified a priori as an input for the political system or as a static measure for the quality of governance’ (Dahl and Soss 2012, 31). If we are to arrive at new answers to what we want from our public services they can only be discovered through democratic political struggle, and they remain contested as much as shared. I support this commitment to democratic process and contingency. As Mahoney and Clarke (2013, 92) note, if the goal is to ‘collectively create new kinds of public futures out of the conflicts of the current moment, it will be vital to recognize and robustly engage with how different versions of “crisis” work to imagine, address and position “the public”’. The chapters in this book are an attempt to do just that: identify and critically understand different expressions of public service transformation. However, without some core shared principles and definitions we run the risk of falling into public service relativism, whereby anything

mcdonal d | 5 declared ‘public’ is good, with no objective reference points for evaluating these claims theoretically or empirically. Such open-ended contingency permits the defence of poorly run or undemocratic state services. It also allows for the promotion of heavily commercialized state-owned utilities that are run on market principles, often allowing governments to maintain a public façade while deepening the commodification of services at home and even seeking for-profit contracts outside of their own jurisdiction (Gentle 2009; Magdahl 2012). At the other extreme is an anti-state position that questions the potential for any form of progressive state-led public service, often fetishizing notions of community. Much of the writing on ‘the commons’, for example, shares the belief that ‘collective management by communities’ is preferable to that of ‘market and state failures’ (Bakker 2007, 441, emphasis added). States are seen to be ‘inefficient and untrustworthy’ while communities are ‘the most reliable sources of social innovation’ (McCarthy 2005, 18). This is not to dismiss the potential for non-state actors to play a progressive role in the delivery of essential services. My point is simply to illustrate once again how far we are from a counter-consensus on this thing we call ‘public’, and in answering the question ‘What do we want?’ In the end there is little that unites these calls for a commons beyond ‘their assertion of collective ownership and rights against relentless privatization and commodification’ (McCarthy 2005, 11). Advancing publicness Perhaps the best we can ask for at this stage is a shared distrust of commercialization. But if we are to develop an effective pro-public voice (a point I return to in Chapter 15) we can, and must, advance common reference points for alternatives. My proposal, drawing on previous research, is to focus on public service outcomes rather than getting bogged down in a priori debates about organizational form (McDonald 2014; McDonald and Ruiters 2012; Pigeon et al. 2012). This is not a theory of public service per se, but a methodological framework for establishing shared boundaries for what constitutes good service results, regardless of the type of public entity that produces them. Table 1.1 outlines a set of normative criteria for evaluating the publicness of a service provider. Services that score well on these criteria would be considered to have a high degree of publicness (and

TABLE

Normative category

Universality

Prices that ensure • Poorer households disproportionately economic accessibility burdened? for all • Programmes in place for cross-subsidy pricing?

Affordability

Reliable, satisfactory • Safe for all users? services that create • Responsive to user needs? positive relations with • Ongoing improvement mechanisms in end users place?

• Equitable quantity of service across Equality of user groups? opportunity to access quality services for all • Equitable quality of service across user groups?

Quality

Equity

• Affordability a legal obligation?

• Culturally acceptable service?

• Sufficient quantity?

• Per capita consumption by region

• Levels of access by socially disadvantaged groups

• Complaints by region

• Level of service interruptions

• Primary health outcomes

• Levels of subsidization by region

• Disconnection rates

• Cost as percentage of household income

• Hours/day that service is available

• Time-distance to service location

• Proportion of population with adequate access

• Rural/urban divide?

Physical availability of the service at a convenient distance from user’s dwelling

Access

Examples of possible measurement indicators

Definition

Criteria

Examples of possible sub-criteria questions

1.1 Normative criteria for evaluating the publicness of a service provider

Sustainability

Ability to obtain the greatest benefit out of available resources to meet service mandates

Solidarity

• Climate change mitigation plans in place?

• Programmes in place to reduce demand • Levels of renewable energy use on natural resources from industry and • Quality of wastewater treatment households? • Rates of respiratory infection • Respect for different cultural understandings of resources?

• Employee turnover rates

• Cost per unit of service delivered by region

• Locally appropriate technology choices? • Short-term cost reductions undermining sustainability?

• Financing as a proportion of overall operating costs

• Infrastructure investments helping to meet social goals of the service?

• Water-borne disease socioeconomic patterns

• Service model building a stronger • Budget allocations and crossCohesion among ‘public ethos’ around services? subsidization mechanisms producer and user between regions/sectors groups from all • Service contributing to improvements sectors and regions in other service delivery sectors? • Evaluation of inter-sectoral that builds economic, impacts (e.g. improved sanitation • Explicit safeguards against privatization social and political reducing diarrhoeal burden)? and commercialization, with sufficient commitment to a political support? • Legal mechanisms to prevent public service model privatization

Environmental Ability to protection meet service mandates without compromising future resource needs or undermining cultural environmental norms

Efficiency

• Formalized, legalized or institutionalized goals?

Definition

Obligation to report on and answer for activities, and to disclose the results to the public in a transparent, readily available and understandable manner

Citizen involvement in policy making and implementation of service delivery

1.1 (Continued)

Criteria

Accountability

Participation

TABLE

Normative category

Governance

• Number of people participating in formalized consultations • Range of processes open to participation (policy making, budget decisions, etc.) • Availability of participation by region

• Appropriate levels and sufficiently representative? • Adequate resources for broad and diverse participation (transportation, time off work, etc.)? • Culturally appropriate?

• Adequate monitoring to assess • Indicators tracked to assess performance on all aspects of the service? performance both economically and socially

• Transparent capital and operating budgets?

• Access to mechanisms of accountability by region

• Clear operational mandates linked with mechanisms of accountability at appropriate scales (local, national, regional)?

• Documentation openly available and verifiable, in suitable languages and formats for all users

Examples of possible measurement indicators

Examples of possible sub-criteria questions

Quality of workplace

Commitment to a safe • Adequate numbers of workers to ensure service quality? work environment, sensible workload, as • Mechanisms for workers/unions to well as fairness and participate in operation, management trust between employor policy making? ees and management, contributing to quality • Feedback loops between frontline workers, managers and end-users? service delivery • Access to training opportunities

• Transparency of hiring processes and pay equity (job type, gender, race, ethnicity, etc.)

• Availability of health and safety protocols and equipment

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their mode of delivery could be investigated for potential replication elsewhere). Those that do not could be rejected as inadequate (at least in their context) and in need of reform. This approach aims to balance the universal and the particular, establishing a common set of normative principles that can be applied everywhere but allowing for democratic process and local variation, circumventing the need for a divisive and controversial effort to develop an ‘ideal’ public service model. It can also be applied to different service sectors. The criteria for these evaluations have been selected for two reasons. First, they are the closest thing we have to a consensus on good service delivery outcomes in the existing literature. There may be widespread disagreement on how services should be delivered, but virtually all public services models today share the (rhetorical) goals of universality, equity and accountability (Haque 2001; Molina and McKeown 2012; Pidd 2012; Pollitt 2000). These principles can be summarized by Beetham’s (1987, 34) definition of public services as amenities that aim to be inclusive in their coverage, subject to public scrutiny, and developed according to a norm or public ethos that values citizen participation (although I have added a criterion for ‘solidarity’, which is not always found in the public services literature). Second, we can reclaim and rework these criteria in progressive ways. The past 30 years have seen performance evaluations dominated by narrow economic metrics such as cost recovery ratios and labour productivity, as well as neoliberal terminology such as ‘customer service’, imported in no small measure from the private sector (Clarke et al. 2007). It is imperative that we break out of this discursive and fiscal trap. Finances should play a role in performance evaluation but they need not be the governing principle. Nor does the World Bank have a monopoly on how to define efficiency or accountability. As Wolff (2002, 3) notes: ‘When and where an absolute efficiency calculus is believed to exist … one particular group (or set of groups) has established its hegemony over others … An absolutized efficiency calculus will be used by the social groups that support it as a weapon to suppress contending social groups, their social analyses, and their programs for social change.’ We must problematize and recover this conversational terrain to better understand ways of valuing public that go beyond the narrow tropes of financial accounting and private contract law. To do so requires the development of additional sub-criteria that offer

mcdonal d | 11 more probing and critical insights into public service objectives. Measurements of efficiency, for example, could include social factors such as loss of livelihoods as a result of service cut-offs. Affordability can be measured in terms of how the cost of a service facilitates or denies its use by women. Participation can take into consideration the cultural appropriateness of consultation mechanisms within diverse settings. Neoliberal evaluations of utility performance may pay lip service to these kinds of evaluative criteria but they are typically sidelined in practice in favour of more commodified benchmarking metrics (Lefeber and Vietorisz 2007; Nove 2011; Triantafillou 2007). There are dozens of critically important dimensions that could be added to mainstream evaluation systems in an effort to better reveal the strengths (and weaknesses) of pro-public alternatives. Not all of these criteria would be examined in every case, of course. Nor should we expect to find ‘perfect’ examples of public services. No single service provider can realistically excel at all of the potential criteria suggested here, and what may be seen as important in one place (e.g. community participation in budgeting decisions) may be less important in another. Nevertheless, it is possible to develop a common framework for evaluating pro-public services while at the same time recognizing that generalizations are fraught with cultural and political tensions that may be irreconcilable at times. There is certainly a practical and political need for such an approach. As Harvey (2000, 94) notes with reference to the development of universal norms for human rights, ‘To turn our backs on such universals at this stage in our history, however fraught or even tainted, is to turn our backs on all manner of prospects for political action.’ Such expediency is all the more relevant in the world of service delivery, given the abject failures of privatization and the immediate life-and-death realities of health, water, sanitation and electricity affecting at least one third of the people on the planet. Applying universal concepts across different sectors and regions, while still allowing for local interpretation, is not only justifiable academically, it is necessary politically if we are to develop a coherent transnational dialogue about the kinds of alternative public services we want to see in the 21st century. Structure of the book Ironically, not all of the case studies in this book follow this methodological protocol. While some were worked out in advance as

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part of a larger research programme of the Municipal Services Project, others were conducted independently and submitted for consideration at a large international conference on progressive public services organized by the project in South Africa in 2014.1 Nevertheless, all of the authors were familiar with this framework, and submitted their papers based on a commitment to seeking a more coherent analytical model for public alternatives to privatization. In this regard, the individual chapters, and the collection as a whole, represent a methodological work-in-progress, illustrating both the limits and possibilities of a more cohesive approach to advancing our understanding of alternative public services. The chapters are also intentionally short in length and designed to encourage readers to explore places and sectors they may not be familiar with. The book is organized into sections to highlight major themes, but what gives the collection its real strength is the diversity of outcomes it presents, revealing both the context-based nature of public services as well as some of the universalities that bind them together. In addition to heavily studied sectors such as water and healthcare, the book examines lesser known debates on the publicness of electricity, waste management and banking. The cases cover urban and rural locations in Africa, Asia and Latin America (as well as one chapter on municipal ‘insourcing’ in the United States) operating at various levels of governance. The authors are new and established scholars, social movement activists, unionists and NGO representatives. In this respect the book can claim some degree of representativeness in terms of the variety of struggles taking place on the ground. The first part of the book is entitled ‘Engaging communities and workers’, and starts with an examination of efforts to build a labour–community alliance for water delivery in Valle del Cauca, Colombia. This is a coalition between two public sector trade unions (representing workers from the department’s water provider and environmental agency) and members of a community-run aqueduct in La Sirena (a low-income suburb of Cali). In this case the alliance has served to strengthen autonomous community water management – despite significant governance differences with the public utility – serving to recognize the importance of community-owned water systems as functionally and culturally appropriate in peri-urban and rural settings. The chapter highlights the long, demanding process of

mcdonal d | 13 creating this public alliance and the distinct organizational forms and capacities that managed to come together in their mutual mistrust of privatization. Chapter 3 explores an under-examined service sector: that of waste management, and specifically that of ‘reclaimers’ – informal waste pickers who salvage reusable and recyclable materials. Municipalities in the South are slowly expanding their waste management systems to include recycling, but standard discourse and practice assumes that modern recycling must be technology-intensive and run by the state or private companies. Reclaimers are seen as atavistic, dirty and marring the modern image of the city. Most recycling systems thus exclude informal workers, with municipalities often contracting out mechanized companies to do recycling work. Fighting against this trend, organized reclaimers have been mobilizing to secure formal integration into public municipal waste management systems. Belo Horizonte (Brazil), Pune (India) and Bogotá (Colombia) are positive illustrations of these developments and this chapter argues that official inclusion of reclaimers in these cities’ waste management systems is expanding both the public sector and the public sphere, transforming relations between government, the formal and informal economy, and residents, creating a more inclusive, participatory and democratic public service. Labour–community alliances are once again the subject of Chapter 4. In this case, however, the chapter’s subject is more accurately described as potential coalitions – the possibility of reigniting what used to be a powerful labour–community alliance culture in South Africa. The author reviews the history of alliance building that once worked to oppose privatization and asks how these associations can be rebuilt to promote public service alternatives in the future. There are ongoing efforts to reclaim these initiatives in thought and practice via a unity of class struggle that is grounded in mutual respect and learning, a tactical focus on grassroots mobilization, an organizational culture of internal democracy, and the forging of a principled, socially progressive, accountable and committed leadership. The present-day picture is a far cry from the strong coalitions of the anti-apartheid era and the early promises of the post-apartheid period, but there are examples of re-emerging alliances that offer sparks of hope. Chapter 5 takes us to rural Guatemala, where indigenous communities have historically been unable to access public healthcare

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services on an equal footing with wealthier urban populations. Using a rights-based approach and participatory action-research methodology, civil society organizations have developed and implemented a system of citizen monitoring of public healthcare services to enhance their quality and empower communities in six municipalities in the western highlands, all with a majority indigenous population. This approach includes capacity-building activities aiming to enhance the knowledge and skills of indigenous populations, particularly about their human rights and legal entitlement to public services. Participatory actionresearch in this case is not only a methodological tool but an approach that can be used in adult education to trigger political action. Five years since implementation, communities have influenced the improvement of public health services at the local level, as well as the allocation of resources, contributing to a more robust and democratic form of public health services. The next cluster of chapters falls under the heading of ‘Recognizing quasi-public actors’ which, as the title suggests, explores the role of non-state actors in service delivery and how they should be recognized as legitimate public actors. Chapter 6 reviews the experiences of two NGOs based in Ahmedabad, India – the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) and Saath – and their role in an equity-oriented slum electrification programme. This initiative was a response to a need for innovative approaches to affordable legal electricity in informal settlements. Over 100,000 homes were electrified in Ahmedabad by 2008, and the programme is being replicated in smaller cities in the states of Gujarat and Rajasthan. The study showcases inventive ways of addressing land tenure issues for women in particular, devising equitable systems of paying for state-generated electricity, improving management processes, dealing with non-payment, and developing information and reporting systems to provide feedback to utilities and municipalities. It is a community–community partnership in a field dominated by big government and big capital. Democratizing the nature of state delivery – in part through the insertion of NGOs working in partnership with residents and local authorities – is seen to build new, equity-oriented forms of publicness. Involving NGOs in slum electrification is labour-intensive and expensive, however, and the chapter reveals how the absence of policy guidance and financial resources represents the biggest impediment for their NGOs’ participation in public projects.

mcdonal d | 15 Chapter 7 also looks at partnerships with communities, this time with a focus on sanitation. Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) programmes are designed to ‘force’ communities to recognize that the practice of open defecation causes sickness and disease, and ‘trigger’ them to take action, ensuring that every household builds at least a pit latrine in an effort to make the community defecation-free. At one level, CLTS can be considered a typical neoliberal tactic on the part of the mainstream sanitation fraternity, downloading the costs and physical labour of actual service delivery onto communities. But it can also be viewed as an acknowledgement of the need to revive the publicness of sanitation services by making them more democratic and participatory, and acting as a form of redress for the ineffectiveness of top-down state delivered sanitation services in the past. This chapter explores the degree to which such programmes can be considered public by invoking the ‘messiness’ of community in an effort to avoid the false dualism of either strengthening neoliberalism through self-help programmes or uncritically celebrating an abstract public ideal. Chapter 8 is our only look at faith-based service provision as a public option. In Uganda, faith-based health facilities (Christian and Muslim) are deeply integrated into the public system, often serving areas where there are few, if any, state-managed services available. These healthcare facilities have been operating in the country since the late-19th century, where they focus on primary care in rural areas, charging affordable user fees and treating those who cannot pay, regardless of their religious affiliation. They promote solidarity through multi-stakeholder engagement and cross-subsidization, using mechanisms such as community health financing schemes that protect the community against catastrophic out-of-pocket health expenditures. Nevertheless, there are questions as to whether faithbased establishments let the state off the financial hook, the extent to which they appear to be seeking profit opportunities to subsidize other areas of work, and concerns over the role that religion can play in controversial health-related topics such as contraception. The third part of the book is entitled ‘Promoting equity and democratic control’, starting with a focused examination of gendered conceptualizations of public water in Dhaka, Bangladesh, in Chapter 9. Based on the premise that poor women are constrained by illegality and water scarcity, the chapter seeks to pry open the ‘black box’ of

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household and community by exploring gendered inclusions and exclusions in the city’s public water system and outlines the beginnings of a broader conceptual framework for socially just and equitable delivery mechanisms that are responsive to women’s needs and conducive to the emergence of a politicized sense of self and autonomy. The study reveals a strong preference among women for publicly provided municipal water, shaped by affordability and a desire for full citizenship and legal standing. Returning to Colombia, Chapter 10 looks at the city of Medellín and its much-celebrated public multi-utility company – Empresas Públicas de Medellín (EPM). EPM has long contributed to the overall welfare of the city, but now operates across Latin America and has implemented a number of market-oriented operating principles in its activities, raising challenging questions about its public character. With approximately 66,000 households in Medellín being denied access to water by EPM for non-payment of bills, or because their land tenure status remains illegal, this chapter explores the relationship between infrastructure networks, citizenship and access to water, revealing how marginalized people fight to reclaim what they consider to be a public good. Renewable energy in sub-Saharan Africa is the focus of Chapter 11. Paradoxically, Africa is the most under-serviced region of the world when it comes to electricity provision but ranks as one of the bestendowed in terms of potential production, especially in renewable sources such as solar, wind and geothermal. Renewable energy also opens up possibilities for off-grid and mini-grid access, as well as localized solutions that can rapidly escalate access and democratize electricity provision, potentially making it more public. This chapter explores what such public energy systems might look like in terms of ownership and control, outlining the state of renewable energy debates on the continent. The struggle for publicly owned renewable electricity systems in Africa that are democratic, accountable, affordable and accessible will not be easy, but it must start with a realistic account of what exists and what lies on the road ahead. The last part of the book looks at ‘Financing public services’, beginning with the trend toward (re)making public banks. Sitting at the pinnacle of a financialized global capitalist system, it is easy to forget that many banks were (and remain) state-owned and operated, and that finance long pre-dates the market. As such, all banking institutions are

mcdonal d | 17 historically and socially constructed. Chapter 12 provides an overview of the history of state banks, noting that even if they charge interest they have not always had a profit mandate and can loan on strategic developmental grounds, providing the potential for counter-cyclical lending. The chapter then looks specifically at Turkey’s state banks, noting that while retaining control of roughly one third of the country’s banking assets today, their original mandates have become overlaid with neoliberal competitive imperatives. Efforts to reclaim their publicness are ongoing, and it is argued that public banks can serve as potentially significant sources of progressive social developmental power, providing support in times of crisis and instability, and extending access to finance mechanisms, all the while operating more ‘efficiently’ than private banks. We then turn to the heartland of capitalism – the USA – where direct public provision accounts for almost half of all local government service delivery. When cities do contract out, they typically mix public and private delivery over time through insourcing and outsourcing, depending in part on the financial benefits or constraints of doing so. Chapter 13 argues that such dynamic forms of market management reinsert some level of public management control into the privatization process. Reversing privatization via ‘insourcing’ is a process of ‘making public’ among US local governments, even if it is primarily a pragmatic practice of experimentation as opposed to any particular ideological commitment to publicness per se. Empirical results suggest an important role for city managers and public sector workers in assessing private delivery and improving public service delivery, resulting in contracting that is more likely with public partners (other municipalities) than private ones, and where public ethos, accountability and openness are present. Notably, the top two reasons cited by city managers for reversing contracts were poor service quality and a lack of cost savings from private companies. The last case study looks at water provision and financing in Bolivia. This country has been a beacon of hope for many on the left since the election of the Evo Morales government in 2006, not least because of its extensive and dramatic efforts to stop and reverse privatization in essential services and to finance them in ways that do not depend on international financial institutions. Chapter 14 looks at reforms in the water sector in particular, reviewing the significant reorientation from private to public forms of provision and finance. The Morales

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government has signalled its commitment to the human right to water, which is now enshrined in the Constitution, and has established new institutions to bolster the role of the state in water management and financing. However, the formal regulatory and institutional situation of water in Bolivia is still weak, incomplete, non-existent and outdated in some areas. Nor have government agencies yet figured out how to evaluate performance on the basis of ‘social efficiency’ rather than the more narrow financial indicators established during the neoliberal era. Despite fiery anti-capitalist rhetoric and a commitment to ‘protecting Mother Earth’, the government has prioritized investments geared toward industrial take-off, particularly in the hydrocarbons and transportation sectors. In the spirit of critical engagement, the chapter argues that the Morales government could afford to invest more of its own funds to improve the publicness of the water sector instead of relying on (yet to be realized) financial support from the World Bank and other donor agencies. The book concludes, in Chapter 15, with a review of the challenges (and opportunities) of building a more effective global pro-public movement. It points to three particularly challenging areas: the inherent (and probably intractable) complexities of what it means to build a ‘public’ service; a reluctance by some anti-privatization actors to be critical of the state-led services that we still have; and the lack of an established academic agenda for research. This is followed by an assessment of existing areas of strength – in regional and sectoral terms – and possible traction points for moving the debate and practice of service delivery alternatives forward. No single book can possibly cover the wide range of alternative public service models that are being developed around the world today, but the hope is that this collection is broadly representative of the forms of change taking place and the kinds of outcomes they can produce. In doing so it aims to strengthen the empirical record of what is taking place, and to advance our conceptual understanding of how we might better evaluate the publicness of service delivery alternatives in the future. Note 1 ‘Putting Public in Public Services: Research, Action and Equity in the Global

South’, Cape Town, South Africa, 13–16 April 2014.

mcdonal d | 19 References Aivazian, V. A., Ge, Y. and Qui, J. 2005. Can corporatization improve the performance of stateowned enterprises even without privatization? Journal of Corporate Finance, 11(5): 791–808. Allen, A. 2012. Water provision for and by the peri-urban poor: Publiccommunity partnerships or citizens co-production? In I. Vojnovic (ed), Urban sustainability: A global perspective, 309–340. Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press. Bakker, K. 2007. The ‘Commons’ versus the ‘commodity’: Alter-globalization, anti-privatization and the human right to water in the global South. Antipode, 39(3), 430–455. Beetham, D. 1987. Bureaucracy. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Blum, D. and Ullman, C. 2012. The globalization and corporatization of education: The limits and liminality of the market mantra. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 25(4): 367–373. Budds, J. and McGranahan, G. 2003. Are the debates on water privatization missing the point? Experiences from Africa, Asia and Latin America. Environment and Urbanization, 15(2): 87–114. Chavez, D. and Torres, S. (eds). 2014. Reorienting development: State-owned enterprises in Latin America and the world. Amsterdam: Transnational Institute. Clarke, J., Newman, J., Smith, N., Vidler, E. and Westmarland, L. 2007. Creating citizen-consumers: Changing publics and changing public services. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Clò, S., Del Bo, C., Ferraris, M. and Florio, M. 2013. Mapping public enterprises in the new millennium: A participatory

research database. Paper presented at the Public Enterprises in the 21st Century conference organized by CIRIEC International, Berlin, Germany, 14–15 February. Cumbers, A. 2012. Reclaiming public ownership: Making space for economic democracy. London: Zed Books. Dahl, A., and Soss, J. (2012). Neoliberalism for the common good. In Public value governance and the downsizing of democracy, paper presented to the Public Values Conference, September, Minneapolis, MN. Esping-Anderson, G. 1990. The three worlds of welfare capitalism. Cambridge: Polity Press. Ferguson, J. 2009. The uses of neoliberalism. Antipode, 41(s1): 167. Florio, M. 2013. Network industries and social welfare: The experiment that reshuffled European utilities. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gentle, L. 2009. Escom to Eskom: From racial Keynesian capitalism to neo-liberalism (1910–1994). In D. A. McDonald (ed.), Electric capitalism: Recolonizing Africa on the power grid, 50–72. London: Earthscan. Grugel, J. and Riggirozzi, P. 2012. Postneoliberalism in Latin America: Rebuilding and reclaiming the state after crisis. Development and Change, 43(1): 1–21. Haque, M. S. 2001. The diminishing publicness of public service under the current mode of governance. Public Administration Review, 61(1): 65–82. Harvey, D. 2000. Spaces of hope. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Kickert, W. J. M. 2001. Public management of hybrid organizations: Governance of quasi-autonomous executive agencies. International Public Management Journal, 4(2): 135–150.

20 | o n e Lefeber, L. and Vietorisz, T. 2007. The meaning of social efficiency. Review of Political Economy, 19(2): 139–164. Magdahl, J. O. 2012. From privatisation to corporatisation: Exploring the strategic shift in neoliberal policy on urban water services. Oslo: FIVAS, Association for International Water Studies. Mahony, N. and Clarke, J. 2013. Public crises, public futures. Cultural Studies, 27(6), 933–954. Maurer, F. A., and Smith, C. M. 2012. Community/public health nursing practice: Health for families and populations. Maryland Heights, MO: Elsevier Health Sciences. McCarthy, J. 2005. Commons as counterhegemonic projects. Capitalism Nature Socialism, 16(1): 9–24. McDonald, D. A. and Ruiters, G. (eds). 2012. Alternatives to privatization: Public options for essential services in the global South. New York, NY: Routledge. McDonald, D. (ed). 2014. Rethinking corporatization and public services in the global South. London: Zed Books. Molina, A. D. and McKeown, C. L. 2012. The heart of the profession: Understanding public service values. Journal of Public Affairs Education, 375–396. Newman, J. and Clarke, J. 2009. Publics, politics and power: Remaking the public in public services. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Nove, A. 2011. Efficiency criteria for nationalised industries. New York, NY: Routledge. OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) 2005. OECD guidelines on corporate governance of state-owned enterprises. Paris: OECD Publishing.

Offe, C. 1972. Advanced capitalism and the welfare state. Politics and Society, 2(4): 479–488. Pidd, M. 2012. Measuring the performance of public services: Principles and practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pigeon, M., McDonald, D. A., Hoedeman, O. and Kishimoto, S. (eds). 2012. Remunicipalisation: Putting water back into public hands. Amsterdam: Transnational Institute. Pollitt, C. 2000. How do we know how good public services are? In G. Peters and D. J. Savoie (eds.), Governance in the twenty-first century: Revitalizing the public service, 119–152. Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Shirley, M. M. 1999. Bureaucrats in business: The roles of privatization versus corporatization in state-owned enterprise reform. World Development, 27(1): 115–136. Triantafillou, P. 2007. Benchmarking in the public sector: A critical conceptual framework. Public Administration, 85(3): 829–846. van Rooyen, C. and Hall, D. 2007. Public is as private does: The confused case of Rand Water in South Africa. MSP Occasional Paper no.15. Cape Town: Municipal Services Project. Warner, M. (2002). Publics and counterpublics. Public culture, 14(1), 49–90. Wolff, R. 2002. ‘Efficiency’: Whose efficiency? Post-Autistic Economics Review, 16(3): 1–3. Wollmann, H. 2011. Provision of public services in European countries: From public/municipal to private and reverse? Croatian and Comparative Public Administration, 11(4): 889–911.

2 | W ORK OF T H E A N T S : L A B O UR A N D C OM M UN I T Y R E I N V E N T I N G PUB LI C WAT E R I N CO L O M B I A Madeleine Bélanger Dumontier, Susan Spronk and Adrian Murray

It is a beautiful Sunday morning and the town is still sleeping. Six public water utility workers share a tinto (coffee) before loading into a jeep that takes us deep into the hillsides of Valle del Cauca, Colombia, for a popular assembly on a proposed collaboration between the community aqueduct and local unions. After the bumpy 30-minute ride in the heat one of the workers breaks into a wide smile and says: ‘What is one’s purpose in life if not to serve others?’1 In a country still struggling to overcome its violent past, and scarred by extreme inequalities, his statement summarizes a general sentiment among members of local public service unions that they are doing the ‘work of the ants,’ that is, labouring collectively to build a better country, one community at a time. Colombia has the second-largest annual average of renewable freshwater resources in Latin America, and the seventh in the world (FAO 2000). Despite water’s natural abundance, 30 per cent of Colombians do not have access to an improved water source (Garcés 2009), and scarcity disproportionally affects rural areas, where one quarter of the population lives.2 The privatizations of the 1990s were intended to improve water services and redress such inequalities; yet the communities most in need were harmed by higher prices, rendering water and sanitation services even less accessible (Defensoría del Pueblo 2010). Activists have used a variety of tactics to fight the government’s ongoing neoliberal agenda. In this chapter, we analyse struggles to promote alternatives to private modes of water service delivery in Colombia, focusing on peri-urban and rural areas in the department of Valle del Cauca where workers and community members have been resisting privatization of water and sanitation services for almost two

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decades. Despite repeated attempts to privatize Acuavalle, the public water and sanitation provider outside the department’s capital city of Cali, worker–community coalitions have successfully maintained public control over the majority of the utility’s operations by brokering a public–public partnership with the regional environmental authority – the Autonomous Corporation of the Cauca Valley Region (CVC in Spanish) – to leverage much-needed resources. Parallel to these efforts to preserve the ‘publicness’ of water, local activists have worked to reinforce the capacity of the region’s community-owned and community-operated aqueducts. This chapter looks specifically at the experience of building a labour–community alliance3 between the trade unions Sintracuavalle and Sintrambiente, which represent public employees from the water provider Acuavalle and the environmental agency CVC, and members of the community aqueduct in La Sirena (a low-income suburb of Cali). As a member of the inter-American water network Red VIDA,4 and the Platform for Public–Community Partnerships in the Americas (Plataforma-APC), Sintracuavalle has been committed to sharing this experience across borders. The research was also collaborative and action-oriented insofar as it consisted of a series of joint research planning meetings, individual interviews, field visits and focus groups with workers and community members to collectively document the alliance process and to identify lessons learned.5 Two three-hour focus groups were organized with union and community members, and a final workshop to discuss ways forward was held with workers and community leaders from La Sirena as well as two other acueductos comunitarios that were in the process of starting similar partnerships with the unions. In this way, the participatory nature of the research contributed in its own way to celebrating the ‘public’ nature of these partnerships. Privatization and the need for labour–community alliances As users and producers of public services, public sector workers around the world have been doubly hit by the privatization agenda (Barchiesi 2007): they face higher user fees and restricted access to services, and while on the job they are under considerable pressure to accept concessions, including lower salaries, benefits and pensions to reduce the costs of service delivery. Labour–community alliances have been particularly common in struggles to defend the provision

bé la n g e r dumont ier et al . | 25 of public goods (Ross 2013), such as water and sanitation, healthcare and electricity, successfully reversing privatizations in countries as diverse as Canada, Bolivia, Colombia, El Salvador and the Philippines (Almeida 2006; Spronk and Terhorst 2012). In Colombia, public sector unions have been at the forefront of struggles to defend the ‘publicness’ of water as a resource and service despite the fact that it is one of the most dangerous places in the world to be a trade unionist. Unionists – particularly from the public sector (Amnesty International 2007) – have been the targets of violent attacks, and since 1986 almost 3,000 have been killed, largely with impunity (HRW 2013). Nonetheless, the public sector still has fairly robust union density: 28.7 per cent of public sector workers in Colombia were members of unions in 2010 (ILO 2013). Colombia has been no exception to the privatization trend that has swept Latin America. In 1991, the Colombian constitutional reform abolished public monopoly over service utilities. In the case of water provision, this change prohibited delivering water at prices lower than operational costs. The Public Services Law 142 of 1994 reinforced this institutional framework by requiring the incorporation of public service providers as joint-stock companies, allowing multinationals to enter the new water market (see López Rivera n.d., 5). Within a neoliberal context marked by corruption and statesponsored violence, the labour movement has been stigmatized and its image tarnished, meaning that workers not only have to resist privatization but also have to rekindle trust from citizens to regain their mobilization capacity. By 2001, however, evidence was increasingly weighing in favour of public water as it became clear that water privatization had led to growing inequalities with low-income users paying 30 per cent more for their water services (Defensoría del Pueblo 2010, 34). As discontent grew across the country, so too did popular mobilization. In Valle del Cauca, worker resistance to privatization of essential services was particularly fierce. From the epic struggle to keep the capital’s multi-service utility EMCALI in public hands since 1995 (see Novelli 2004), to the eleventh-hour rescue of Acuavalle from a 20-year concession plan (Sintracuavalle 2012), public utility workers have been able to garner broad-based support from the communities they serve to fend off aggressive attempts to privatize services.

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Struggles for alternatives to privatization in Colombia Popular struggle in defence of public water has taken many forms in Colombia. Key strategies have built on a repertoire shared with other popular resistance struggles in Latin America (Perera 2013), including the organization of a referendum campaign on the right to water, the formation of public–public partnerships (PuPs) to prevent privatization of water utilities, and advocacy in defence of traditional water systems mostly located in rural areas.

Referendum on the constitutional right to water, 2005–2009 Inspired by the successful Uruguayan constitutional challenge to water privatization in 2004, campaigners in Colombia initially united to promote water as a public good and soon formed the Comité Nacional en Defensa del Agua y de la Vida (CNDAV) to call for a referendum. They were pushing for a constitutional amendment that would ‘legally enshrine the fundamental right to potable water, a minimum amount of free water, public management of the resource, and the special protection of ecosystems essential to the water cycle’ (Dugard and Drage 2012, 11). Labour played an important role in the referendum coalition that united over 1,200 member groups (FWW 2009). Among them, Sintracuavalle workers and their compañeros from Sintrambiente participated actively by raising awareness and collecting signatures. Larger unions such as the telecommunications and bank workers’ unions (ETB and ANEBRE) provided broader financial support, and the national union of public employees (Sintraemdes) organized regional forums (personal interview with Marta Cañon Parra, Corporación MECCA and Rodrigo Acosta Barrios, National Union of Users and Defenders of Public Services). On September 29, 2009, the coalition submitted 2,500,000 signatures in support of the referendum, but then-President Álvaro Uribe pushed for significant changes to the text, slashing key demands (FWW 2009). CNDAV expressed concern with the changes before Congress, which voted to adopt the watereddown text nonetheless, effectively burying the campaign in June 2010 (Dugard and Drage 2012). Nonetheless, Rodrigo Acosta, long-time water campaigner and advisor to various unions, notes that the socio-political consensus built through the referendum process remains, notably around the need to defend community aqueducts (personal interview). The process itself

bé la n g e r dumont ier et al . | 27 contributed to building the capacity of the acueductos, which initiated their own ‘counter-network to resist dispossession and absorption by large private or public water companies’ (Perera 2014, 4).

Public–public partnerships The idea of forming PuPs in Colombia was partly inspired by two foreign public water companies, Aguas Bonaerenses SA (Argentina) and Obras Sanitarias del Estado (Uruguay), which were pioneers in this regard (Spronk, Crespo and Olivera 2012, 2014). These publicly owned and operated utilities have provided financial and technical assistance to other utilities to help keep water in public hands. One successful PuP in Colombia was brokered in the Valle del Cauca, where water activists successfully advocated for a partnership between public water utility Acuavalle and the regional environmental authority CVC. In 2005, Acuavalle transferred 39 per cent of its shares from the department and municipalities to the CVC to stave off privatization. The new ownership structure served to bring drinking water solutions to seven municipalities in Valle del Cauca where there were significant inequalities in terms of access (Sintracuavalle 2013, 9). Workers from the CVC had unionized nationally in 2000 in Sintrambiente (union of workers from the National Environmental System), and the Valle del Cauca chapter soon forged ties with their sister union Sintracuavalle (union of workers from Acuavalle). With support from their respective public entities, the unions developed concrete initiatives to reinforce autonomous management of water in communities, including in La Sirena.

Community aqueducts: key rural players Within the national and Latin American water justice movements, community aqueducts have emerged as one of the most practical and culturally appropriate public alternatives to address rural water problems. In Colombia, most acueductos comunitarios came to life with the initial public investment in rural water infrastructure in the 1980s, and from that time communities took on their maintenance with little or no support from the state. In some cases it was the communities themselves that saved the little money they had to build their own systems in those years – such as in La Sirena, as will be discussed below. There are now approximately 11,500 community organizations delivering water services in rural and peri-urban areas in Colombia (Smits, Rojas and Tamayo 2011).

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They are responsible for 40 per cent of water services in rural areas and in some cities they provide nearly 20 per cent of water services (Colmenares and Mira 2007). There is rich diversity among acueductos comunitarios as well, but ‘above all, they are popular institutions responsible for water management that form part of the social fabric in hillside communities, indigenous reserves, [and] black communities’ (Correa 2006, 14). Their ‘vision of what is “public” goes well beyond the state, [and] they have their own norms and mandates to manage public goods’ (personal interview with Diego Martínez Zambrano, CENSAT Agua Viva). This alternative model has come under threat with the neoliberal legal and institutional water regime set up in the 1990s because of the focus on cost recovery (Uribe Botero 2005, 5). The implementation of Departmental Development Plans backed by the World Bank beginning in 2007, which aimed to centralize operations at the department level to create economies of scale, increased the strain on community aqueducts and public operators. One stated goal was to attract investments to improve services, but according to critics it siphoned a considerable amount of money into administration (Vargas Nuñes 2012) and became a vehicle for private profit, allowing the entry of ‘specialized’ operators with no sizeable investment (Salazar Restrepo 2011; Urrea and Cárdenas 2011). The policy was abolished in 2011. Still, what remains is the ‘vision of regional markets that commodify and commercialize water services, even if the enterprises may be public’ (email communication with Javier Márquez Valderrama, Corporación Penca de Sábila). Today, community aqueducts face a number of challenges. Within the current regulatory framework, their main problems are meeting the water quality and financial sustainability criteria that are difficult to achieve in the context of extreme poverty. Public water workers and community members are united in their criticism of neoliberal water policies. These shared values have created the conditions for the successful experience with labour–community alliance building in La Sirena. Community water management: the case of La Sirena Among water activists in Colombia, the community aqueduct in La Sirena is considered an example of ‘best practice’ for at least three reasons (Spronk, Crespo and Oliveira 2012). First, it brings quality

bé lan g e r dumont ier et al . | 29 water around the clock to all its residents at an affordable price. Second, it has been praised for its autonomy, transparency and public ethos: the community owns the infrastructure and network, which it has developed and maintained in a financially responsible manner. Third, it is the site where one of the first formal alliances between community members and public utility workers was created in the water and sanitation sector. In 1971, 20 families invaded the property of a large landowner on the outskirts of Cali and started building the community they later called La Sirena. As the population expanded, problems related to the lack of infrastructure emerged. In the mid-1980s, the first water catchment was built to bring water from the Epaminondas stream to La Sirena’s 300 low-income households. Two years later, they started pumping from Las Valencias stream and the Meléndez River in the nearby Farrallones forest reserve. The first water delivery system used hoses, which were progressively replaced with pipes, and in the 1990s a water treatment plant was built thanks to a partnership with Universidad del Valle’s CINARA research institute. By 1995, the community water system provided water to an impressive 95 per cent of households. A first independent Board was created in 1998 to manage the aqueduct. The positions of president, vice-president, public prosecutor, secretary and treasurer are elected by a general assembly. Over time, Cali has continued to sprawl. Once a relatively isolated rural community, La Sirena has now been absorbed by the city. Nonetheless, the public water utility serving the metropolitan area, EMCALI, has not been interested in expanding formal water and sanitation services to reach La Sirena residents, in part because it would be very costly to deliver water to the hillside neighbourhood from the valley. To this day, aqueduct managers value this autonomy and pride themselves on the fact that since 1994 ‘they haven’t received a penny’ from the state. Due to the desire to maintain control over water, the community has forfeited investment by the Ministry of Public Health, and later by the departmental administration via the Programme for Rural Water Supply because financing was made conditional on ceding control over operations to the municipality. Despite the fact that the community aqueduct has been financed exclusively by its low-income residents, the Board has managed to

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continue to expand its services at about the same rate as population growth. By 2013 the Subscribers Association of La Sirena was delivering water to 918 households (representing 5,500 users), up from 698 in 2004. Since 2004, Board members have not received any salary or bonuses in order to ensure that as much money as possible is reinvested in the water network. Two paid plant operators maintain the system and one secretary is on staff to manage the administrative side. Overall, the aqueduct’s management and cost structure has served as a model among its peers from the regional Association of Community Organizations Providing Public Services in Water and Sanitation (Aquacol). But for all its success, there is considerable debate regarding the aqueduct’s reliance on voluntary labour as well as on the more complex issue of government subsidies, which it prefers not to access for fear of becoming dependent on such funds (99 per cent of subscribers are from the first, poorest category of users, and would pay even lower water rates than they are currently if the tariff methodology of the regulatory authority, CRA, were to be used; see Roa García and Pulido Rozo 2014). La Sirena also faces challenges in trying to comply with complex water legislation and ageing infrastructure, which is what prompted the leaders of the aqueduct to pursue an alliance with local unions. History of the labour–community alliance When Acuavalle was first faced with the threat of privatization in the early 2000s, long-time union president Margarita López recalls, they needed two things: evidence in favour of public services, and the support of the community (focus group A). The struggle has been ongoing ever since and workers have continued their popular outreach activities as the public utility faced ‘a series of threats, from liquidation to concession contracts to deliver services, to the privatization of specific sectors of activity’ (López 2013, 9). For Sintrambiente, it was never a matter of defending its own public enterprise from privatization, although then-union president Tulio Murillo noted that the environmental mandate was undermined by the fact that decision makers within the CVC ‘were more preoccupied by money than the environment’ (group interview CVC). Sintrambiente’s community outreach was meant to contribute to broader struggles ‘against megaprojects, mining, agro-fuels and the issue of infrastructure that poses the most significant threat to ecosystems’ (focus group A).

bé lan g e r dumont ier et al . | 31 The support of international networks proved key for the partnership with La Sirena to get off the ground. Both Sintracuavalle and Sintrambiente are affiliated with Public Services International (PSI), a global federation of public sector trade unions that has been promoting the formation of PuPs and labour–community alliances since the early 2000s. The idea to reach out to communities to fend off privatization first emerged in the context of these discussions, and PSI provided financial support. Sintracuavalle first contacted La Sirena to learn more about its experience with community water management in 2008. However, according to Olmedo Tapias, who was the first worker to go to La Sirena under the union’s banner, it was joining the Plataforma-APC in 2009 that created the ‘possibility to deepen collaboration’ (focus group A).

Building trust, setting objectives The first contact between the community and Sintracuavalle was marked by deep mistrust. Not only had the community leaders gotten their fingers burned when dealing with public authorities that had tried to take over their aqueduct, but Acuavalle’s management had also been marred by corruption scandals (Cárdenas Lesmes 2011). On the union side, a certain reticence was also felt among workers. There existed a ‘fear to work with the community due to stigmatization [of unionists]’ (Margarita López, focus group A). The Sintracuavalle workers who decided to participate in building the alliance did so to move beyond the myopic focus on workplace issues and to revitalize their union; in the words of Margarita López, it was to show that ‘we are not only thinking about our own labour gains [e.g. salaries and benefits] and are doing something to defend what is “public”’ (joint research planning meeting). Even for Sintrambiente workers, who could hardly be perceived as attempting to overtake the aqueduct, changing this negative perception of ‘the unionist’ proved a challenge (Maria Fernanda Castillo, group interview CVC). It took workers two years to build the necessary trust to reach a first ‘pre-agreement’ signed in 2010, when joint work started in earnest to identify concrete avenues for cooperation. The pre-agreement was only possible because the unionists signalled their commitment to respect the aqueduct’s independence. By May 2012 they had mobilized the necessary resources and formalized the main goals of the alliance. A total of 12 workers from Sintracuavalle and Sintrambiente and

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seven representatives from La Sirena took part directly in the formal cooperation agreement on a volunteer basis.

Sharing knowledge Most of the immediate concerns of the acueducto comunitario were of an operational nature and aimed to improve efficiency in service delivery. Wilson Álvarez, responsible for plans and network archives in Acuavalle for more than 28 years and an active member of the union, voluntarily spent weekends in La Sirena to meticulously update the water network plans (focus group B). This work helped the aqueduct to comply with national regulations in addition to improving knowledge of their own system. The detection of leaks was another pressing concern for the network operators. Wilmer Henao, an 18-year Acuavalle worker and union member, recalls that La Sirena plant operators spent two days with counterparts from Sevilla’s Acuavalle branch to learn how to monitor the water network and fix leaks (personal interview during field visit in Sevilla). Later he returned to La Sirena to teach them how to repair damage. The alliance also aimed to build the capacity of aqueduct workers on regulatory norms, illustrating both the practical and political nature of the skill sharing. Anyela Torres, secretary of the Subscribers Association of La Sirena, explains that: ‘Many aqueducts fear legality, but this is what can protect them from privatization’ (focus group B). The aqueduct had reported to the Superintendencia de Servicios Públicos since 2006, but the union helped them streamline administrative tasks. Lina Cañas, who works in Acuavalle and has been the union’s treasurer for 15 years, took an active part in sharing her knowledge of the commercial side of water management, including strategies for managing the database of users, billing and collection. Raising environmental awareness Sintrambiente focused on raising awareness of the importance of water conservation among aqueduct staff and directors. They jointly identified contamination factors in the three watersheds, showing how deforestation, misuse of land due to unsustainable agricultural methods, small-scale illegal mining activities and human sprawl affected the ecosystems (Tulio Murillo, focus group A). It was an opportunity ‘to explain the importance of conservation of those ecosystems so that comrades from the Board would become

bé lan g e r dumont ier et al . | 33 custodians’ (personal interview with Carlos Alberto Posada during the field visit in Sevilla). They also designed broader educational projects to help community members understand and value the whole cycle of water conservation. Maria Fernanda Castillo led this broader awareness-raising work in La Sirena, giving workshops on watershed management to encourage the community to take the protection of its water source in its own hands. For Tulio Murillo, this alliance sowed the seeds of a longer term community commitment to protecting ecosystems. Outcomes of the alliance When asked about principles guiding the process of a successful labour–community alliance, workers insisted on the importance of engagement and for workers to participate with solidarity and humility (focus group A). To build trust, community members said it is essential to guarantee the autonomy and independence of the community partner, with a vision of solidarity rather than charity (acompañamiento). Agreement on goals, using clear language and transparency in managing cooperation activities were also seen as key. Finally, delivering on set objectives was mentioned as fundamental to the success of the initiative: ‘it is important to be careful, to start and complete the task’ (Julio César Osorio, focus group A). When assessing the results of the alliance, focus group participants pointed to technical benefits, stating that the most important accomplishments of the alliance were improved efficiency in service delivery and the continuity of the service. In La Sirena, these gains were achieved by reducing unaccounted-for water thanks to simple technological solutions. Better use of water resources following the implementation of consumption controls also played a part. As concrete results of these improvements, coverage has continued to increase, and there has been no water rationing since the partnership was signed, a measure that was formerly all too common during the summer months. La Sirena aqueduct staff and Board stated that learning about laws and norms was especially valuable because they had no formal training in managing water systems. Thanks to capacity building by the union they improved metering techniques, billing methods and consolidated the tariff structure following the introduction of a fixed rate to ensure that small users would not subsidize high-volume users. Tariffs remain

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lower than in the urban area where public provider EMCALI operates (Roa García and Pulido Rozo 2014, 19). Working with the union, they were able to detect fraudulent connections and learned about legal procedures to deal with them (José Noé García, focus group B). Although much remains to be done on the environmental front, the alliance put in place some basic controls. Staff from the community association monitor the watersheds regularly, and aqueduct leaders have proposed a project to create a plant nursery to restore the area. José Noé García felt that following this partnership they had gained privileged access to the CVC, and could now report environmental violations in the Farrallones forest reserve (focus group B). The next step is to develop a territorial planning strategy for the watershed, although resources are lacking to achieve this goal. The project also had an important spinoff: La Sirena is working with three neighbouring aqueducts to help them improve their service and to jointly protect the watersheds they all rely on. Following this experience, Sintrambiente and Sintracuavalle have pushed new collaborative projects with other rural aqueducts, one of which was formalized in November 2013 during the final workshop organized as part of our participatory research. Conclusions Public sector unions in Colombia have actively defended alternatives to privatization, well beyond the narrow interests of their members. In the water sector, they have joined forces with NGOs, environmental activists and citizen movements in developing anti-privatization strategies. Our case study of the labour–community alliance between La Sirena, Sintracuavalle and Sintrambiente shows that this early initiative in defence of public water has served to strengthen both local management of this essential service and to build solidarity. But for all their potential, labour–community alliances such as the one established in La Sirena have limitations. They are often ad hoc and ensuring their long-term sustainability can be difficult. The pressing need for mass support often arises when the union is weakened and workers’ capacity to fund community work is limited. In the case of Sintracuavalle, workers recognized that it was the ‘best time to engage, but the worst financial moment’ (Lina Cañas, joint research planning meeting) given that workers have been forced to accept concessions from their employer, mostly with regard to pensions.

bé la n g e r dumont ier et al . | 35 Another challenge is organizational. It is daunting to try to coordinate between unions that have different mandates (e.g. environmental protection and water delivery) and that face their own internal tensions and contradictions. Sintracuavalle has benefited from strong institutional backing from Acuavalle’s management, but it has been harder for Sintrambiente to gain recognition for its social work from the CVC, complicated by the fact that the union is a larger, national-level entity and is more fragmented territorially (personal interview with Harold Humberto Fernández, Sintrambiente). Even more difficult is cooperation between unions and communities, due to the fact that they have distinct organizational forms and capacities. In our case study, the communities’ deep mistrust of organized workers, often characterized within Colombian society as a ‘labour aristocracy’, coupled with their fierce defence of local water systems from external control loomed large in efforts to facilitate cooperation. But in the end, workers helped reinforce the community aqueduct’s autonomy by taking concrete steps to erect operational and legal safeguards. They did so despite significant differences with their own public enterprise model, recognizing the importance of the community-owned water systems as functional and culturally appropriate alternatives to privatization. Genuine exchange and reciprocity between unions and communities need to overcome the reality that these organizations are in an inherently asymmetrical relationship, since unions have stronger formal organizational, human and financial resources. Recognizing these inherent imbalances, let alone dealing with them, makes labour– community alliances a test of political wills from the start. Nonetheless, such collaboration has the potential to foster better appreciation of the unique contributions of community aqueducts: their vision of the commons, responsible consumption, economic solidarity and selfgovernment, among others. Considering how challenging it was to bring together a relatively small and dedicated set of volunteers to pursue clearly defined shortterm goals in La Sirena, it will not be easy to broaden such alliances. Our case study shows that so far unions have preferred to replicate the model in small communities where it is easier to navigate local politics and where they can set objectives that yield immediate results. Despite these challenges, we see three main positive lessons that can be taken from this research. First, a labour–community alliance is only a first step in creating solidarity over the longer term. It is an

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empowerment tool that, in this case, contributed to both the betterment of the community aqueduct and residents’ material circumstances, as well as a learning process of movement building that has deep roots in struggles for public services in Colombia (see Novelli 2010; Perera 2013). Through cooperation, the social, environmental and political vision of all actors involved is enriched, and solid foundations are laid for alternatives. Second, in demonstrating that non-state public water provision is possible, such local initiatives can constitute compelling examples of alternatives to privatization within a larger political struggle. The case presented here has contributed to the building of such a wider political movement in a number of ways: via the revitalization and reframing of union priorities and concerns, expanding them beyond the workplace; by inspiring participation in direct action in support of public services; and through the development of union–community solidarities and collective identities around the defence of public provision. Third, in a globalized world, systemic change requires engagement at levels above the local. Our case study, along with other research (Novelli 2011), has demonstrated the importance of transnational support in local labour struggles to defend public services in Colombia. In turn, local alternatives feed those active in the global struggle to advance public options to neoliberal restructuring and the privatization of public services. The regional water networks Red VIDA and PlataformaAPC, as well as the global federation of public sector unions, PSI, have contributed as much as they have benefited from the success of the alliance in La Sirena. The experience is allowing them to show that there are alternatives and to spark action elsewhere. Members of PlataformaAPC have launched various cooperation agreements across Latin America that have a lot of potential to create solidarity across national borders and across different forms of civil society organizations. As one participant in our research put it, it is round one in the ‘ants’ fight against the elephant’. Acknowledgements We wish to acknowledge the generous support of Acueducto La Sirena, Sintrambiente, Sintracuavalle, Red VIDA and, particularly, Margarita López. The expertise of water activists and union representatives interviewed was also

invaluable. In addition, we would like to thank Javier Márquez Valderrama, Juan Camilo Mira and Marcela López for their insightful suggestions for revisions. Any errors remain the responsibility of the authors.

bé la n g e r dumont ier et al . | 37 Notes 1 All translations from the Spanish original were done by the authors unless otherwise indicated. 2 In rural areas coverage is 69.6 per cent for sanitation and 69.5 per cent for water (Vargas Nuñes 2013). 3 Even though the term ‘public– community partnership’ is broadly used to define this type of cooperation, we prefer using the word ‘alliance’ in this context for two reasons. First, the ‘public– community partnership’ category is broad and can include agreements between city councils and communities, as promoted by Plataforma-APC in Antioquia for example (see Márquez Valderrama 2012,

8). Second, the term ‘alliance’ allows us to anchor our research in the literature on ‘labour–community alliances’, which provides a useful theoretical framework. 4 Red VIDA (Vigilancia Interamericana para la Defensa y Derecho al Agua) was created in 2003 by 54 organizations from 16 countries in the Americas to defend water as a common good and a human right. See http:// laredvida.org/. 5 Details about the different kinds of interviews and group discussions held, including their composition, dates and locations can be found at the end of this chapter.

Joint research planning, field visits and focus groups Joint research planning meeting with Sintracuavalle (seven participants), Cali, October 7, 2013. Joint research planning meeting with the community aqueduct (six participants), La Sirena, October 15, 2013. Field visit to Sevilla’s Acuavalle branch and to community aqueduct Acuamiramelba with Sintracuavalle and Sintrambiente (five participants), October 20, 2013. Focus group A with Sintracuavalle and Sintrambiente (seven participants), Cali, October 21, 2013.

Focus group B with the community aqueduct (12 participants), La Sirena, October 24, 2013. Group interview CVC (four participants from Sintrambiente), Cali, October 28, 2013. Workshop with unions and three aqueducts (13 participants: four from Sintracuavalle, one from Sintrambiente, four from Acueducto La Sirena, three from Acueducto COSTA, one from Acueducto Acuamiramelba), Buga, November 9, 2013.

Interviews Rodrigo Hernán Acosta Barrios, Unión Nacional de Usuarios y Defensores de los Servicios Públicos (UNUSP), personal interview, Bogotá, September 26, 2013. Marta Esperanza Cañon Parra, Corporación MECCA, personal interview, Bogotá, September 26, 2013. Harold Humberto Fernández, Sintrambiente, personal

interview, Buga, November 9, 2013. Marcela López, PhD candidate, email communication, June 16, 2014. Javier Márquez Valderrama, Corporación Penca de Sábila, email communication, June 11, 2014. Diego Andrés Martinez Zambrano, CENSAT Agua Viva, personal interview, Bogotá, September 30, 2013.

38 | towo ne Juan Camilo Mira, environmentalist and advisor on water and sustainability, email communication, June 9, 2014.

Carlos Alberto Posada Castañeda, Sintrambiente, personal interview, La Melba, October 20, 2013.

References Almeida, P. 2006. Social movement unionism, social movement partyism, and policy outcomes: Health care privatization in El Salvador. In H. Johnston and P. Almedia (eds.), Latin American social movements, 57–73. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Amnesty International. 2007. Trade unionists under attack in Colombia: Defending the rights of education, health and public service workers. www.amnesty.org/en/library/asset/ AMR23/033/2007/en/a56cfc6fd36a-11dd-a329-2f46302a8cc6/ amr230332007en.pdf (accessed September 4, 2014). Barchiesi, F. 2007. Privatization and the historical trajectory of ‘Social Movement Unionism’: A case study of municipal workers in Johannesburg, South Africa. International Labor and Working Class History, 71(50): 50–69. Cárdenas Lesmes, R. M. 2011. Carta del Director por el rescate de Acuavalle. Portafolio, May 8. Colmenares, R. and Mira, J. C. 2007. Paradojas del agua en Colombia: Privatización y alternativas públicas. In H. D. Correa (ed.), Colombia: ¿Un futuro sin agua? Bogotá: Ecofondo, Foro Nacional Ambiental and Ediciones Desde Abajo. Correa, H. D. 2006. Acueductos comunitarios, patrimonio público y movimientos sociales. Notas y preguntas hacia una caracterización social y política. Bogotá: Ecofondo. Defensoría del Pueblo. 2010. El derecho humano al agua: Diagnóstico de la accesibilidad económica y el acceso

a la información. Bogotá: Defensoría Delegada para los Derechos Colectivos y del Ambiente. Dugard, J. and Drage, K. 2012. Shields and swords: Legal tools for public water. MSP Occasional Paper No. 17. Cape Town: MSP. FAO. 2000. Colombia. www.fao.org/nr/ water/aquastat/countries_regions/ COL/index.stm (accessed September 4, 2014). FWW (Food and Water Watch). 2009. Colombia’s movement for water democracy and constitutional reform. Briefing Paper, June. Washington, DC: FWW. Garcés, Andrew Willis. 2009. Colombia: Fighting development banks for the human right to water. Upside Down World, March 30. HRW (Human Rights Watch). 2013. World report 2013: Colombia. www. hrw.org/world-report/2013/countrychapters/colombia?page=1 (accessed September 4, 2014). ILO (International Labour Organization). 2013. Ilostat Database. Colombia. Trade Unions and Collective Bargaining. Trade union density rate by institutional sector (as a percent of total employment). www.ilo.org/ilostat/faces/home/ statisticaldata/data_by_country?_adf. ctrl-state=16vzyvumn_211&_ afrLoop=267717752190751 (accessed May 9, 2014). López, M. (ed.). 2013. Historia y lucha por el agua en manos públicas. Cali: Sintracuavalle and ISP. http://issuu. com/otapias/docs/30-01-13_historia_ y_lucha_por_el_agua-sintracuaval (accessed September 10, 2014).

bé la n g e r dumont ier et al . | 39 López Rivera, M. n.d. Water distribution as an indicator of social inequality. The case of Medellín, Colombia. DesigALdades.net. www.fflch.usp. br/centrodametropole/antigo/static/ uploads/marcela_l.pdf (accessed September 4, 2014). Márquez Valderrama, J. 2012. La defensa del agua y la vida en Colombia: Una lucha que apenas comienza. Ottawa and Medellín: Blue Planet Project and Corporación Ecológica y Cultural Penca de Sábila. Novelli, M. 2004. Globalisations, social movement unionism and new internationalisms: The role of strategic learning in the transformation of the Municipal Workers Union of EMCALI. Globalisation, Societies and Education, 2(2): 161–190. Novelli, M. 2010. Learning to win: Exploring knowledge and strategy development in anti-privatisation struggles in Colombia. In A. Choudry and D. Kapoor (eds.), Learning from the ground up: Global perspectives on social movements and knowledge production, 121–138. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Novelli, M. 2011. Thinking through transnational solidarity: The case of Sintraemcali in Colombia. In A. Bieler and I. Lindberg (eds.), Global restructuring, labour and the challenges for transnational solidarity, 147–162. Oxford and New York: Routledge. Perera, V. 2013. From Cochabamba to Colombia: Travelling repertoires in Latin American water struggles. In F. Sultana and A. Loftus (eds.), The right to water: Politics, governance and social struggles, 241–256. New York: Earthscan. Perera, V. 2014. Engaged universals and community economies: The (human) right to water in Colombia. Antipode: 1–19.

Roa García, M. C. and Pulido Rozo, A. 2014. El reto de la equidad rural– urbana en el acceso al agua de uso doméstico en Colombia. Ambiente y Sostenibilidad, 4: 3–15. Ross, S. 2013. Social unionism and union power in public sector unions. In S. Ross and L. Savage (eds.), Public sector unions in the age of austerity, 59–64. Winnipeg: Fernwood. Salazar Restrepo, B. 2011. El PND, el servicio de agua y saneamiento básico. Se agudiza el proceso de privatización del agua en Colombia. Desde Abajo, May 21. Sintracuavalle. 2012. Convenio de cooperación asocio públicocomunitario Sintracuavalle– Sintrambiente–Acueducto La Sirena, Cali. Diciembre 20, Santiago de Cali, accessed online April 12, 2013, at http://www. plataformaapc.org/im/Documentos/ SINTRACUAVALLElaSIRENA.pdf. Sintracuavalle. 2013. Asocio público por el agua en manos públicas: Acuavalle–CVC. Revista Sintracuavalle, January 3. Smits, S., Rojas, J. and Tamayo, P. 2013. The impact of support to communitybased rural water service providers: Evidence from Colombia. Water Alternatives 6(3): 384–404. Spronk, S., Crespo, C. and Olivera, M. 2012. Struggles for water justice in Latin America: Public and ‘socialpublic’ alternatives. In D. McDonald and G. Ruiters (eds.), Alternatives to privatization: Public options for essential services in the global South, 421–452. New York: Routledge. Spronk, S., Crespo, C. and Olivera, M. 2014. Modernization and the boundaries of public water in Uruguay. In D. McDonald (ed.), Rethinking corporatization and public services in the global South, 107–135. London: Zed Books.

40 | towo ne Spronk, S. and Terhorst, P. 2012. Social movement struggles for public services. In D. McDonald and G. Ruiters (eds.), Alternatives to privatization: Public options for essential services in the global South, 133–156. New York: Routledge. Uribe Botero, E. 2005. La descentralización en el manejo de los recursos hídricos: Asunto de equidad, transparencia y eficiencia. Bogotá: Fundación

Alejandro Ángel Escobar and Foro Nacional Ambiental. Urrea, D. and Cárdenas, A. 2011. Aguas sin planes ni dueños: Política de privatización y procesos de resistencia en Colombia. Bogotá: CENSAT Agua Viva. Vargas Nuñes, P. M. 2012. Congreso pone lupa a alto gasto en Planes de Agua. Portafolio, May 29. Vargas Nuñes, P. M. 2013. Planes departamentales de agua nada que despegan. Portafolio, April 30.

3 | OLD TRAS H , N E W I D E A S : P UB L IC WASTE MANAGEMENT AND INFORMAL RECLAIMERS

Melanie Samson

The use of informal workers in municipal service delivery is seen as a key part of the neoliberal privatization agenda, which is eroding the capacity of the formal public sector and the rights of workers employed within it. Informalization is increasingly used to undercut the wages and collective power of unionized labour and to hollow out the local state around the world (Coyle 1985; Doogan 1997; Meagher 2013; Miraftab 2004; Patterson and Pinch 1995; Peck 2001; Peck and Tickell 2002; Pinch 1989). However, in many cities across the globe a different process is also taking place, as organized informal ‘reclaimers’, who salvage reusable and recyclable materials from solid waste, mobilize to secure formal integration into municipal waste management systems. In these cases the engagement of informal workers in service delivery potentially counters the neoliberal drive because of a genesis and dynamic different from the top-down informalization described above, which entrenches it. Belo Horizonte (Brazil), Pune (India) and Bogotá (Colombia) are positive illustrations of these developments. This chapter argues that in these cities the formal inclusion of reclaimers in waste management systems is expanding both the public sector and the public sphere, transforming relations between the state, the formal and informal economy, and residents, forging a more inclusive, participatory and democratic state. The chapter begins with an overview of the role of reclaimers in municipal waste management systems in cities in the South and explains why formally including them has the potential to counter neoliberalization trends in municipal service delivery. I briefly sketch out the approaches adopted in Belo Horizonte, Pune, and Bogotá, and then discuss the implications these examples have for our understanding

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of how new political imaginaries of ‘the public’ can be developed and achieved in innovative ways. Reclaiming waste In advanced capitalist countries, formal industry played a critical role in the establishment of municipal recycling programmes to stave off calls for more radical transformation of environmentally destructive forms of industrial production (Rogers 2005). By contrast, in cities in the South, formal waste management systems overwhelmingly remain focused on the collection and disposal of waste. In many of these cities, local recycling systems were created informally by reclaimers, and the salvaging of materials from waste has typically been illegal. Reclaimers must literally fight to gain access to garbage dumps and face harassment and arrest by police for collecting materials on the landfills and in the streets. They also battle profound social stigmatization (Beall 1997; Chikarmane and Narayan 2005; Hayami, Dikshit and Mishra 2006; Moreno-Sánchez and Maldonado 2006; Nas and Jaffe 2004; Samson 2009a; Wilson et al. 2006). Although recycling systems created by reclaimers usually remain informal they form an integral, if unacknowledged, part of municipal waste management systems and greatly benefit municipalities. In 2007, research conducted in six cities1 by the Collaborative Working Group on Solid Waste Management in Low- and Middle-Income Countries, and the German technical cooperation agency GTZ, found that in three of the cities reclaimers collected between 20 and 23 per cent of waste entering the system. In Cairo the figure was as high as 66 per cent. When organic, reusable, and recyclable materials are removed from the waste stream, municipalities save money on transport and landfill costs. The report’s authors estimated that the 80,000 people working informally as reclaimers in the six cities saved the municipalities a staggering €38.2 million per year. By reducing the need for virgin materials, and saving landfill space, reclaimers also make important environmental contributions (WIEGO 2014). Increasingly, municipalities in the South are expanding their formal waste management systems to include recycling. There are two very different catalysts for this development. On the one hand, international donors are pushing municipalities to recycle as part of what is considered a ‘modern’ waste management system. On the other, in cities where reclaimers are organized they are mobilizing to demand

mcdonal samson d | 43 formal recognition and inclusion. As the examples of Pune and Bogotá, as well as many others from around the world (Samson 2009a; Wilson et al. 2006) demonstrate, often they are the first to place recycling on the municipality’s agenda. Within standard waste management discourse and practice it is assumed that modern means technology-intensive. Reclaimers are seen as atavistic, dirty and marring the image of the city. Recycling systems that exclude reclaimers are frequently imported from advanced capitalist countries, and municipalities contract private companies to implement them. Such efforts to establish formal recycling systems capture a sphere of accumulation created by reclaimers, dispossessing them of their livelihood. Enclosing waste and excluding reclaimers from service delivery is yet another form of accumulation by dispossession (Harvey 2005), which forms part of the neoliberalization of the state (Samson 2009b). Including reclaimers in waste management systems can sometimes reinforce neoliberal dynamics too. For example, a number of South African municipalities granted contracts to private companies to recycle on landfills. Only a few existing reclaimers were authorized to continue collecting materials. The situation of these informal reclaimers deteriorated as the majority were barred from working, while those who continued to work were no longer free to sell to the buyer of their choice. Reclaimers did not receive wages or benefits, and they were paid lower rates for their materials as the private companies took a cut of the selling price (Samson 2008). However, this is not the only possible scenario. When the inclusion of reclaimers in municipal waste management systems is driven by reclaimers themselves, with a clear agenda to transform both their status and the nature of the state, it can challenge the logic of neoliberalism and promote a more inclusive, democratic waste management alternative. Three innovative approaches The formal integration of reclaimers has taken different forms in Belo Horizonte, Pune, and Bogotá. The particular approach in each city was influenced by the political orientations of reclaimer organizations, their support organizations, and the political parties in power, as well as the reclaimers–state relationship and the nature of the space that reclaimers had already carved for themselves informally within the waste management system.

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Belo Horizonte, Brazil: a social covenant In Belo Horizonte, reclaimers are formally integrated into waste management via a social covenant between the municipality and reclaimer cooperatives. This unique approach was developed by Asmare (the city’s first reclaimer cooperative), the street pastoral of the Catholic Church (Pastoral de Rua) and the local council governed by the Workers’ Party (PT). When Asmare was formed in May 1990 it had a combative relationship with the municipality. But when the PT was elected in 1993, the party had a political agenda of transforming the state, promoting participatory democracy and working with the previously marginalized and excluded. It was therefore open to negotiating a social covenant with Asmare and Pastoral de Rua. The municipality had a long history of collecting waste from households, but had never been involved in recycling. The covenant made Asmare the city’s preferred partner for selective collection and committed the municipality to erecting recycling containers where residents could deposit recyclables, collecting the recyclables, providing Asmare with warehouses for sorting materials, providing reclaimers with literacy and skills training and health and safety equipment,2 and conducting environmental education with residents around the importance of recycling. Individual reclaimers collecting in the streets continued to earn their income from the sale of recyclables. Importantly, the covenant required the municipality to provide Asmare with a monthly subsidy, which it used for organizational costs. In subsequent years the municipality began to collect recyclables from homes in certain parts of the city to be delivered to the cooperatives and the system was expanded to include newly formed reclaimer cooperatives. In cooperatives that receive recyclables collected by the municipality, members perform jobs such as sorting, cleaning and bailing materials and are paid a wage by the cooperative. Recognizing that the formal inclusion of reclaimers was not just a technical issue, the municipality formed a Social Mobilization Unit in the waste management department staffed by social scientists tasked with transforming social attitudes toward reclaimers and building their capacities. Asmare established a bar and restaurant run by reclaimers to achieve similar goals, and for a number of years the cooperative and the Social Mobilization Unit worked together to host a pre-carnival in which reclaimers and workers officially employed by the municipality to sweep the streets and collect and dispose of waste wore costumes

mcdonal samson d | 45 they made out of recycled materials, foregrounding the talents and skills of people previously derided and dismissed by the city’s residents (Dias and Cidrin 2008; Dias 2011a; Horn 2008; Samson 2009a). Initially Belo Horizonte’s integrated waste management system was governed by a Collegial Board, which included Asmare and Pastoral de Rua. When more cooperatives were formed the Collegial Board was not sufficiently inclusive and stopped functioning. In 2003 the Belo Horizonte Waste and Citizenship Forum was formed. The Forum includes all reclaimer cooperatives and relevant stakeholders in the city. Such forums have been established at the local and national levels throughout the country to develop guidelines for integrating reclaimer organizations and allocating public resources for waste management (Dias 2011b; Dias and Cidrin 2008). Although Belo Horizonte was a pioneer in formally integrating reclaimers, in subsequent years the city’s initiatives have been bolstered by developments at the national level, including: the formation of the radical Movimento Nacional dos Catadores de Materiais Recicláveis (MNCR), a national movement of reclaimers allied to other Brazilian social movements; the election of the PT nationally; and the adoption of numerous national laws promoting integration of reclaimers into municipal waste systems (Dias and Cidrin 2008).

Pune, India: challenging contracting models The formal integration of reclaimers into the waste management system in Pune is a form of co-production that explicitly challenges neoliberal approaches of the contracting state (Chikarmane 2014; Samson 2009a). The process has been driven by the Kagad Kach Patra Kashtakari Panchayat (KKPKP) trade union. KKPKP was formed in 1993 after feminists from SNDT Women’s University approached women waste pickers to try and assist in increasing their daughters’ school attendance. Together they realized that if reclaimers could access segregated waste their incomes would increase enough that they would not require their daughters’ assistance, freeing time for them to attend school. This goal provided the impetus for the formation of the union (Chikarmane and Narayan 2005). KKPKP began by using Freire’s methodology (2000 [1968]) to develop members’ identities as workers. It then mobilized to end police harassment and demand recognition from the municipality for the reclaimers’ economic and environmental contributions. Research

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conducted by the union and allied academics showed that each waste picker contributed US$5 free labour to the municipality every month, and that waste pickers saved the municipality US$316,455 in transport costs (cited in Chikarmane 2012, 3). Eventually the union secured official identity cards for members and won educational and healthcare benefits from local and state governments for members and their families (Chikarmane and Narayan 2005). In 2000 the national government adopted the Municipal Solid Waste Rules, which for the first time required municipalities to ensure segregation of waste, door-to-door collection of waste and recyclables, and the processing of recyclable materials (Chikarmane and Narayan 2005; KKPKP 2009). Previously, the Pune municipality had not been involved in these activities, all of which had been conducted by reclaimers. Fearing the municipality would contract a private company and dispossess its members, KKPKP sought an agreement with the municipality to provide these services (KKPKP 2009). After a successful pilot project, in February 2007 the municipality approved the formation of a cooperative of reclaimers to perform door-todoor collection. Political changes in the council nearly scuttled the decision. Ultimately it was approved, but with the requirement that the cooperative include urban poor who had not previously worked as reclaimers (SNDT Women’s University and Chintan 2008). The Solid Waste Collection and Handling (SWaCH) Cooperative was formed in October 2007 and a year later entered a five-year memorandum of understanding with the municipality to provide door-to-door collection of segregated waste in Pune. The approach deepened and expanded relationships between the state, informal workers and residents in a number of ways. Reclaimers were granted secure ownership over recyclables and continued to earn an income from their sale. They also charged residents a monthly service fee, with lower rates in slum areas supplemented by the municipality (SNDT Women’s University and Chintan 2008, 51–52, 106). As of April 2014, SWaCH’s 2,300 members collected 600 tons of waste a day (90 of which was recyclable) from 375,000 non-slum households and 28,716 slum households (Chikarmane 2014, 11). With the formation of SWaCH, reclaimers’ incomes increased by 40 per cent, their daily working hours decreased and they gained a weekly rest period (personal communication with Malati Gadgil, former coordinator, January 20, 2015). In order to increase accountability of reclaimers

mcdonal samson d | 47 to residents and strengthen relations, SWaCH members collected fees directly from service recipients and reclaimers reported directly to local citizen’s groups (SNDT Women’s University and Chintan 2008, 106). Recognizing that it would take time and support for reclaimers to establish a financially viable cooperative, the agreement required the municipality to educate residents and provide SWaCH with training as well as funds for handcart maintenance, uniforms, gloves, insurance and other essentials for the first five years (SNDT Women’s University and Chintan 2008, 108). The agreement expired in 2013 and SWaCH no longer receives support from the municipality, but services continue to be provided and governed in the same manner (Chikarmane 2014).

Bogotá, Colombia: remunicipalization Two distinct initiatives have been undertaken in Bogotá to formally include reclaimers in waste management. The first was initiated by local government as part of a privatization process, while the second was driven by reclaimers themselves and led leftist mayor Gustavo Petro to re-orient the service to prioritize social and environmental justice. Colombia boasts the oldest known reclaimer movement in the world, with the first cooperative formed in Medellín in 1962 (Medina 2007). The Asociación de Recicladores de Bogotá (ARB) was formed in 1990 by three cooperatives fighting the closure of their dump. By 2013 it included 17 organizations (Acosta Táutiva and Ortiz Olaya, 6). As in other Colombian cities, the NGO Fundación Social provided crucial support for the formation of the ARB (Medina 2007). Government has been involved in the collection and disposal of waste in Bogotá since 1875 but not in recycling (Ruiz-Restrepo and Barnes 2010). In 1994, when the council decided to privatize waste management, the municipal workers went on strike and the council contracted the ARB (with support from Fundación Social) to collect waste in 10 per cent of the city. But in 1996, the municipality turned around and awarded seven-year contracts to large private companies, shutting out reclaimers from the formal system (Ruiz-Restrepo 2008; Ruiz-Restrepo and Barnes 2010). The ARB secured international partners and legal assistance to bid for the new tender issued in 2003. However, the law stipulated that only stock corporations could provide waste services in large cities, and the tender required direct experience in cities of more than five

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million people in the preceding five years. The ARB challenged these exclusions in the Constitutional Court, arguing that they undermined both reclaimers’ human rights and their constitutional right to compete (Ruiz-Restrepo and Barnes 2010). The court ruled it was unfair to exclude cooperatives from bidding as this would deepen reclaimers’ marginalization. It further ruled that as a vulnerable group reclaimers merited special state protection and ordered the state to build their capacity to compete for future tenders. Unfortunately the municipality had fast-tracked issuing the contracts, so the ARB needed to wait for the next tender (Ruiz-Restrepo 2008). The municipality did nothing to build the ARB’s capacity before issuing a new tender in 2011. The reclaimers returned to the court, which blocked the tender and ordered the municipality to give reclaimers exclusive right to recyclables and pay them for extracting recyclables from the waste stream (Parra forthcoming). Once again the municipality ignored the ruling. However, in January 2012 Gustavo Petro assumed office as mayor. A former leftist guerrillero, he saw the requirement to formally include reclaimers as an opening to transform the waste management system (Samson, Parra and Abizaid 2014). He adopted a plan committing the city to creating a zero waste system, registering and paying reclaimers, and remunicipalizing waste (Parra forthcoming; Valenzuela 2013). The municipality began paying reclaimers on March 21, 2013 based on an amount per kilogram collected in addition to the payment they received for selling the same materials to designated buyers. By December 2014, the 8,112 registered reclaimers had approximately doubled their incomes to US$200 a month.3 However, Petro’s process to end privatization enraged the right and was sabotaged by the existing contractors. As a result, he only partially succeeded in taking back public control of the service (Valenzuela 2013). Even this partial remunicipalization had a tremendous effect, reducing the waste management budget by 11 per cent in 2013.4 Nevertheless, on December 9, 2013, the country’s conservative Inspector General ordered that Petro be removed from office and banned from politics for 15 years for endangering public health and violating the principle of free enterprise (Vieira 2013). This precipitated a political crisis, and tens of thousands of protestors took to the streets (Wyss 2013). Several court cases challenged Petro’s removal and the court reinstated him in April 2014. However, threats to remove him continued, starkly

mcdonal samson d | 49 revealing the profound political stakes in reversing privatization and progressively transforming the public sector. Democratizing and expanding the public sphere These three municipal experiences of formally including reclaimers in waste management represent a number of innovations in expanding and progressively transforming public services. Instead of exploiting the reclaimers as a source of cheap, informal labour, in both Bogotá and Pune reclaimers are paid for the service they provide and still earn an income from the sale of recyclables. As noted above, this has increased their income security and their monthly earnings. The Belo Horizonte agreement does not include payment to individual reclaimers, but by providing a subsidy to their cooperatives it boosts organizational capacity to develop collective initiatives (such as joint sale of recyclables in order to achieve higher prices and the building of a plastics recycling plant) that allow reclaimers to increase their work security, move up the value chain and improve their incomes (Dias and Cidrin 2008, 30). Even before KKPKP negotiated for SWaCH to be contracted by the municipality, it secured health and welfare benefits from the state by using research and mobilization to successfully argue that reclaimers saved the municipality a significant amount of money by providing an important municipal service for free, but were enduring the costs in their own bodies (Chikarmane and Narayan 2005; SNDT Women’s University and Chintan 2008). This was important recognition that the state bears responsibility for people performing municipal work even if it does not employ them, establishing an important principle not only for other informal workers but also for workers employed by privatized and subcontracted companies delivering municipal services. Additionally, it expanded the notion of what constitutes a municipal service and laid the basis for KKPKP to negotiate a formal agreement with the municipality by establishing that recycling must be part of the municipal waste management system and that reclaimers founded this service. This expansion of the understanding of what constitutes a municipal service was taken further in Belo Horizonte, where, in addition to formally including collection of recyclables, the municipality transformed its very conceptualization of waste management from being a purely technical issue to also being social, political, economic

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and environmental (Dias 2011a; Samson 2009a). This required the municipality to restructure how the service was governed to include social partners through the Collegial Board and the Waste and Citizenship Forum. According to Dias and Cidrin (2008, 32–3), this shift to collaborative governance created a more democratic culture in the waste department, increased its regulatory capacity, strengthened reclaimer cooperatives, raised their profiles, and boosted reclaimers’ self-esteem and professional recognition. The creation of the Social Mobilization Unit and co-hosting of the pre-carnival festivities were perhaps the most creative and transformative initiatives of the Belo Horizonte municipality. Transforming how reclaimers see themselves and are seen by residents and the state is a crucial preliminary step in processes of formal integration (Butler 2004), as without such an ‘ontological insurrection’ reclaimers are dismissed as ‘scavengers’ who do not have the right to appear in the public sphere, let alone negotiate formal agreements with the state (Samson 2009b, 18). Significantly, in Belo Horizonte it was the state that expanded its own mandate to work with the reclaimers to enable reclaimers to claim their place in the public sphere. To a lesser extent the Pune municipality also accepted this role (SNDT Women’s University and Chintan 2008). In Bogotá, the reclaimers had to wage this ‘ontological insurrection’ against the state as they struggled to be accepted as legitimate stakeholders in municipal waste management. Transforming how residents see reclaimers is important on a number of levels. It is crucial in ensuring they are not harassed and marginalized and are able to do their work. In Pune, where reclaimers are paid directly by residents, it increases payment rates and accountability of service providers to residents. KKPKP made a strategic choice to have residents pay reclaimers and oversee service delivery to facilitate the forging of new social relations as this was seen as an important aspect of transforming how the state, workers, and residents relate to one another and are all involved in the provision of public services (KKPKP 2009; Samson 2009a; SNDT Women’s University and Chintan 2008). None of the municipalities explored in this chapter democratized and expanded the public sphere and the public sector in all of the ways identified above. But the one commonality was that the processes to formally include reclaimers were driven by their own organizations, which explicitly sought to transform the public sector and their place within it. There is, therefore, an important relationship between

mcdonal samson d | 51 progressive transformation of public services and the existence of strong, democratic reclaimer organizations with the capacities to develop political demands and strategies rooted in clear visions for the transformation of the state, and the ability to mobilize to achieve their goals. These capacities were shaped by a number of factors, including: the historical development and nature of the municipal waste management systems; the orientation of the political parties in power locally and nationally; national policy and legislation related to waste management; the strength and nature of broader social movements and how reclaimers relate to them; the extent and nature of support from government, NGOs and other civil society organizations; the political orientation of these external supporters; and the political orientation, vision for the state, and strategic and tactical decisions of the reclaimer organizations themselves. The development of formal waste management systems has subsequently followed different trajectories in the different cities, and has had profoundly different implications for the types of labour performed by informal reclaimers and the strategic choices they face as municipalities seek to formally include recycling in their waste management systems. In Pune the municipality had never conducted door-to-door waste collection. Reclaimers could therefore begin to formally deliver this service without negatively affecting existing municipal workers or narrowing the public sector (KKPKP 2009). However, in Bogotá, the municipality had a long history of collecting waste from residents (Ruiz-Restrepo and Barnes 2010). When ARB was contracted by the municipality to provide this service it undermined existing municipal workers and served the privatization agenda of the local state, creating a strategic and political dilemma for the reclaimers. In Belo Horizonte, a different balance was struck as municipal workers collect recyclables from households and deliver them to the reclaimer cooperatives, preserving both types of employment (Samson 2009a). The wider political context also shapes the openings available to reclaimers as well as their imaginaries for the transformation of the state. The strength and orientation of political parties and social movements and the legislative context are particularly relevant. As Dias and Cidrin argue, reclaimers in Belo Horizonte benefited from the rise to power of the Workers’ Party (PT), first within the city and then nationally (Dias and Cidrin 2008). The PT was born of an alliance

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with social movements and had pledged to democratize the state and to transform society and the economy, to meet the needs of the oppressed and marginalized. Strong, radical social movements in other sectors (such as the Landless People’s Movement) provided inspiration and solidarity for reclaimers, and the national reclaimer movement is explicitly committed to a leftist agenda and democratization of the state, economy and society. The decentralization of power and authority to municipalities created political space for the local council to undertake initiatives to include reclaimers, and once the PT took power nationally it passed legislation that bolstered local initiatives to formally integrate reclaimers and improve their status and conditions (Dias and Cidrin 2008; Samson 2009a). By contrast, reclaimers in Bogotá function in a context in which power is highly centralized around an extremely repressive, rightwing political oligarchy, and trade unions and social movements are violently suppressed. It is harder for reclaimers to imagine a radical democratization of the state, and they have fewer allies. Unlike in Brazil, prior to Petro’s election they had neither a government that was a willing partner in a transformative project, nor progressive legislation to bolster their claims, and both decision makers actively opposed them. The one legal avenue readily available to them was a constitution rooted in neoliberal ‘new constitutionalism’ that combines commitments to human rights with the entrenchment of rights to private property and free economic competition (Gill 1998). This political context shaped the tactical and strategic choices of the ARB to rely on constitutional litigation and frame themselves as ‘entrepreneurs’ (Ruiz-Restrepo and Barnes 2010, 95), avoiding challenge to neoliberalism. The political orientation of, and strategic choices made by reclaimer organizations are also shaped by their engagement with external supporters. Based on extensive research and experience working with the Asmare cooperative and the national reclaimer movement MNCR in Brazil, Dias has long argued that NGOs, political parties, and religious organizations (and I would add lawyers and academics) often play critical roles in organizing reclaimers and supporting their struggles (Dias 2000; Dias and Cidrin 2008), a point reaffirmed by research in a range of other contexts (Chikarmane and Narayan 2005; Medina 2007; Samson 2009a). Rosaldo also notes the role played by NGOs in forming the ARB in Bogotá and assisting it to win greater support from the state, and

mcdonal samson d | 53 argues that this challenges the thesis that NGOs deradicalize social movements (Rosaldo 2014). Yet, like the NGO-ization literature that he critiques, Rosaldo pays insufficient attention to the importance of the political orientations of specific NGOs being studied. As the KKPKP Secretariat argues in relation to the emergence of the reclaimer movement in India, the approaches that different support organizations take to organizing reclaimers depend on their political orientations and philosophies (Central Secretariat KKPKP 2009, 37). There is, therefore, a deeper critique, rooted in the need to interrogate the politics of particular support organizations and how they shape and influence the politics and goals of social movements. For example, although the ARB received significant support from lawyers, key members of the legal team did not support remunicipalization and had a narrower agenda that simply sought to include reclaimers within competitive, private sector service provision.5 They played a central role in framing the ARB’s vision for the inclusion of reclaimers in service delivery as entrepreneurs in a way that did not challenge neoliberalization (Ruiz-Restrepo and Barnes 2010, 95). By contrast, the imprint of feminist academics from SNDT University in Pune committed to Freire’s methodologies and socialist democratization of the state is evident in KKPKP’s focus on developing an alternative to contracting models and its demands for social benefits for reclaimers and their children. Comparative analysis of the social histories of reclaimer organizations in the three cities explored in this chapter demonstrates the crucial importance of developing a nuanced understanding of how the particular political commitments of support groups inform their approaches to organizing, their relations to reclaimers, the types of education and capacity building they conduct, the debates and networks they expose reclaimers to, and ultimately how they seek to influence the politics of the reclaimer movements. Reclaimers and their organizations do not, however, passively adopt the political orientations of their support organizations. At times the relationships can be fraught with political tensions, with reclaimers even needing to wrest control of their own organizations away from those who helped form them (Samson 2009a). As Dias notes, frequently reclaimer organizations engage with a number of NGOs with different political perspectives, each of which must be strategically engaged by the reclaimer organization.6 Ultimately, reclaimer organizations

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determine their own political principles, their vision for the state, and their strategies and tactics to achieve this vision. Their internal structures and decision-making processes shape how such positions are developed, the extent to which they are supported throughout the organization, and how members mobilize around them. Within every context, reclaimer organizations are capable of developing a range of different perspectives on how the state should be transformed, and the approaches they advocate represent political choices. The processes through which they make their strategic decisions therefore need to be critically analysed. Finally, the reclaimer organizations in Belo Horizonte, Pune, and Bogotá collaborate with others around the world through the Global Alliance of Waste Pickers. With the support of international networks such as Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO) and the Global Alliance for Incineration Alternatives (GAIA) they have shared their ideas and experiences in conferences and learning exchanges, and have taken inspiration from each other’s successes. For example, the Bogotá court case presented models of integration from India and Brazil to establish a precedent for paying reclaimers for the service they provide. But reclaimers’ experiences cannot simply be transplanted from one city to another. The failure of SWaCH in the municipality of Pimpri Chinchwad, despite the fact that the city neighbours Pune and the reclaimers are also represented by KKPKP (de Brito 2014), demonstrates the crucial importance of the local political context. Political differences among reclaimer organizations also affect the extent to which different approaches align. Through engaging with one another and sharing their experiences, reclaimer organizations can, however, assist each other to critically reflect on their own goals, strategies and tactics, and develop new visions for the state and their relationship to it. Taken together, these multiple approaches assist us in thinking through what it means to challenge the neoliberal state and democratize and expand the public sector and public sphere in the current conjuncture. Acknowledgements The author thanks Olga Abizaid for translating interviews and documents. Special thanks to the leaders of the

ARB, KKPKP and Asmare for their inspiration and for sharing their insights over a number of years. Thanks also

mcdonal samson d | 55 to Federico Parra, Ricardo Valencia, Sonia Dias, Lakshmi Naryan and Poornima Chikarmane, who work with the reclaimer movements in the cities included in this study, for generously

sharing their knowledge and analysis and for critically engaging the ideas developed in this chapter. Any gaps, inadequacies and errors remain my own.

Notes 1 Cairo, Egypt; Pune, India; Lima, Peru; Lusaka, Zambia; Ciuj-Napoca, Romania; and Quezon City, Philippines. 2 Although the municipality provided the reclaimers with health and safety equipment, as in many places in the world, the reclaimers often preferred not to use items such as gloves as they said that wearing them made it harder and slower to work (personal communication with Sonia Dias, January 14, 2015). 3 Personal communication with Federico Parra, WIEGO Latin American

Waste Picker Coordinator, January 21, 2015, based on information presented in the Centre for Economic Development in Bogotá’s newsletter on inflation, released on January 17, 2014. 4 Ibid. 5 Personal communication with Federico Parra, WIEGO Latin American Waste Picker Coordinator, December 13, 2013. 6 Personal communication with Sonia Dias, WIEGO Waste Sector Specialist, October 14, 2014.

References Acosta Táutiva, A. and Ortiz Olaya, R. 2013. Bogotá IEMS city report: Waste pickers linked to the Association of Waste Pickers of Bogotá. Draft Report for Inclusive Cities, March. Beall, J. 1997. Thoughts on poverty from a South Asian rubbish dump: Gender, inequality and household waste. IDS Bulletin 28(3): 73–90. Butler, J. 2004. Precarious life: The powers of mourning and violence. London: Verso. Central Secretariat KKPKP. 2009. The SWACHH National Alliance of Waste Pickers, India. In Refusing to be cast aside: Waste pickers organising around the world, 37–39. Boston, MA: WIEGO. Chikarmane, P. 2012. Integrating waste pickers into municipal solid waste management in Pune, India. WIEGO Policy Brief (Urban Studies, No. 8), July. Boston, MA: WIEGO. http:// wiego.org/sites/wiego.org/files/ publications/files/Chikarmane_

WIEGO_PB8.pdf (accessed June 22, 2015). Chikarmane, P. 2014. Of users, providers and the state: Solid waste management in Pune, India. Paper presented at Putting Public in Public Services: Research, Action and Equity in the Global South. Municipal Services Conference, Cape Town, April 13–16. Chikarmane, P. and Narayan, L. 2005. Organising the unorganised: A case study of the Kagad Kach Patra Kashtakari Panchayat (Trade Union of Waste-Pickers). http:// wiego.org/sites/wiego.org/files/ resources/files/Chikarmane_ Narayan_case-kkpkp.pdf (accessed June 22, 2015). Coyle, A. 1985. Going private: The implications for women’s work. Feminist Review 21: 5–23. De Brito, D. 2014. PCMC case study. March 2014. WIEGO. Unpublished report.

56 | tohnreee Dias, S. 2000. Integrating waste pickers for sustainable recycling. Paper presented at Planning for Integrated Solid Waste Management – CWG Workshop, September 18–21, Manila. Dias, S. 2011a. Integrating informal workers into selective waste collection: The case of Belo Horizonte, Brazil. WIEGO Policy Brief (Urban Policies) No. 4. Manchester: WIEGO. http:// wiego.org/sites/wiego.org/files/ publications/files/Dias_WIEGO_PB4. pdf (accessed June 22, 2015). Dias, S. 2011b. The municipal waste and citizenship forum: A platform for social inclusion and participation. WIEGO Policy Brief (Urban Policies) No. 5. Manchester: WIEGO. http:// wiego.org/sites/wiego.org/files/ publications/files/Dias_WIEGO_PB5. pdf (accessed June 22, 2015). Dias, S. and Cidrin, F. 2008. Integration of the informal recycling sector in solid waste management in Brazil. Study prepared for the sector project promotion of concepts for propoor and environmentally friendly closed-loop approaches in solid waste management (SWM). GTZ. www.gtz. de/de/dokumente/gtz2008-informalrecycling-brazil.pdf (accessed September 5, 2011). Doogan, K. 1997. The marketization of local services and the fragmentation of labour markets. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 21(2): 286–302. Freire, P. 2000 [1968]. Pedagogy of the oppressed. 30th anniversary edition. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing. Gill, S. 1998. New constitutionalism, democratisation and global political economy. Pacifica Review: Peace, Security and Global Change 10(1): 23–38. Harvey, D. 2005. The new imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hayami, Y., Dikshit, A. K. and Mishra, S. N. 2006. Waste pickers and collectors in Delhi: Poverty and environment in an urban informal sector. Journal of Development Studies, 41–69. Horn, P. 2008. Notes on visits to cooperatives. Brazil, March–April. Unpublished paper. KKPKP. 2009. Of dilemmas and difficult decisions. Unpublished document. Meagher, K. 2013. Unlocking the informal economy: A literature review on linkages between formal and informal economies in developing countries. WIEGO Working Paper No. 27. Boston, MA: WIEGO. http://wiego.org/sites/ wiego.org/files/publications/files/ Meagher-Informal-Economy-LitReview-WIEGO-WP27.pdf (accessed June 22, 2015). Medina, M. 2007. The world’s scavengers: Salvaging for sustainable consumption and production. Lanham, MD: Altamira Press. Miraftab, F. 2004. Neoliberalism and casualization of public sector services: The case of waste collection services in Cape Town, South Africa. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 28(4): 874–92. Moreno-Sánchez, R. and Higinio Maldonado, J. 2006. Surviving from garbage: The role of informal waste-pickers in a dynamic model of solid-waste management in developing countries. Environment and Development Economics 11(3): 371–91. Nas, P.J. M. and Jaffe, R. 2004. Informal waste management. Environment, Development and Sustainability 6(3): 337–53. Parra, F. forthcoming. Reciclaje, sí, pero con recicladores. Gestión pública del aprovechamiento con inclusión de recicladores: Un nuevo paradigma en el manejo de los residuos en Bogotá,

mcdonal samson d | 57 Colombia. WIEGO Technical Brief. Boston, MA: WIEGO. Patterson, A. and Pinch, P. 1995. ‘Hollowing out’ the local state: Compulsory competitive tendering and the restructuring of British public services. Environment and Planning A 27: 1437–62. Peck, J. 2001. Neoliberalizing states: Thin policies/hard outcomes. Progress in Human Geography 25(3): 445–55. Peck, J. and Tickell, A. 2002. Neoliberalizing space. Antipode 34(3): 380–404. Pinch, S. P. 1989. The restructuring thesis and the study of public services. Environment and Planning A 21: 905–26. Rogers, H. 2005. Gone tomorrow: The hidden life of garbage. New York: New Press. Rosaldo, M. 2014. Revolution in the garbage dump: The political and economic foundations of the Colombian recycler movement (1987–2012). January 26. Unpublished paper. Ruiz-Restrepo, A. 2008. The poor shall not remain small: Broadening access of the organized poor to the market by means of strengthening NPOS through constitutional justice (The case of the ARB-Colombia). https://www.academia.edu/1220500/ The_Poor_Shall_Not_Remain_Small_ Broadening_access_of_the_organized_ poor_to_the_market_by_means_ of_strengthening_NPOs_through_ Constitutional_Justice_The_ (accessed June 22, 2015). Ruiz-Restrepo, A. and Barnes, S. 2010. WIEGO Report on the Policy Environment of Informal Urban Waste Pickers and Artisanal Mine Workers in Colombia. October 2010. Boston: WIEGO. http://wiego.org/sites/ wiego.org/files/publications/files/

Ruiz-Restrepo_Policy_Environment_ Informal_Workers.pdf (accessed June 22, 2015). Samson, M. 2008. Reclaiming livelihoods: The role of reclaimers in municipal waste management systems. Pietermaritzburg: Groundwork. Samson, M. 2009a. Refusing to be cast aside: Waste pickers organising around the world. Boston, MA: WIEGO. Samson, M. 2009b. Wasted citizenship? Reclaimers and the privatized expansion of the public sphere. Africa Development 34(3–4): 1–25. Samson, M., Parra, F. and Abizaid, O. 2014. Trashing democracy in Bogotá: The real issue behind the mayoral crisis. The Global Urbanist, January 21. http://globalurbanist.com/2014/01/21/ trashing-democracy-in-bogota (accessed February 10, 2014). SNDT Women’s University and Chintan. 2008. Recycling livelihoods: Integration of the informal recycling sector in solid waste management in India. GTZ. http://www2.gtz.de/dokumente/ bib-2010/gtz2010-0485en-informalrecycling-india.pdf (accessed June 22, 2015). Valenzuela, S. 2013. El esquema de aseo por el que destituyeron a Petro. El Espectador, December 10. http://www. elespectador.com/noticias/bogota/ el-esquema-de-aseo-el-destituyeronpetro-articulo-463434 (accessed June 22, 2015). Vieira, C. 2013. Zero garbage plan tied to fate of ousted Bogotá mayor. Inter Press New Service Agency, December 13. www.ipsnews.net/2013/12/zerogarbage-plan-tied-fate-oustedbogota-mayor/ (accessed June 22, 2015). WIEGO. 2014. Waste pickers & solid waste management. http://wiego. org/informal-economy/waste-pickerssolid-waste-management (accessed March 10, 2014).

58 | tohnreee Wilson, D. C., Velis, C. and Cheeseman, C. 2006. Role of informal sector recycling in waste management in developing countries. Habitat International, Solid Waste Management as if People Matter, 30(4): 797–808.

Wyss, J. 2013. How Bogotá’s trash trouble became a national crisis. Miami Herald, December 12. http://www.miamiherald. com/2013/12/12/3814523/howbogotas-trash-trouble-became.html (accessed June 22, 2015).

4 | S H I P S P AS S I N G I N T H E D A R K ? R E I GN I TI N G L A B O UR – CO M M UN IT Y A LLI AN C E S FO R P UB L I C S E R V I CE S IN SOU TH AF RI C A

Dale T. McKinley

One of the most studied and celebrated aspects of the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa was the significant impact of labour–community alliances. A key demand of those alliances was the provision of public services to all South Africans (Ballard et al. 2005; Baskin 1991; Buhlungu 2010; von Holdt 2003; Webster 1988). But even in their heyday, these grassroots labour–community alliances were up against a tendency for top-down, centralized coordination of the anti-apartheid movement. In 1961, some of the underground leadership of the African National Congress (ANC) and the South African Communist Party (SACP) decided that the main strategic direction was to be armed struggle (ANC 1991, 5), with a select group of movement leaders and activists tasked with stimulating mass movement by its own (armed) example. By its very nature an armed sabotage campaign would have to rely on a highly secretive organization and minimal involvement of oppressed sectors of the population because the liberation movement lacked the strategy or capacity to wage extended armed resistance. Thus, from the very beginning of the ANC/SACP-led armed phase of the liberation movement, the core strategic orientation was leadershipcentric. This fundamentally shaped ensuing forms and practices of the labour and community movements as well as their possibilities for future collaboration. With the transition to democracy and the ANC’s capturing of state power after 1994, a range of new political, socio-economic and organizational constellations of power came to the fore. This occurred alongside the rapid adoption by the ANC of a neoliberal macroeconomic policy framework. In turn, such transitional realities have, over the last 20 years, profoundly reshaped not only the political

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economy of South Africa but the more specific struggles against privatization and the push for improved public services. It is within such a historical context that this chapter seeks to critically analyse the content, character, sustainability and impact of past labour– community alliances that have worked to oppose privatization and promote public services, and where they may be headed in the future with a focus on recent efforts by the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa to forge a new set of alliances in the country. The apartheid years: repression, resistance and contradiction During the 1970s and 1980s, the broad working class was hit with a double blow. Emerging clusters of neoliberal capitalism privileged the opening up of global markets, increasing capital mobility and reorganizing states to guarantee and catalyse ‘free market principles’ (Harvey 2005), while pushing for a flexible, insecure and informal labour regime (Chun 2009; Kalleberg 2009). As a result, unions lost some of their ability to service their existing members and recruit new ones at the same time as the objective basis for organizing outside of their immediate terrain was severely undermined (Paret 2013b). A large number of unions had become increasingly opposed to what they saw as the subordination of worker interests and struggles to the macro-national liberation politics of the ANC/SACP which, as the 1961 Lobatse conference had confirmed, saw the labour movement as more of a transmission belt for the ‘vanguard’ political party (Pillay 1996, 31). These unions wanted to forge politically independent labour organizations allied to the broader working class of communities, informal workers and students that practised workers’ control and participatory democracy (Baskin 1991; Friedman 1987). This eventually resulted in the formation of the Federation of South African Trade Unions in 1979, which foundationally believed that ‘unless labor’s political organizations were fully independent from the liberation movement they would merely abolish the legal structure of apartheid while subordinating workers to the new majority-based nationalist regime’ (Barchiesi 2011, 53). Linking the strengthening of internal union (especially shop-floor) structures and democracy to the struggles against state repression on a more general societal level, the Federation reached out to communities and their unemployed and casual worker constituencies. This broad-based approach saw their involvement ‘in struggles over community demands such as resistance

mckinl ey | 61 to the eviction of “illegal” squatters in [the East Rand townships of] Kathelhong and Daveyton’ (Barchiesi 2006, 9). This was consistent with the ‘social movement unionism’ that had emerged in places such as South Korea and Brazil, moving beyond the productive realm and encompassing struggles for social reproduction (Munck 1988; Seidman 1994; Waterman 1999; Webster 1988). On the community front, things were moving forward as well. ANCaligned community and civic leaders launched the United Democratic Front (UDF) in 1983, bringing together a wide range of community and other anti-apartheid civil society organizations. Key to these developments were the worsening material conditions of the black majority and their increasingly radical resistance to the devastating socio-economic impact of the apartheid-capitalist system, as evidenced by the UDF’s Asinamali (‘We Have No Money’) campaign that called for communities to boycott the paying of rents and services (Barchiesi 2006; Naidoo 2010). Similarly, the 1984 uprising of residents and workers in the Vaal industrial belt (south of Johannesburg) showed the links that communities made between local grievances and national political and economic change. Here was the seed of a genuine people’s alliance that contained an equally genuine alternative to apartheidcapitalist oppression. Unity talks between various unions to strengthen the movement resulted in the formation of a new labour federation, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), in 1985 (Baskin 1991). Linking up with community and student groups, and bringing with it the militancy of hundreds of thousands of workers, COSATU provided a much needed cohesion and direction to the ongoing anti-apartheid resistance. However, it was not long before Congress leaders endorsed the Freedom Charter, thus allying COSATU to the ANC/SACP as well as to the UDF. By tendering itself to the ANC/SACP camp, COSATU had placed a large part of the organized working class and its anticapitalist struggle within a contradictory strategic and organizational framework. These contradictions later came to the fore when, in 1986, COSATU’s Central Executive Committee used the term ‘progressive alliance’ to refer to organizations that supported the UDF and ANC/ SACP. This implicitly announced that they would not ally with others, as was confirmed soon thereafter when COSATU refused to meet with the Azanian People’s Organisation (Baskin 1991). Such a practical

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application of the unions’ political alliance would be at the heart of the future relationship between COSATU, its affiliate unions and community organizations. Ending apartheid: what kind of alliances, what kind of power? Both COSATU and individual unions became deeply involved in community struggles around issues such as transportation, housing and rent, and basic public services (Barchiesi and Kenny 2008; Paret 2013a). However, tensions around the issue of political as well as strategic and ideological allegiance to the ANC/SACP were never far below the surface. By 1989, behind-the-scenes negotiations between the ANC and the apartheid state were well advanced. Negotiation politics was fast displacing whatever ground the labour and community struggles were attempting to occupy, and in the process creating increasingly fertile conditions for ‘centralised power and decision-making in the hands of a negotiating elite’ (Pillay 1996, 338). In parallel, the apartheid state had embarked on sweeping neoliberal economic reforms, with the establishment of a government privatization unit in 1987 opening the doors to the commercialization of many key parastatals, for example. While subsequent strikes led by the South African Municipal Workers’ Union (SAMWU) did contribute to the apartheid state postponing the ‘full privatisation of core State-Owned Enterprises’ (van Driel 2003, 72), the die was cast. The apartheid government had already begun transforming the state into a body geared toward ‘regulating and promoting the private sector as opposed to serving public provision’ (Fine and Hall 2012, 56). On the terrain of public services, ‘people’s power’ had seemingly been trumped by the political party and elites. After the release of liberation movement leaders and the unbanning of the ANC, SACP and other political parties in February 1990, the strategic locus of resistance and people’s power shifted even further onto a ‘negotiations’ terrain. Following the same general strategy as the ANC, COSATU had become involved in a parallel negotiating process with capital and the state, devoting much of its energies to institutionalizing bargaining agreements between unions, employers and the state (McKinley 1997, 121). Similarly, a range of community organizations from historically black areas had entered into negotiations with local white councils about the provision of public services. With

mckinl ey | 63 the core leadership and organizations constituting the UDF now absorbed into the ANC itself, the remaining community organizations, after holding talks with the ANC, formed a new umbrella body called the South African National Civic Organisation, which unofficially became the fourth member of the ANC/SACP/COSATU Alliance (Zuern 2004, 6). Combined, these shifts resulted in the effective curtailment of mass struggle by the broad working class. Ordinary workers and community members often had little say in key political and policy decisions. The perceived necessity of seeking common ground with capital and the apartheid state for some kind of social contract to restructure an ailing South African local government and macro-economy meant that mass struggle by the broad working class would need to be contained within the parameters of that very negotiating process. No sooner had the ANC overwhelmingly won the democratic election of April 1994 than the new government began to give institutional and legislative form to the corporatism that had now come to dominate ANC-Alliance politics. Simultaneously, previous commitments to a state-led ‘public sector restructuring’ were quickly back-pedalled (Habib and Padayachee 2000). In 1995 the government announced the partial privatization of ‘South African Airways and Telkom and the complete sale of several other SOEs’ (van Driel 2003, 67). The end result was the signing of a National Framework Agreement on the Restructuring of State Assets (NFA) in February 1996 between the government and all the main trade union federations. This framework said nothing about reversing the privatization of SOEs or putting a halt to the more widespread privatization process that was also underway at the local government level. All this severely limited the ability of the labour movement to mobilize their members and communities against future privatizations. Crucially, it placed the labour movement in a position of ‘co-determining the “restructuring of state assets” with government on a neoliberal basis’ (van Driel 2003, 73), notwithstanding SAMWU’s lone voice of disagreement. Thus, by the time the ANC government went ahead with the decidedly neoliberal Growth, Employment and Redistribution macro-economic policy in 1996, the labour movement had placed itself and millions of workers within a corporatist strategic framework that effectively undermined any politically principled, democratic and collectively enjoined struggle against privatization, or any pro-public

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alternative vision. Placed within the context of a globally dominant neoliberal capitalism, what was really being instituted was a politics of social and class control (Catchpowle and Cooper 2003, 14), a neoliberal corporatism in which participating labour and community movements would now be expected to be reliable political partners.

A different kind of working class: post-1994 division and realignment SAMWU was the only union in South Africa to make consistent efforts during the mid- to late-1990s to actively oppose privatization within the institutional and policy frameworks of the new democratic state, as well as through a mass-based campaign involving communities and other civil society actors. Yet, a combination of internal union weaknesses, the unwillingness of COSATU to fully back an antiprivatization campaign, and the exigencies of the ANC-Alliance and its neoliberal corporatist framework undermined what could have been a strong kick-start for both the public sector and labour–community alliances to defend and transform public services. As a result, SAMWU’s campaign was gradually weakened and ultimately sidelined, and a neoliberal-inspired ‘restructuring’ of public assets and services was further institutionalized. Additionally, the two main institutional and legislative frameworks governing labour–state– capital relations, the National Economic, Development and Labour Council and the Labour Relations Act, rapidly became vehicles for ‘specific intra-union and worker issues removed from the local level’, catalysing a growing insularity of union members, increasingly delinked from community needs and struggles (Roger Ronnie, personal interview). In turn, the material gains for many public sector workers increased the ‘social distance’ between workers and poor communities whose material realities were moving in the opposite direction due to the devastating impacts of neoliberal restructuring (Michael Blake, personal interview). The macro-social import of this neoliberal social engineering ensured that free market forces and individualism came at the forefront of shaping both the social and political relations of the broad working class and their organizations. By the early-2000s, the number of casualized/ informal workers and unemployed made up between 30–40 per cent of the entire South African working age population (Altman 2006), while COSATU was becoming dominated by permanent workers (Buhlungu 2010, 107). What this translated into was an increasingly

mckinl ey | 65 fragmented broad working class with ‘multiple relational identities’ (Ruiters 2005; Spronk 2007) and a widening socio-economic and organizational separation between (employed) organized workers and casualized/unemployed poor communities (Murray 2013; Qotole, Xali and Barchiesi 2001). The ANC-managed state also implemented basic needs policies that turned many public services into market commodities. The drastic decrease in national government grants/subsidies to municipalities and support for the development of financial instruments for privatized delivery forced local government to turn toward this latter option as a means of generating revenue (McDonald 2000). It also laid the foundations for an enabling environment of patronage, corruption and factional politics as well as skyrocketing costs for basic services and a concomitant increase in the use of cost-recovery mechanisms such as water and electricity cut-offs that necessarily hit poor people the hardest. In turn, this brought together those inhabiting an extended and flexible ‘community’ of work and life (as opposed to the formal workplace), which became the epicentre of social solidarity. It was within this multifaceted post-apartheid context that a range of new community organizations and social movements surfaced (Ballard, Habib and Valodia 2006; McKinley and Naidoo 2004; Naidoo and Veriava 2003). In almost all cases, they emerged in the very spaces opened up by the failure of the traditional political, labour and other civil society formations to respond to the changing conditions of their equally traditional constituencies (McKinley and Naidoo 2004, 14– 15). Since the vast majority of such new forces represented different strata within the broad working class they were treated by most of the labour movement as secondary to formal, organized workers. Despite serious efforts from some workers to engage, the dominant politics and practices of the labour movement made the possibilities of forging collective solidarities and struggles extremely difficult, even though social movements such as the Anti-Privatization Forum initially brought together a wide range of organizations, individual activists and political groupings that included labour unions (McKinley 2012b). Whither post-apartheid labour–community alliances? No sooner had the Anti-Privatisation Forum, with many more community organizations on board from 2001, begun to offer public critiques of, and engage in direct action against, the privatization

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agenda of the ANC government than the various union structures pulled out, charging that the Forum had become too anti-ANC and anti-government. What this unfortunately confirmed once again was that an independent, politically radical community movement was unpalatable to most of the leadership allied to the ANC (McKinley 2012b). Even though COSATU engaged in a one-day anti-privatization strike (supported by many of the new social movements) in August 2001, its longer-term impact was seriously diluted by the COSATU leadership’s adoption of a de-politicized and individualistic approach attributing the privatization problem to technocrats within government (Lehulere 2003; van Driel 2003). Reflecting the pattern that had begun to emerge in the 1990s, the leadership of COSATU and most of its affiliate unions had once again made opportunistic use of the masses with such strikes. They did so for their own internal ANC-Alliance political purposes and as a means of managing and controlling the desires and expectations of their own membership and of the broader working class. At the same time, the ANC began to engage in a political propaganda campaign, portraying the new community/social movements, and the various initiatives to link labour and community struggles around opposition to privatization, as being composed of ‘criminals’ and ‘anarchists’. The ANC leadership accused all those who were actively critiquing and opposing its policies of being ‘ultra-left … waging a counter-revolutionary struggle against the ANC and our democratic government’, and of siding with the ‘bourgeoisie and its supporters’ (ANC 2002, 12). These attacks distinguished between ‘bad’ and ‘good’ civil society actors, an approach that was to become dominant in the ANC-Alliance and the government, and which henceforth would fundamentally shape any subsequent relationships between independent community organizations and COSATU. Crucially, this self-serving division of civil society, according to the needs of the various leaderships of the ANC-Alliance, codified a parallel binary. As a result, proposals such as those of the Anti-Privatisation Forum (2006) for ‘independent and democratic mass working class organisations’, in which ordinary workers and residents of poor communities would be ‘active in the formulation of alternatives’, were de-legitimized due to their political and organizational origins. However, approaches that sanctified ANCAlliance processes, privileging politically controlled government spaces

mckinl ey | 67 for ‘consultation’ and involving only those formations that were not overtly critical of the macro-developmental trajectory of the ANC and the state, were embraced. One of the immediate consequences was the translation of this conceptual-ideological attack into a physical assault, led by the coercive forces of the state, on identified community activists and organizations (Bond 2002; Kimani 2003). The next several years saw a coordinated attempt by the state not only to actively repress the organizations involved but to crush the spirit of community resistance. While neither of these attempts wholly succeeded, what they did do was divert community organizations’ and social movements’ limited human and material resources into a defensive political and organizational mode of operation (McKinley and Veriava 2005). In the process, they also contributed to substantially undermining the varied bases for unity between labour and community, helped along by the deafening silence of most of the labour movement as well as the many internal weaknesses and divisions within the social movements (McKinley 2012a; Runciman 2012). Combined, these varied weaknesses and divisions served to feed mutually reinforcing and largely negative perceptions about the ‘other’, on both ‘sides’. From the mid-2000s, the bases for unity necessary for meaningful and sustained labour–community alliances were already largely lying in tatters. Things have not been helped in the last few years by COSATU’s political support of current president Jacob Zuma, on the basis that his ANC faction is engaged in a ‘reclamation’ of the ANC and its Alliance by setting a new ‘developmental’ path away from the privatization policy of neoliberal technocrats (Gentle 2008; Pillay 2011; van der Walt 2009). However, as Zuma’s ANC and South African presidency has made clear, his ‘developmental state’ and its declared focus on state intervention has not, in any fundamental way, begun to address the various forms of privatization; in fact they have continued to be pursued with vigour. As a result, the approach to local government administration and its public service delivery mandate has remained firmly within the neoliberal frame (Pillay 2011). All macro-development decisions affecting poor communities have now become dominated by politicobureaucratic and economic elites with elected representatives doing the rubber-stamping. Networks of patronage – which incubate and sustain

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growing corruption – increasingly drive what formal participation there is and determine who does and does not benefit from ‘delivery’. Formal, institutional channels for citizen participation have become even more politically manipulated than before and an atmosphere has been created in which there is fear of dissent and an almost complete lack of access to information related to municipal budgets, services and associated mismanagement. This has led to the closing down of a sizeable portion of popular space for contestation and accountability, fuelling socio-political conflict. Community and worker protests and violence most often involving the state’s police forces as well as local politicians and elites have increased substantially (Alexander 2010; Runciman 2012; von Holdt 2013). This was the case at the Marikana mine in August 2012 when 10 miners were killed in intra-union violence, followed by the massacre of 35 striking miners by police, with another 70 injured (Alexander et al. 2012). There have also been scores of community protesters shot dead by police forces over the last several years (The Sowetan, 24 January 2014). The broader implications for community organizations and, more generally, residents of poor communities, have been significant. An escalating hyper-commoditized daily existence has led to an intensification of social division, stratification and dysfunction, now more than ever driven on by increased competition for limited social benefits, services and productive opportunities. Scarce wage labour has become the main ‘prize’ in marginalized communities, the second prize being access to state-serviced and controlled social grants that are subject to considerations of political patronage and party electoral support. Cumulatively, this cocktail of constructed dysfunction, division and conflict has made the possibilities of labour–community alliances centred on public services even more difficult and tenuous. Indeed, the last several years have been relatively barren when it comes to labour–community alliances for public services, especially at the national level and those involving COSATU. A good example of one lost opportunity in this regard was the 2009 public sector strike. While most community organizations publicly and energetically sympathized with the demands of low-paid public sector workers, COSATU failed to open communication channels and to offer meaningful ways to engage in solidarity, thus forfeiting longer-term campaign linkages with the workers (Ceruti 2011). While there have been a few attempts at

mckinl ey | 69 national campaigns involving both ‘sides’, these have not really taken root within the respective rank-and-file memberships, having largely involved leadership. Sparks of hope? Nonetheless, there are some examples of existing labour–community alliances, as well as specific unions and community organizations coming together for brief periods around issue- and location-specific struggles, which have sometimes involved joint research as well as direct action. Arguably the most durable of these is the South Durban Community Environmental Alliance (SDCEA), an environmental justice movement. While community organizations constitute its formal base, SDCEA has, since its formation in 1996, worked with a variety of unions that cut across different federations and independent ones. The main vehicle for these informal alliances with the labour movement has been specific campaigns, educational activities and protests. As SDCEA coordinator Desmond D’Sa (personal interview) points out, these ‘inherently involve an anti-privatization politics’ since they ‘seek to enforce government regulation on the safety, health and environmental fronts … in other words, to force government to do its job’. However, there have also been a significant number of activities with unions focused on the defence of jobs in local industries, both private and state-owned. What has made these informal, largely issueand campaign-based alliances with the labour movement an integral and consistent part of SDCEA’s activities is that the relationships were often ‘facilitated by union members who are part of the communities’ that make up the SDCEA. Another example is the coming together of activists from the Housing Assembly, a collection of community organizations in Cape Town struggling for better housing, and shop stewards from the city’s branch of SAMWU. Through a series of workshops and occasional joint actions, the alliance has been able to forge a collective response to the city’s Integrated Development Plan. This has allowed the development of ‘numerous structures, campaigns and documents … pertaining to service delivery policy, municipal governance, employment and the further development of the Housing Assembly as a forum in which numerous organizations can converge to critique and develop alternatives’ (Murray 2013, 3). Even if numerically small and

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politically limited, the project can be seen as a first step to (re)laying the foundations for a more solid and lasting alliance. Lastly, following the massacre of striking miners at the Marikana platinum mine in August 2012, the Marikana Support Campaign was formed. It involved families of the murdered miners, independent worker committees, the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union, a newly formed women’s community organization, Sikhala Sonke, as well as several small political groups and individual activists. The campaign has since focused on support for those families of miners killed or arrested but has also engaged issues of land ownership in the area, the dire lack of basic public services (water, health, electricity), inadequate housing and chronic unemployment in the area. While a closer relationship developed between community structures and the union, according to a veteran community organizer in the Marikana area, it has largely been an alliance of activists and workers living in surrounding communities who have engaged in activities including rallies and marches, acting ‘on their own’ without union involvement (Chris Malebatsi, personal interview). Contemporary sources of weakness and disconnection It is not clear if these sparks can reignite a larger flame of labour– community alliances in the country. The ANC–SACP–COSATU coalition has placed the majority of the labour movement in a wholly contradictory position wherein its independence is subsumed under a macro-political corporatism that requires its subservience to interests that are not of or for the workers themselves. Unions simply do not know how to relate to independent community organizations and struggle, and most community organizations have become largely selfcontained and focused; they are either unable or unwilling to try and break through the enforced political separation. Even within social movements and community organizations that have managed to forge some kind of alliance with unions, such as the Anti-Privatisation Forum, there were many internal weaknesses and divisions (Runciman 2012). At one level these divisions related to internal clashes of personalities, prefigured vanguard politics, and the tendency to spend too much time on debates about desired organizational forms and critiques of the ANC-Alliance. At the same time, there was little grassroots organizing or capacity building within an increasingly divided labour movement (Leonard Gentle, personal

mckinl ey | 71 interview; Lance Veotte, personal interview). On another level, there were often too ‘few instances of the [respective] membership working together … little knowledge of the daily struggles and campaigns of the other’, and a yawning gap between the ‘negotiations culture’ of the unions versus the ‘campaigning “culture” of the community organizations’ (Xali 2005, 10). While some unions did, on occasion, try to break through the political fog, there has been, and remains, a distinct lack of political will at the level of COSATU itself to ‘build the infrastructure necessary for campaigns at the national and regional levels’ (Hilary Wainwright, personal interview) that could have provided the equally necessary means for labour–community alliances to sink deeper roots. In the words of a seasoned unionist, ‘there is just not much effort to push labour–community alliances within COSATU … driven by a neglect at the national level to support and link up with suggestions and proposed activities of COSATU locals in a way that recognizes the link between communities and workers’ (Jane Barret, personal interview). This macro-politics has also intensified factionalism within the ANC-Alliance, which, in turn, has been reflected within community organizations and has affected the character and content of linked struggles for public service provision (von Holdt et al. 2011). Thus, it is even more difficult both for labour and community activists to develop trusting and sustained relationships and for unions and community organizations to forge genuine alliances (Lance Veotte, personal interview). More tragically, though, it has incubated a politics of patronage and corruption that has seeped into the fabric of the labour and community movements. For example, in 2012 when a group of casualized street cleaners in Ekhuruleni (east of Johannesburg) joined SAMWU and went on strike with the union’s demand for permanent employment status, they would have had every reason to believe that their struggle would come to fruition. Instead, a local SAMWU shop steward involved in a labour-brokering business intervened and undermined their struggle by ensuring that the street cleaners were only offered a temporary contract with his firm at wages less than one third of those of permanent municipal employees (Ighsaan Schroeder, personal interview). Since then, SAMWU’s national leadership has itself been implicated in massive corruption involving the fraudulent use of workers’ union and strike funds and has instituted a wide-ranging purge of officials and

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shop stewards who have fought to expose and stop the corruption and factional politics (Aboobaker 2014; Pillay 2014). As corruption and individualism have grown, levels of trust and comradeship essential to positive personal relationships, internal democratic organization and meaningful alliances of support, solidarity and shared struggle have declined (Desmond D’Sa, personal interview). Within unions, the social (and thus political) gap between well-paid leaders and officials and ordinary worker members has widened. The same gap can be seen between many employed and unionized workers on the one hand and unemployed or casual workers on the other. With respect to community organizations, leaders have regularly been co-opted into well-paid local government positions or have become involved in local-level networks of patronage and corrupt activity (Mercia Andrews, personal interview). This has often left not only a huge organizational vacuum but also a divided community. Mostly tucked away in their institutional silos, unions have failed miserably to forge any serious and longer-term strategy to relate to, organize or support informal, casualized workers and the unemployed who dominate the membership of community organizations. When community organizations protest over a lack of basic public services, they are generally blind to the public sector workers who deliver those services; similarly, when union members go on strike to defend their jobs and/or improve their conditions of work, they largely ignore the masses of people who have no jobs or whose conditions of work are most often much worse. The combined consequence is like two ships passing in the dark. So, for example, while there are no research statistics to measure the degree to which members of community organizations have involved themselves in union-led strikes, the 2012 workers’ survey (COSATU 2012) does show that less than 25 per cent of COSATU workers had participated in a community protest over a four-year period, while the 2013 COSATU shop stewards survey (Forum for Public Dialogue 2013) reveals that only 12 per cent indicated their involvement in community organizations had anything to do with their work. It is the cumulative undermining of the possibilities for the organic development of labour–community alliances that has hit both sides the hardest. The challenge then is to throw off both the subjective and objective baggage that has either been willingly or forcibly brought on board so that the respective ships can be turned around, converge side

mckinl ey | 73 by side and join together to embark on a new journey. Twenty years into the new South Africa there are signs that such possibilities are beginning to emerge from the long shadows of the past. New spaces, new possibilities The present-day picture is a far cry from the celebrated days of the 1980s and the early promise of the post-apartheid period. In many ways this should come as no surprise, but that does not make it more acceptable given the high expectations that South Africa’s broad working class could and would lead a strong and unified post-apartheid struggle for radical systemic change. Nonetheless, South Africa has a rich history of labour–community alliances that needs to be reclaimed both in thought and in practice, the most crucial aspects of which are: unions seeing the community, and thus also the ‘other’ working class, as part of who they are and possessing a strategy to pursue and activate alliances; a unity of class struggle that is grounded in mutual respect and learning; a tactical focus on grassroots mobilization and vibrant political and social education; the embracing of a political and organizational culture of internal democracy and gender equity alongside vibrant dialogue and debate; and forging a principled, socially progressive, accountable and committed leadership. Finally, there is a need for moving beyond a rather stale anti-privatization posturing to a broadened dialogue of what a pro-public service might look like and consist of. Similarly, the labour and community movements in South Africa must reclaim an internationalism that has, for the most part, disappeared into the shadows of proclamation and propaganda. There are numerous present-day examples across the globe of unions doing the very things that their South African counterparts used to do, such as: engaging privatization not just as workers but ‘as service users … and as citizens’; using their ‘distinctive organizing capacities and the detailed knowledge of their members to improve the quality of the service they deliver to their fellow citizens, as a necessary part of defending its public character’; and in the process working ‘alongside civic organizations, farmers and rural movements’ (Wainwright 2012, 71). Possibly more than anything else, South African unions need to commit themselves ‘to serving the wider public, rather than simply seeking instrumental alliances to save their own jobs’ (Wainwright 2009, 93).

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The good news is that there are spaces opening up that speak to both the realities and reclamation of change. The most crucial of these spaces has been engendered by the ongoing fracturing of the ANCAlliance over the last few years, a process that has been greatly catalysed by the horrific events at Marikana in August 2012. Along with this, there has been a slow but sure loosening of the ANC’s political and ideological hegemony. Whether in South Africa or elsewhere, the very basis, historically, for the maintenance of a sustainable political alliance between unions and (ostensibly progressive) political parties that have held state power is the parallel maintenance of both a politically malleable union leadership and expanding benefits for a meaningful threshold of unionized workers. On both counts, the alliance ‘ship’ in the South African context is taking on copious amounts of water and there is absolutely no reason to believe that this will be turned around simply because of a shifting of the leadership deckchairs. This is where the incipient moves by the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA) to forge an independent and anti-capitalist united front of the broad working class comes into the picture. For the first time in the history of a democratic South Africa, a COSATU-aligned union, and its largest one at that, has openly declared that it no longer wants to be in a political alliance with the ANC, and has attracted the support of many community organizations and other civil society formations across the country. In place of that long-standing alliance, NUMSA (2013) has stated that it will now seek to: Lead in the establishment of a new United Front that will coordinate struggles in the workplace and in communities, in a way similar to the UDF of the 1980s. The task of this front will be to fight for the implementation of the Freedom Charter and be an organisational weapon against neoliberal policies such as the NDP [National Development Plan]. At a Resistance Expo in February 2014 (held to conclude NUMSA’s first political school for the year), a wide variety of community organizations and social movements were invited to share perspectives on their struggles and engage in discussion with shop stewards. Another first in the post-apartheid era, such initiatives could indicate that the ‘revolt of the poor may be complemented by

mckinl ey | 75 an industrial partner’ (Gentle 2014) and see a rejuvenation of labour– community alliances centred on basic public services (Ashman and Pons-Vignon 2014). Additionally, NUMSA (2013) has said that it will embark on a process to organize workers across value chains, including those in the highly divided and volatile mining sector, a move that could also herald the beginnings of organizational support for informal and casualized workers. And, in early 2014, NUMSA made much more conscious efforts to reach out to community and other independent left organizations in a campaign against the ANC government’s introduction of a youth wage subsidy and its neoliberal budget. Joint protests took place and were then extended to other struggles initiated by community organizations and social movements (NUMSA 2014). NUMSA’s moves remain embryonic at this stage, and it must still translate stated intent into practical action when it comes to active involvement in community struggles and organizations, as well as in making common cause with informal/casualized workers. Nonetheless, what NUMSA has done is to open wide the door of new possibilities not just for labour–community alliances for public services but for a broad working class-led movement to mount a serious political challenge to the ANC and the state. Building labour–community alliances is an inherently difficult practical task everywhere, even in the best of circumstances. Even in instances, for example in Valle del Cauca, Colombia, where a single union and a small community organization located in one particular area have successfully formed an alliance to oppose water privatization and promote alternative means of delivery, it took a slow and often painful process to build the necessary trust and understanding (Bélanger Dumontier, Spronk and Murray, this volume). In more socially heterogeneous contexts such as South Africa, the task is that much more difficult. Nonetheless, the time is ripe. What is required is patient political and organizational work informed by a democratic spirit of humility and openness. There is no space here for vanguardist, paramount leadership, no room for the presumption of collective ‘working-class’ consciousness, and no place for the defensive and divisive promotion of narrow organizational identities. What must act as a constant reminder is the immediate goal to engage in a struggle to ‘democratise, open up and improve the way services and indeed the state itself is organised’ as a means toward ‘accountability, ending

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corruption, introducing participatory methods of government [and] creating means by which the knowledge of all is used for the benefit of all’ (Wainwright 2013, 46). While a longer-term goal of broad working-class struggle might well be to replace capitalism with an alternative system, it is only by engaging in the kind of practical, here-and-now struggle for real changes in the lives of the public, both human and institutional, that the possibilities for more radical change can be brought into being. Interviews Mercia Andrews, Director, Trust for Community Outreach and Education (TCOE), personal interview, November 26, 2013. Brian Ashley, Director, Alternative Information and Development Centre (AIDC), personal interview, December 10, 2013. Jane Barret, Affiliates Coordinator, Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), personal interview, October 14, 2013. Michael Blake, Researcher, International Labor, Research and Information Group (ILRIG), personal interview, November 29, 2013. Desmond D’Sa, Coordinator, South Durban Community Environmental Alliance (SDCEA), personal interview, February 26, 2014. Stephen Faulkner, International Relations Officer, South African Municipal Workers Union (SAMWU), personal interview, September 17, 2013.

Leonard Gentle, Director, ILRIG, personal interview, October 4, 2013. Chris Malebatsi, community liaison for the Marikana Support Campaign, personal interview, February 11, 2014. Roger Ronnie, unionist and political activist and former General Secretary of SAMWU, personal interview, November 29, 2013. Ighsaan Schroeder, Coordinator of the Casual Workers Advice Office (CWAO) in Johannesburg and past union organizer and educator, personal interview, September 18, 2013. Lance Veotte, Western Cape Provincial Chairperson, SAMWU, personal interview, November 29, 2013. Hilary Wainwright, editor of Red Pepper magazine and fellow at the Transnational Institute, Skype interview, October 25, 2014.

References Aboobaker, S. 2014. Cosatu ‘did nothing’ to help affiliate. Independent News Online, August 24. http://www.iol.co.za/news/ politics/cosatu-did-nothing-to-helpaffiliate-1.1740000#.VYHosM9Viko (accessed June 17, 2015). Alexander, P. 2010. Rebellion of the poor: South Africa’s service delivery

protests – a preliminary analysis. Review of African Political Economy, 37(123): 25–40. Alexander, P., Sinwell, L., Lekgoa, T., Mmope, B. and Xezwi, B. 2012. Marikana: A view from the mountain and a case to answer. Johannesburg: Jacana Media.

mckinl ey | 77 Altman, M. 2006. Low wage work in South Africa. Cape Town: Human Sciences Research Council. ANC (African National Congress). 1991. Submit or fight: 30 years of Umkhonto we Sizwe. Johannesburg: ANC Political Education Section. ANC (African National Congress). 2002. Contribution to the NEC/NWC response to the Cronin interviews on the issue of neo-liberalism. September, Johannesburg: ANC Political Education Unit. Anti-Privatisation Forum (APF). 2006. Local government platform. Johannesburg: APF. Ashman, S. and Pons-Vignon, N. 2014. Numsa rupture could mark new start for socialist politics. Business Day, February 11. Ballard, R., Habib, A. and Valodia, I. (eds.). 2006. Voices of protest: Social movements in post-apartheid South Africa. Scottsville: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press. Ballard, R., Habib, A., Valodia I. and Zuern, E. 2005. Globalization, marginalization and contemporary social movements in South Africa. Africa Affairs, 104(417): 615–634. Barchiesi, F. 2006. Commodification, economic restructuring, and the changing urban geography of labor in post-apartheid South Africa: The case of Gauteng Province, 1991–2001. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers, March 7–11, Chicago, US. Barchiesi, F. 2011. Precarious liberation: Workers, the state and contested social citizenship in post-apartheid South Africa. Albany: State University of New York Press. Barchiesi, F. and Kenny, B. 2008. Precarious collaborations: Workingclass subjectivities, community activism, and the problem with

‘social movement unionism’ in lateapartheid East Rand (South Africa). Paper submitted for the 8th North Eastern Workshop on Southern Africa (NEWSA), Burlington, VT, US, October 17–19. Baskin, J. 1991. Striking back: A history of COSATU. Johannesburg: Ravan Press. Bond, P. 2002. The world summit on sustainable development: Critiques from the left. Paper presented to the University of Pretoria, Department of Sociology, Pretoria, South Africa, July 18. Buhlungu, S. 2010. A paradox of victory: COSATU and the democratic transformation of South Africa. Scottsville: University of KwaZuluNatal Press. Catchpowle, L. and Cooper, C. 2003. Neoliberal corporatism: Origins and implications for South Africa. In T. Bramble and F. Barchiesi (eds.), Rethinking the labour movement in the ‘new’ South Africa, 13–24. Aldershot: Ashgate. Ceruti, C. 2011. 2007 and 2010 public sector strikes: Maturing contradictions. South African Labor Bulletin 35(1): 2–5. Chun, J. J. 2009. Organizing at the margins: The symbolic politics of labor in South Korea and the United States. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. COSATU (Congress of South African Trade Unions). 2012. Findings of the COSATU Workers’ Survey. Johannesburg: COSATU. Fine, B. and Hall, D. 2012. Terrains of neoliberalism: Constraints and opportunities for alternative models of service delivery. In D. A. McDonald and G. Ruiters (eds.), Alternatives to privatisation: Public options for essential services in the global South, 45–70. Johannesburg, HSRC Press, Africa edition.

78 | fo ur Forum for Public Dialogue. 2013. COSATU shop steward survey findings report. Johannesburg: Community Agency for Social Enquiry. Friedman, S. 1987. Building tomorrow today: African workers in trade unions 1970–1984. Johannesburg: Ravan Press. Gentle, L. 2008. The Zuma coups: The need for political clarity is even greater. Unpublished paper. Gentle, L. 2014. Forging a new movement: NUMSA and the shift in SA politics. South African Civil Society Information Service, January 28. http://sacsis.org. za/site/article/1897 (accessed January 29, 2014). Habib, A. and Padayachee, V. 2000. Economic policy and power relations in South Africa’s transition to democracy. Research Paper. Durban: University of Natal-Durban School of Development Studies. Harvey, D. 2005. A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kalleberg, A. L. 2009. Precarious work, insecure workers: employment relations in transition. American Sociological Review 74(1): 1–22. Kimani, S. (ed.) 2003. The right to dissent. Johannesburg: Freedom of Expression Institute. Lehulere, O. 2003. The road to the right: COSATU economic policy in the post-apartheid period. In T. Bramble and F. Barchiesi (eds.), Rethinking the labour movement in the ‘new’ South Africa, 25–42. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishers. McDonald, D. A. 2000. The bell tolls for thee: Cost recovery, cut offs, and the affordability of municipal services in South Africa. Johannesburg: Municipal Services Project Special Report. McKinley, D. T. 1997. The ANC and the liberation struggle: A critical political biography. London: Pluto Press.

McKinley, D. T. 2012a. The crisis of the left in contemporary South Africa. In M. Dawson and L. Sinwell (eds.), Contesting transformation: Popular resistance in twenty-first century South Africa, 23–43. London: Pluto Press. McKinley, D. T. 2012b. Transition’s child: A brief history of the Anti-Privatisation Forum. In D. T. McKinley, Transition’s child: The Anti-Privatisation Forum (APF), 8–20. Johannesburg: South African History Archive. McKinley, D. T. and Naidoo, P. 2004. New social movements in South Africa: A story in creation. In D.T. McKinley and P. Naidoo (eds.), Mobilising for Change: New Social Movements in South Africa, Development Update Special Edition 5(2): 9–22. McKinley, D. T. and Veriava, A. 2005. Arresting dissent: State repression and post-apartheid social movements. Johannesburg: Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation. Munck, R. 1988. The new international labour studies: An introduction. London: Zed Books. Murray, A. 2013. Overcoming fragmentation? Labor–community alliances and the complexity of movement building in Cape Town. MA thesis. Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada. Naidoo, P. 2010. The making of ‘the poor’ in post-apartheid South Africa: A case study of the city of Johannesburg and Orange Farm. Unpublished PhD thesis, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa. Naidoo, P. and Veriava, A. 2003. Remembering movements: Trade unions and new social movements in neoliberal South Africa. Research Report No. 28, Centre for Civil Society. Durban: University of KwaZulu-Natal.

mckinl ey | 79 NUMSA (National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa). 2013. Resolutions adopted at NUMSA Special National Congress, December 16–20. http://www.numsa.org.za/ article/resolutions-adopted-numsaspecial-national-congress-december16-20-2013/ (accessed 5 February, 2014). NUMSA (National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa). 2014. NUMSA/other trade unions, communities and youth organizations call on you to support protest action for jobs for youth on February 26 2014 and national strike on March 19 2014. NUMSA pamphlet. Paret, M. 2013a. Narratives of community protest: Union perspectives on community struggles in South Africa. Unpublished manuscript draft, University of Johannesburg, South Africa. Paret, M. 2013b. Precarious labor politics: Unions and the struggles of the insecure working class in the United States and South Africa. Critical Sociology, April 17. http://crs.sagepub.com/content/ early/2013/04/17/0896920513483149 (accessed September 1, 2013). Pillay, D. 1996. Social movements, development and democracy in postapartheid South Africa. In J. K. Coetzee and J. Graff (eds), Reconstruction, development and people, 325–351. Johannesburg: International Thompson Publishing Company. Pillay, D. 2011. The Tripartite Alliance and its discontents: Contesting the ‘National Democratic Revolution’ in the Zuma era. In J. Daniel, P. Naidoo, D. Pillay and R. Southall (eds.), New South African review 2: New paths, old compromises, 31–49. Johannesburg: Wits University Press. Pillay, V. 2014. Top union man’s World Cup junket. Mail & Guardian, July 18. http://mg.co.za/article/2014-07-17-

top-union-mans-world-cup-junket (accessed November 2, 2015). Qotole, M., Xali, M. and Barchiesi, F. 2001. The commercialisation of waste management in South Africa. Occasional Paper No. 3, June. Cape Town: Municipal Services Project. Ruiters, G. 2005. Knowing your place: Urban services and new modes of governability in South African cities. Paper presented at the Centre for Civil Society, University of KwaZuluNatal, Durban, October 6. Runciman, C. 2012. Mobilization and insurgent citizenship of the AntiPrivatisation Forum, South Africa: An ethnographic study. Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Glasgow. Seidman, G. 1994. Manufacturing militance: Worker’s movements in Brazil and South African 1970–1985. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Spronk, S. 2007. Roots of resistance to urban water privatization in Bolivia: The ‘new working class,’ the crisis of neoliberalism, and public services. International Labor and Working Class History 71(8): 8–28. van der Walt, L. 2009. Labor in South Africa: A sleeping giant? In I. Ness, A. Offner and C. Sturr (eds.), Real world Labor: A reader in economics, politics and social policy, 27–42. Boston, MA: Dollars & Sense. van Driel, M. 2003. Unions and privatisation in South Africa, 1990– 2000. In T. Bramble and F. Barchiesi (eds.), Rethinking the labour movement in the ‘new’ South Africa, 62–80. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishers. von Holdt, K. 2003. Transition from below: Forging trade unionism and workplace change in South Africa. Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press. von Holdt, K. 2013. South Africa: The transition to violent democracy.

80 | fo ur Review of African Political Economy 40(138): 509–604. von Holdt, K., Langa, M., Mogapi, N., Ngubeni, K., Dlamini, J. and Kirsten, A. 2011. ‘The smoke that calls’: Insurgent citizenship, collective violence and the struggle for a place in the new South Africa: Eight case studies of community protest and xenophobia. Johannesburg: Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation and Society Work and Development Institute. Wainwright, H. with M. Little. 2009. Public service reform … but not as we know it. Hove: Picnic Publishing. Wainwright, H. 2012. Transformative resistance: The role of labor and trade unions in alternatives to privatisation. In D. A. McDonald and G. Ruiters (eds.), Alternatives to privatisation: Public options for essential services in the global south, 71–98. Johannesburg: HSRC Press, Africa edition. Wainwright, H. 2013. The tragedy of the private, the potential of the public. Ferney-Voltaire and Amsterdam: Public Services International and Transnational Institute.

Waterman, P. 1999. The new social unionism: A new union model for a new world order. In R. Munck and P. Waterman (eds), Labor worldwide in the era of globalization, 247–264. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Webster, E. 1988. The rise of Social Movement Unionism: The two faces of black trade union movement in South Africa. In P. Frenkel, N. Pines and M. Swilling (eds), State resistance and change in South Africa, 247–263. London: Croom Helm. Xali, M. 2005. Seeking trade union and community organisational linkages in the Cape Town Metropolitan Area: Possibilities for new trade unionism and new social movements. Centre for Civil Society Research Report No. 37. Durban: Centre for Civil Society. Zuern, E. 2004. Continuity in contradiction? The prospects for a national civic movement in a democratic state: SANCO and the ANC in post-apartheid South Africa. Centre for Civil Society Research Report No. 26. Durban: Centre for Civil Society.

5 | P U B LI C H E A L T H F O R I N D I G E NOUS PE OP LE S I N G UA T E M A L A : M O N I TOR ING F ROM TH E B O T T O M UP

Walter Flores

Rural indigenous communities in Guatemala are unable to access public healthcare services on an equal footing with wealthier urban populations. Despite a National Political Constitution that allows for public participation in healthcare decisions, indigenous peoples face barriers to doing so. As result, Guatemala’s indigenous population experiences higher infant, child and maternal mortality (INE 2009; MSPAS 2011). Using a rights-based approach, civil society organizations have developed and implemented a system of citizen monitoring of public healthcare services, enhancing services that are available, and empowering themselves in the process. This approach includes capacity-building activities aimed at enhancing knowledge and skills of indigenous populations about services and the legal frameworks, human rights and public policies that affect them. The monitoring system involves data collection and analysis tools that help monitor public services and provide strategic advocacy to influence public policy making. Five years since implementation, communities have managed to influence the improvement of public health services at local levels, as well as the allocation of resources. However, the most important achievement has been the political empowerment of community leaders that were previously alienated from public institutions, helping to improve public healthcare services in rural areas via increased attention and resources from central government due to the communities’ demands. All of this is helping to build trust and collaboration between public authorities and community-based organizations, hopefully contributing to a more robust and democratic form of public health services in the future. This enhanced community monitoring system has since been expanded to over 35 indigenous municipalities in Guatemala. This

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chapter summarizes the advances, challenges and lessons learned from this initiative since 2008, although the programme is still ongoing and evolving. Making health public for all There is something starkly wrong within Guatemalan society: the middle-income economy is among the top five world exporters of sugar (FAO 2003) and coffee (ICO 2011), but almost 50 per cent of all children under five years of age are stunted, giving Guatemala the fourth-highest concentration of chronic malnutrition in the world (UNICEF 2011). Malnutrition in indigenous children stands at 70 per cent, higher than the national average and twice as high as that of non-indigenous children (INE 2002). Moreover, indigenous women are three times more likely to die in childbirth than non-indigenous women (MSPAS 2003), and indigenous children are twice as likely to be out of school than other children (Center for Economic and Social Rights and Instituto Centroamericano de Estudios Fiscales 2009). These indicators are the result of complex structural determinants that influence the distribution of power, income, goods and services in the country, including how public services are provided and received. In addition to the historical exclusion of poor and indigenous populations from development, the armed conflict from 1960 to 1996 was one of the most vicious and violent on the American continent. Guatemala’s Historical Clarification Commission (CEH in Spanish) estimated that 200,000 people were executed or ‘disappeared’ and the number of orphans approached 150,000 as a result of the conflict. Massacres and destruction of villages gave rise to forced displacement of the civilian population and more than 1.5 million people were displaced (CEH 1999). Although the political violence affected more than one third of the population, the largest burden fell on the indigenous population – more than 80 per cent of all crimes verified by the CEH were on indigenous citizens although they constitute only 40 per cent of the population (CEH 1999). In 2007, a civil society coalition composed of community-based organizations, local healthcare workers and researchers led by the Centro de Estudios para la Equidad y Gobernanza en los Sistemas de Salud (CEGSS), took up the challenge of addressing inequities in public health services faced by rural indigenous populations by directly confronting and attempting to transform inequities in power relations.

f lo r e s | 83 Based on a human rights framework, this coalition designed and implemented a participatory action-research approach to challenge power relations in six municipalities of the western highlands of Guatemala, all with a majority indigenous population. The idea behind this approach was that empowered rural citizens can affect the power balance in public decision making and lead to pro-equity public policy and resource allocation. Since the return to democratically elected governments in 1986, and the signing of the peace accords in 1996, there have been important social reforms and the passing of progressive laws that have strengthened legal frameworks in Guatemala. Most notably, the country has implemented progressive laws that recognize the right to health and promote the participation of citizens in the development, implementation and evaluation of public policy. Although this legal framework is a major step forward, the effective participation of citizens, particularly those affected by inequity and social exclusion, is very limited. Barriers include distance, transport costs and travel time, limited formal education and speaking languages other than Spanish, making it particularly difficult for rural indigenous citizens to engage in public policy development, reflecting the ‘asymmetrical power’ conditions within Guatemalan society (Flores and Gómez 2010). Despite these barriers CEGSS has led a broad coalition of people to push for more participatory health policy, starting with efforts to better understand power and power relations in the country, and how citizens affected by inequity should be involved in decision making. Understanding power and power relations Power lies at the centre of all social relationships. However, there is not a single concept that captures its meaning or that is agreed upon by theorists and practitioners. Instead of attempting to present a singular definition of power, therefore, it is more useful to understand its attributes and why it is important for development work. For instance, power has the ability to produce changes in society. Those changes can be either the product of conflict or consensus (Haugaard 2002). From the perspective of conflict, power is a determinist force ‘possessed’ by an actor, and can be taken away by another through struggles that may be revolutionary (Poulantzas 1968). Actors can legitimize their power and dominance through social structures (religion, formal education, laws, economic system, and stratifying

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social groups by caste, race or other) that reproduce their interests and create relations of dependence (Clegg, Courpasson and Phillips 2007). From another perspective, we can also create and multiply power through consensus. Power is based on the human capacity to act together. Therefore, power does not belong to only one actor but rather to a social group and is generated through agency (Arendt 1970). The idea of power through consensus and agency should not be confused with naïve perceptions about social relations, however. For instance, Flores, Ruano and Phe (2009, 39) argue: [T]he inclusion of traditionally excluded groups in decisionmaking processes does not create agency unless there are actions or policies that improve the material conditions of this population. Likewise, assigning resources to improve the status quo can generate opposition and conflict with those actors who benefit from the existing power structure, which also interferes with creation of agency. Another perspective looks at power as a dynamic force in latency (Morriss 2002). Power is expressed as ‘influence’ in decision making. From this point of view, there are no powerless individuals but people who are yet to become conscious about, and activate, their hidden power to exercise influence. This view of power as a ‘latent’ force is useful in explaining recent social changes in several South American countries, such as the ‘piqueteros’ movement in Argentina (Benclowicz 2006), workers’ unions and peasants in Bolivia (Regalsky 2006), and indigenous movements in Ecuador (Pachano 2005). All are examples of how traditionally excluded social groups became ‘conscious’, and activated their power to generate a shift resulting in a change of governments and social policies. The recognition of social, economic and cultural rights is one such vehicle to address the redistribution of power, allowing socially excluded citizens to activate it through the legal framework. Different strategies and actions (e.g. capacity building, advocacy, and solidarity) can be employed as well. Involving citizens through participatory action-research In health systems research, there is an emphasis on evidence and research produced through quantitative approaches, such as large

f lo r e s | 85 household surveys, modelling studies, econometrics, and so on, mostly undertaken by academic experts. There is little emphasis on evidence and knowledge produced through participatory action-research (PAR), in which citizens, particularly those affected by inequities, actively participate in data gathering, analysis and in debating policy reforms and monitoring their implementation (Loewenson et al. 2011). PAR draws from critical theory and constructivism and may use a range of qualitative and quantitative methods (Baum, MacDougall and Smith 2006). PAR transforms the role of those who typically participate as ‘subjects’ of research, engaging them as active researchers and agents of change (Minkler and Wallerstein 2008). PAR has been used to study a range of health system issues, from social determinants of health to community health outreach, to improving quality of services, to systematizing local experience and organizing shared collective analysis on relationships and causes of problems. PAR links such analysis to reflection and action, organizing shared experience and perception to generate new learning and knowledge (Loewenson et al. 2011). Within the CEGSS approach in Guatemala, there is a commitment to working collaboratively with poor, rural indigenous organizations in their efforts to influence public policy and achieve more equitable resource allocation at the municipal level. By applying tools and techniques from PAR, and the direct involvement of ‘aggrieved’ citizens, CEGSS seeks to strengthen the ‘citizenship’ of rural indigenous peoples. The CEGSS approach The two conceptual and methodological themes described above crosscut the four implementation phases of the CEGSS approach. Each of these phases is briefly described below.

Phase 1: initial appraisal study The initial appraisal involves a rapid analysis of local conditions in relation to access to healthcare services, availability of essential resources at healthcare facilities, power relations (trust) and key characteristics of democratic governance (accountability, transparency and social participation). The appraisal also applies rapid ethnographic techniques (social mapping, document analysis, participant observation and in-depth interviews) to analyse and understand power relations.

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As part of the PAR approach, community-based organizations (CBOs) are involved in the initial appraisal study. CEGSS discusses and agrees with them as to the particularities of the study and then jointly develops the data collection tools, provides training to use these tools, and support for data analysis. This initial appraisal is very important in defining the situation at the beginning of the intervention, which allows community organizations to identify whether their efforts are leading to change (e.g. increased availability of essential medicines and supplies, better treatment to families while seeking healthcare, improved communication between families and healthcare providers). During CEGSS’s work it has been demonstrated that monitoring changes occurring at the process and output levels is very important to maintaining citizens’ motivation and confidence in their involvement. This initial phase lasts between three and five months.

Phase 2: capacity building Based on the findings of the initial appraisal study, a capacity-building process is designed and implemented with the participation of community representatives and local authorities. These workshops, based on popular education and adult learning techniques, develop skills and knowledge around the following themes: • • • • •

legal framework for health and social participation in Guatemala; public policies and the roles and responsibilities of different actors; participatory planning and monitoring; implementing participatory monitoring for accountability; strategies and activities to demand accountability of authorities and advocacy.

This capacity building is organized around seven one-day workshops and participants receive study guides to work on at home. However, there may be up to two additional workshops based on the interest of local CBO partners (e.g. some may be interested in expanding on the participatory planning and monitoring training, and others on training for strategic advocacy). This second phase lasts between 7 and 10 months.

Phase 3: participatory monitoring This stage involves designing, fieldtesting and implementing a participatory system to monitor whether

f lo r e s | 87 public policies and resources at the municipal level are addressing and resolving access to healthcare problems. For monitoring policies and resources, two instruments were developed: (a) healthcare facility surveys to assess availability of essential drugs, medical equipment/ supplies and availability of human resources; and (b) an interview guide for families who faced a healthcare problem and went to a public healthcare facility but did not receive adequate care. The purpose of adding family interviews was to demonstrate that the inability to solve the basic healthcare needs of families through public healthcare facilities has a negative impact on livelihoods. Families often have to use scarce resources to pay for medicines, transport to a central hospital, and also lose working days to illness. Community leaders were trained to apply the instruments and to carry out the analysis on the collected data. The design of this CEGSS monitoring system is described schematically in Figure 5.1, starting with the central complaint by rural citizens that they are not receiving the healthcare services they need from public health facilities. The figure also identifies a ‘steering commission’ with representatives from health authorities, municipal authorities and CBOs (called COCODE, a Spanish acronym for Community Development Council). Representatives from COCODE carry out two main tasks: (a) evaluating and monitoring the availability of resources and resolution capacity at public healthcare facilities; and (b) collecting information and monitoring families’ experiences while seeking healthcare at public facilities. Each of these tasks has its own data collection tools. It is important to note that the standards for availability of drugs, medical equipment and human resources at healthcare facilities are all based on the national standards set by the Ministry of Health. Community monitoring evaluates whether surveyed healthcare facilities are complying with these national norms and protocols. Initially, the survey included all essential drugs and medical supplies, which could be more than 100 items. Although comprehensive, applying these tools was lengthy and took a good deal of time from volunteer community members. Instead, it was decided to test new data collection tools using tracer drugs and medical equipment. These new tools greatly reduce the time that community volunteers need to allocate to carrying out the monitoring process.

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Collected information is then fed into a simple database. The analysis is carried out by community boards with the technical assistance of CEGSS. A report is produced and findings are presented during the meetings of the Municipal Council for Development (COMUDE). From these meetings, an action plan is drafted with decisions aimed at correcting problems and allocating resources toward needed services and communities. The next step is to monitor the decision-making process and determine whether targets are being achieved. The monitoring of the decision-making process emphasizes democratic governance variables such as social participation, transparency and accountability. Previous research implemented by CEGSS found that decisions by the COMUDE occur under very asymmetrical conditions (usually community representatives from further areas are at a disadvantage). The system therefore includes tools to monitor whether decisions are benefiting communities facing a larger shortage of resources and whether transparency and accountability are being strengthened throughout this process. Those specific tools are also listed in Figure 5.1. An analysis of findings on the implementation of the action plan, on the decision-making process and on the achievement of targets are then fed back into the central issue to assess whether the collective action of social actors (policy-makers, health authorities and CBOs) is improving rural citizens’ access to healthcare and the accountability of authorities at the municipal level. The results of this assessment inform a new cycle of data collection, analysis, adjustments to action plans and monitoring of implementation and decision making, which in turn feeds information to initiate the next cycle. Each CBO decides on the frequency of data collection rounds, but in the six municipalities already implementing the system, data collection occurs every six months.

Phase 4: advocacy The findings of the monitoring process serve as the main input in order to plan and decide on the strategies and actions to demand accountability from public authorities and changes related to the allocation of resources to improve availability of essential drugs, medical supplies and personnel at public healthcare facilities. Examples of such actions include the analysis of political forces and seeking alliances among political actors (members of parliament and

f lo r e s | 89 Central issue: population does not receive all needed healthcare services

Assessment and monitoring, availability of resources, inputs and resolution capacity in public institutions

Tools:

Actors in the monitoring process: COCODE, municipal authorities and health authorities

Database and reports submitted to the Municipal Council for Development (COMUDE)

Healthcare facility surveys • • •

•

Availability of essential drugs Availability of human resources Availability of medical equipment and essential supplies Barriers to access

Monitoring population experience during healthcare seeking and its impact on family survival/coping strategies

Tools: In-depth family interviews

Action plan for improvement, discussed and agreed within COMUDE

Monitoring equity targets, power asymmetries, transparency and accountability in the decision making at COMUDE and follow-up on decisions

•

•

•

•

Family members who were ill and their coping strategies Type of support and service received at healthcare facilities Out-of-pocket expenses to treat illness due to lack of resources at healthcare facilities Level of satisfaction with healthcare services

Tools: •

•

•

Checklist to monitor decision-making processes that are transparent Monitoring accountability by authorities of decisions implemented Monitoring whether steps are being implemented to reduce power asymmetries in decision making

5.1 CEGSS community monitoring system, 2008–2011

others) and the use of mass media (newspapers, radio and others). In each of the six municipalities where CEGSS works there have been monthly meetings to discuss advocacy efforts and to review their outcomes. In 2010, CEGSS produced educational newsletters and radio programmes in collaboration with CBOs.1 Such advocacy tools generated a good deal of interest among authorities and the general public. The roles for each of the involved partners are outlined in Table 5.1.

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5.1 Key roles of CEGSS partners

Partners

Key roles

CBOs

– Providing input into the analytical frameworks and data collection tools developed by the CEGSS project team – Participating in data collection and analysis for the baseline and end-of-project studies – Participating in capacity-building workshops and all other meetings and activities related to the project’s intervention phase – Leading the participatory monitoring process (data collection, analysis and reporting) at the municipal level – Organizing monthly advocacy meetings and implementing advocacy actions – Providing inputs for educational newsletters and multimedia materials for advocacy – Making suggestions to improve project work plans

Municipal government

– Providing a venue to carry out the capacity-building workshops – Providing information during baseline and end-ofproject studies – Participating in individual and group interviews to elicit data related to project objectives – Meeting with CBOs to discuss and agree on actions to improve access to healthcare and resource allocation

Municipal health authorities

– Providing information during baseline and end-ofproject studies – Participating in individual and group interviews to elicit data related to project objectives – Meeting with CBOs to discuss and agree on actions to improve access to healthcare and resource allocation

CEGSS project team

– Overall project design and technical assistance on data collection tools and for analysis (with inputs from other stakeholders) – Developing and distributing all educational materials required for the capacity-building process – Providing technical assistance to CBOs for the development and implementation of strategic advocacy plans – Taking into account the inputs from CBOs, producing educational newsletters and audio recordings for advocacy

f lo r e s | 91 Evaluation of the programme In 2010, an external formative evaluation was carried out on these participatory action-research initiatives. The main findings were as follows (de Paepe 2010): • The project has created a feeling of empowerment for community members, enabling them to somewhat reduce the power and information asymmetry. This is probably the most important result of the project as far as its sustainability is concerned. One president of a health commission called it an ‘awakening in health’, meaning the community now understands health rights and are able and willing to fight for these rights. • A conceptual framework on health governance was developed as a cycle with inputs, processes, and outputs. The concept of asymmetrical power was developed and the project team developed data collection and analytical tools to analyse asymmetries among COMUDE participants in three main areas: educational level, geographical and financial barriers to attending meetings, and confidence of participants in their skills and knowledge to influence decisions. • Project staff consider that there was less refusal to collaborate with the project than expected from municipalities and health districts because partners got to know each other and authorities understood that it was also in their long-term interest to build better-functioning health services. • Several technical health personnel (nurses, rural health technicians) also integrated into the health commissions that are led by community members. This generates understanding about the benefit of healthcare providers and services users to work together. • There are concrete results from health advocacy: increased availability of personnel for some health services; cancellation of contracts with NGO service providers due to pressure from health commissions; sanctions for doctors who discriminate against indigenous people and better treatment in general by other personnel; more appropriate hours for service provision, including on weekends; and awareness among health staff that equity problems exist and that things can and should be improved. • There is active participation of women in health commissions, which is contributing to empowering them to access healthcare services.

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The review also explained that community leaders would present the results of their analysis of the health system to local health and municipal government authorities, and make specific demands. Although the process is still in its early stages, there have already been achievements. Municipal governments, for example, have increased funding to buy petrol for the local ambulance during emergency transport (which families were paying for previously). Two sub-contracted providers for immunization and other basic health services had their contracts terminated due to corruption (revealed by the monitoring work of communities). The working hours of health facilities have been extended, and complaints by indigenous families that they had received disrespectful treatment by medical doctors have been taken seriously. The above achievements have resulted in a tremendous boost in the self-confidence and motivation of community leaders. As one participant noted: ‘I feel this is an awakening for all of us; we know now that it is possible to demand our right to health and we have seen that change is possible.’ Another female community leader said: ‘Through the training and monitoring system we are now capable of discussing the problems with medicines and personnel in health centres and health posts with the doctors and municipal authorities. Before, we had to accept that services were almost never there and we thought nothing could be done about it.’ It is clear that there is strong potential in the approach being implemented by CEGSS. However, there are important challenges that need to be addressed. At the moment, there is continued interest in the approach by other civil society organizations and donors, hence an expansion of the intervention to new municipalities is underway. Taking into account the findings and recommendations of the formative evaluation, and also the current international interest in rigorous impact evaluation of community empowerment initiatives (McGee and Gaventa 2010; Wallerstein 2006), CEGSS is implementing a randomized control trial to assess the impact of its approach on social accountability of public healthcare services and policies. Lessons learned and sustainability Reflecting on the project to date, team members have been able to identify three main lessons that may be useful for others aiming to research and tackle power inequalities in public services. First, PAR is not only a research tool but also an approach that can be used in

f lo r e s | 93 adult education and to trigger political action. This project embraced PAR because in addition to being an effective method of collectively producing knowledge, it provides the tools to question power at all levels. Overall, our experience in applying PAR to health systems research and actions has shown that the participation of ordinary citizens in the production of evidence and knowledge provides strong legitimacy to research findings; it is an empowering process for citizens and may provide an entry point for action on other social determinants of health. Second, it is important to facilitate an alliance among all individuals and groups that experience different levels of exclusion. Rural indigenous citizens have historically been excluded from development, whereas frontline healthcare workers, working within a hierarchical and professionally controlled organization, are also often excluded. The empowerment of frontline healthcare workers is crucial. They should form an alliance with CBOs seeking to influence pro-equity resource allocation. Third, it is important to be aware of and understand the health politics and complex power relations occurring at the central, regional and local government levels. Demanding transparency and accountability from all actors with vested interests in policy making is a way of tackling power asymmetries. In addition to international funding, our approach has generated support from national NGOs and some government agencies mandated to promote citizen participation in public policy. But most important, the CEGSS approach has demonstrated that this can be implemented through the facilitation of capacity-building processes. Most of the civil society coalitions engaged in the process are already present in these municipalities, hence reducing the need for major external funding. In addition, our approach does not envisage sustainability in the traditional way, in which activities are expected to continue once external funding is ceased. Rather, sustainability relates to maintaining and increasing the level of resources that rural citizens have achieved through their demands and expanding the social mobilization to act upon other social determinants of health (such as education, food security, etc.). In other words, our approach is a catalyst for rural citizens’ struggles in gaining access to other essential livelihood resources and public services.

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Acknowledgements The author would like to thank his research team: Ismael Gómez, Lorena Ruano, Denise Phe, Mayra Méndez, Raphael Zepeda and Carlos Quiñonez. He also thanks IDRC, Canada, and Umea University, Sweden, for the financial

support provided to carry out the work in Guatemala. Also, financial support from WHO (equity, ethics and trade department) and from COPASAH to systematize this experience is acknowledged.

Note 1 These tools are available on the CEGSS website at www.cegss.org.gt.

References Arendt, H. 1970. On violence. New York: Harcourt. Baum, F., MacDougall, C. and Smith, D. 2006. Participatory action research. Journal of Epidemiological Community Health 60(10): 854–857. Benclowicz, J. 2006. La izquierda y la emergencia del movimiento piquetero en la Argentina: Análisis de un caso testigo. www.publicaciones.cucsh. udg.mx/pperiod/espiral/espiralpdf/ Espiral37/123-143.pdf (accessed December 12, 2008). Center for Economic and Social Rights and Instituto Centroamericano de Estudios Fiscales. 2009. ¿Derechos o privilegios? El compromiso fiscal con la salud, la educación y la alimentación en Guatemala. Guatemala City: Mimeo. Clegg, S., Courpasson, D. and Phillips, N. 2007. Power and organization. London: Sage. Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico (CEH). 1999. Informe de la Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico, Guatemala: Memoria del silencio. Guatemala City: Oficina de Servicios para Proyectos de las Naciones Unidas. de Paepe, P. 2010. Evaluation report project ‘Strengthening Health Systems Governance in Latin America

Phase 1’. IDRC Project No. 103887-003 (June). FAO (Food and Agricultural Organization). 2003. Important commodities in agricultural trade: sugar. www.fao.org/docrep/005/ y4852e/y4852e11.htm (accessed February 22, 2011). Flores, W. and Gómez, I. 2010. La gobernanza de los Consejos Municipales de Desarrollo de Guatemala: Análisis de actores y relaciones de poder. Revista de Salud Pública 12(1): 138–150. Flores, W., Ruano, L. and Phe, D. 2009. Social participation within a context of political violence: Implications for the promotion and exercise of the right to health in Guatemala. Health and Human Rights: An International Journal, 11(1): 37–48. Haugaard, M. 2002. Power: A reader. Manchester: Manchester University Press. www.cebem.org/admin/ cmsfiles/archivos/america-latinaregalsky.pdf (accessed December 21, 2008). ICO (International Coffee Organization). 2011. Trade statistics year 2010. http:// www.ico.org/prices/m1.htm (accessed February 24, 2011). INE (Instituto Nacional de Estadística). 2002. Encuesta Nacional de Salud

f lo r e s | 95 Materno Infantil. Guatemala City: INE. INE (Instituto Nacional de Estadística). 2009. V Encuesta Nacional de Salud Materno Infantil 2008–2009. Guatemala City: INE. Loewenson, R., Flores, W., Shukla, A., Kagis, M., Baba, A., Ryklief, A., Mbwili-Muleya, C. and Kakade, D. 2011. Raising the profile of participatory action research at the 2010 Global Symposium on Health Systems Research. MEDICC Review July 13(3) : 35–38. McGee, R. and Gaventa, J. 2010. Synthesis report: Review of impact and effectiveness of transparency and accountability initiatives. Institute of Development Studies. Sussex T/A Initiative 2014. Minkler, M. and Wallerstein, N. 2008. Introduction to community-based participatory research: New issues and emphases. In Minkler, M. and Wallerstein, N. (eds.), Communitybased participatory research for health: From process to outcomes, 5–19. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Morriss, P. 2002. Power: A Philosophical Analysis. 2nd edition. Manchester: Manchester University Press. MSPAS (Ministerio de Salud Pública y Asistencia Social). 2003. Línea basal de mortalidad maternal para el año

2000. Guatemala City: Ministerio de Salud Pública y Asistencia Social. MSPAS (Ministerio de Salud Pública y Asistencia Social). 2011. Estudio Nacional de Mortalidad Materna. Guatemala City: Ministerio de Salud Pública y Asistencia Social. Pachano, S. 2005. Ecuador: Cuando la inestabilidad se vuelve estable. Iconos. Revista de Ciencias Sociales 23: 37–44. www.flacso.org.ec/docs/i23pachano. pdf (accessed December 8, 2008). Poulantzas, N. 1968. Poder político y clases sociales en el estado capitalista. Mexico: Siglo XXI. Regalsky, P. 2006. América Latina: Bolivia indígena y campesina. Una larga marcha para liberar sus territorios y un contexto para el gobierno de Evo Morales. Revista Herramienta 31. www.herramienta.com.ar/revistaherramienta-n-31/bolivia-indigena-ycampesina-una-larga-marcha-paraliberar-sus-territorios- (accessed June 22, 2015). UNICEF. 2011. Statistics by country. Guatemala. www.unicef.org/ infobycountry/guatemala_statistics. html (accessed February 22, 2011). Wallerstein, N. 2006. What is the evidence on effectiveness of empowerment to improve health? Copenhagen: WHO Regional Office for Europe’s Health Evidence Network.

6 | E LE C TRI FI E D P UB L I CS A N D I NFOR MA L SETTLE M E N T S I N UR B A N I N D I A Bipasha Baruah

An estimated 40 per cent of the world’s urban poor lack access to legal energy services (IEA 2010). And yet slum upgrade efforts, if they exist, tend to prioritize water supply and sewerage over electrification, since ‘illegal’ electricity – albeit unreliable, expensive and dangerous – is more widely available than water services in informal settlements (Baruah 2010). Efforts to overcome this situation have typically been neoliberal (more market) or Keynesian (more state). By contrast, this chapter describes the experiences of two non-governmental organizations (NGOs) based in Ahmedabad, India – the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) and Saath – and their role in an equity-oriented slum electrification programme called Ujala Yojana (the ‘light’ project). This partnership – although not without its own challenges and limitations – represents an alternative approach to ‘making public’ in a field dominated by big government and big capital. The task of electrification is indeed massive, but responses to it need not be slavishly delivered by large, remote and often opaque agencies. Significant change can be made by smaller organizations, as illustrated by the fact that 100,000 homes had been electrified in Ahmedabad thanks to this programme by 2008, and it is being replicated in smaller cities in the states of Gujarat and Rajasthan. Using pricing surveys, focus groups and interviews with electricity utility staff and members of the NGOs, this chapter assesses the Ujala Yojana electrification programme in terms of its impacts upon access, tariffs, consumption patterns, quality of service, electricity theft, tenure security, and its role in empowering women through the formation and maintenance of community-based organizations (CBOs). It also looks at CBO participation in meter reading, billing and collections. The findings indicate that NGOs can play very productive roles as intermediaries between utilities, municipalities and

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urban poor communities. They can assist in developing innovative ways of addressing land tenure issues, devising equitable ways of paying for electricity, improving management processes, dealing with non-payment, and developing information and reporting systems by providing feedback to utilities and municipalities. However, the NGO role in slum electrification is labour-intensive and expensive. Scaling up and optimizing NGO participation in progressive electrification activities requires strong state involvement in securing financial resources and developing a policy framework for NGOs to participate in the design and implementation of partnership projects and in the oversight of the electricity reform process in general. It is difficult to determine from this case study whether and how this model might work elsewhere, but findings do highlight the importance of documenting and understanding sub-national scales and actors in experimenting with and testing alternatives to market-based solutions in the massive challenge of urban electrification. Electricity and the urban poor Access to electricity is still only available to two thirds of the world’s population. While electrification is not a sufficient condition for economic development, it is socially desirable and has been strongly correlated with wealth and health (Ferguson, Wilkinson and Hill 2000). Improved energy services provide a wide range of economic and social benefits, such as greater potential for education due to better lighting; savings in time and effort spent gathering traditional fuels; potential for improved access to information and digital connectivity; scope for greater productivity; scope for improved health services; and improved indoor air quality (UNDP 2000; Waddams Price 2000). Increasing access to electricity – especially in rural areas and for the urban poor – is an urgent need. Slum dwellers are willing to risk physical danger and possible prosecution to tap into the power infrastructure themselves or to enter into agreements with illegal service providers. That slum dwellers value and need access to electricity is borne out by the fact that they pay for it almost globally at a higher per unit cost than people in legally served areas (USAID 2004). In the last few decades, many countries around the world have reformed their electricity utility industries. This is justified in part by the unsatisfactory performance of state-regulated and state-controlled power regimes. Although different countries have chosen different

baruah | 101 models of reform, the overall direction tends to focus on corporatization of state-owned facilities (or outright privatization), deregulation and competition, often within the context of larger neoliberal forms of macroeconomic restructuring (McDonald 2014). In many countries, including India, electricity sectors were at the forefront of newly liberalizing economies, even though these marketized visions of electricity provision represented a dramatic shift in policies, serving to unravel post-independence public service models of state-led development in which electricity and water, among other services, were seen to be part and parcel of broader goals of nation building and used as explicit policy mechanisms for redistribution. In this new reform era, electricity delivery involves three key stakeholders: the government, the electricity company (either a private company or a commercialized state electricity board), and consumers. The role of government is to safeguard public health and safety, which in turn implies overseeing the safety, quality and cost of electricity supply, and authorizing tariffs (possibly allowing cross-subsidies for low-income households). Since land ownership and tenure fall under the government’s purview, it also has the power to authorize right of way for utility infrastructure such as distribution lines and transformers. The role of the electricity utility is generally limited to providing infrastructure in the form of meters and wiring, billing and payment collection for the service, and maintaining the quality of the service provided in accordance with the rules that govern electricity supply. Consumers typically have no role in electricity delivery other than to expect that they will receive electricity reliably and safely as long as they pay their bills regularly. However, this tripartite electricity governance approach does not work in the vast majority of the world’s informal settlements, where most electricity transactions are informal and unregulated by the state. Since many governments barely even acknowledge that slums exist, slum dwellers often have no legal entitlements to basic services, and informal and illegal systems grow in response. And because the majority of unserved populations reside in rural areas and urban informal settlements, their load demands and incomes are low, making connection costs unaffordable at market prices. Private electricity companies (and state-owned commercialized utilities), on the other hand, are expected to operate on a cost-recovery or profit basis. Even if governments stipulate that private companies also provide services

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to economically weaker groups, electrifying such communities is often financially unattractive. The challenges of obtaining right-of-way documents to serve largely illegally settled areas also deter electricity companies from attempting to serve slums. Additionally, there may be physical risks for utility staff – particularly if they are seeking payment – in entering slums. Competing illegal suppliers often succeed where legal providers fail, even when they charge more per unit cost, because they are familiar with local conditions and can package their services in ways that poor households find more affordable, such as monthly charges per appliance or flexible payment terms for connection and reconnection. Since illegal suppliers typically steal power from legal power lines and do not assume the cost of production and transmission of electricity to the locations they serve, they are able to offer much more flexible terms of payment (USAID 2004). Within the private sector there is also an assumed ‘culture of nonpayment’ in informal settlements, although ‘theft’ or ‘non-technical’ losses associated with informal settlements represent only 3 to 5 per cent of global revenue from electricity (USAID 2004). Non-payment has been demonstrated to be far more rampant and significant in government agencies, large farms, private corporations and middleclass homes (Wamukonya 2003). All of these real and assumed deterrents severely limit private providers’ interest in undertaking slum electrification efforts. One could argue that these informal or illegal arrangements are an acceptable way of subsidizing the energy needs of the urban poor, but such arguments ignore compelling reasons to improve formal access to electricity. First, illegal electricity supplies are notoriously unreliable and unsafe. Providers can and do cut off supplies at whim for days on end. Slum residents in Ahmedabad, where this research was conducted, complained that the illegal service provider cut off their electricity completely for four or five days a month, and sporadically at least once a day for several hours. Additionally, voltage fluctuated uncontrollably during the day and was almost always very low at night. They were also cut off if they failed to pay their monthly ‘dues’ on time. Faulty wiring as well as the use of flammable energy alternatives when power is cut off has caused devastating fires, destroyed homes, killed, injured and displaced tens of thousands of poor people in cities around the world (IEA 2010). Simply typing ‘slum fires’ into the

baruah | 103 BBC’s web search engine draws up 15 pages of news stories since the year 2000 about slum fires in cities in Bangladesh, India, Cambodia, the Philippines, Kenya, South Africa, Brazil, Haiti and many more. Almost all the fires were attributed either to faulty electric wiring or to the use of flammable energy alternatives such as kerosene. Second, although the terms of payment of illegal suppliers may be better suited for the low and volatile incomes of the urban poor, per unit costs are much higher than those charged by legal suppliers. And finally, illegal supplies do not in any way strengthen or validate the urban poor’s entitlements to basic services. Formal land titles and sale deeds are still not available to the vast majority of slum dwellers. User charge documents such as water and electricity bills are perceived to be empowering by slum communities because they represent a de facto form of tenure security. People who have lived on the margins of society all their lives are eager to embrace such symbols of ‘official’ recognition because they strengthen their right of residence in their homes and communities and provide a certain level of protection from eviction (Baruah 2010). There is clearly a need for innovative approaches to provide affordable legal electricity to informal settlements. As with multiple stakeholder initiatives for water and sanitation (Baruah 2007a), some civil society organizations are suitably placed to work in partnership with government agencies, public electricity companies, slum dwellers and donor agencies to design and implement progressive, pro-public electrification programmes. The Ujala Yojana slum electrification project Ahmedabad is the largest city in the western state of Gujarat and the seventh-largest metropolis in India. The Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) was founded in Ahmedabad in 1972 to organize women in the informal sector for better working conditions and social security provisions. Saath is a smaller NGO based in Ahmedabad with a mandate to improve access to health, education, infrastructure services and livelihood options for the urban poor.1 A survey conducted by the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation revealed that 42 per cent of the city’s population, or approximately 1.2 million people, live in slums that lack the most basic amenities (Kundu and Mahadevia 2002). The Gujarat Mahila Housing SEWA Trust (MHT) was established in 1994 with the overall objective of improving the housing and infrastructure

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conditions of poor women in the informal sector. Since 1997, MHT and Saath have participated in implementing a Slum Networking Project in Ahmedabad that aims to transform the physical environment of slums as well as improving the social and economic lives of slum dwellers. Also known as the Parivartan project (meaning ‘transformation’ in Hindi and Gujarati), it aims to provide a package of basic infrastructure services, including household connections for water supply, individual toilets, storm water drainage, solid waste disposal, paved roads, street lights and landscaping. MHT and Saath have worked to achieve these objectives through a partnership involving slum communities and their representatives, the community-based organizations, the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation, and partial matched funding from the World Bank and USAID. By the summer of 2006, the Slum Networking Project had reached 35,500 slum dwellers in Ahmedabad with its services. It was awarded the prestigious Dubai International Award for Best Practices to Improve the Living Environment in the same year.2 In 2001, building upon the successes of the Slum Networking Project, MHT and Saath forged a partnership with the Ahmedabad Electricity Company (AEC), a corporatized public utility, on a legal slum electrification pilot project. USAID provided partial funding for the project. The main objectives were: to ensure availability of safe and legal electricity supply to slum communities; to minimize process time for new connections and to organize and operate an efficient bill collection system; to eliminate unauthorized use of electricity by regularizing connections and minimizing techno-commercial losses; to involve slum dwellers in the supply and payment of dues through representative CBOs; and to develop strategies for scaling up the programme at the local, state and national levels. By 2008, close to 100,000 homes had been electrified in Gujarat and the programme is now being extended within Gujarat and in the neighbouring state of Rajasthan. The rest of this chapter discusses the successes and limitations of this project as well as its implications for pro-public electricity services. Building upon established trust The successful implementation of a large multiple-stakeholder water and sanitation-focused project enhanced trust between the communities, the municipality and the NGOs. The sequencing of the slum electrification programme was critical to its success. Since

baruah | 105 most slum dwellers prioritized access to water and sewerage over legal electricity, these services were provided first, with almost 90 per cent of residents benefiting from the Slum Networking Project expressing a demand for legal electricity only after receiving water and sanitation services. The 10-year guarantee of non-eviction awarded by the municipality to areas covered by the project also played a big role in motivating slum residents to invest in legal electricity connections.3 In the early years of commercialization of the electricity sector, AEC showed little interest in serving slum communities with legal electricity. The operations of the AEC were at that time regulated by the 1991 Electricity Laws Act, which stipulated that the Government of Gujarat would bail the AEC out of 50 per cent of revenue losses in its operations. This Act, which initially ushered in commercialization and partial privatization of the electricity sector, was eventually amended again to require the Government of Gujarat to pick up only 30 per cent of AEC’s revenue losses. After the amendment, the AEC became motivated to find new customers and reduce losses due to illegal connections. Middle- and upper-income residential communities in Ahmedabad are already fully electrified. Slum communities with densely packed homes presented tremendous opportunities for AEC to scale up its operations to meet the dual objectives of reducing losses and increasing revenue. It is unclear whether the AEC was also motivated by a public service ethos in seeking to electrify slums. Regardless, it is important to emphasize that even commercialized public entities can at least be legislated to implement equity-oriented initiatives since they remain state-owned. Assessment of ability and willingness to pay A primary concern (and a major source of conflict) in electrification programmes in general is the degree to which the household connection fees should be subsidized. It has become accepted practice in India – although not without controversy – to require the recipient household to pay part of the connection cost. This is based on the argument that the improvement would be valued more highly if the recipient household had to make an investment (Black 2008). On the other hand, it is also widely acknowledged that lump-sum payments can be very onerous, and often impossible, for poor households to manage. Most slum households were able to manage the fee best when they could pay smaller sums of money over longer periods of time.

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Before the pilot project, there was a general assumption within the AEC that slum residents would be unwilling and/or unable to pay for legal electricity connections. Therefore, Saath conducted a survey in 2007 to gauge this. The electricity consumption in legally connected households in slums was typically about 36 kWh per month, which at prevailing tariffs would cost INR 108 (US$2.70) per month.4 Based on conversations with slum dwellers about rates charged by middlemen, Saath estimated that the same level of consumption would cost INR 216 (US$5.40) per month for an illegal connection.5 This amounts to 10–15 per cent of monthly income for a household earning INR 25,000 (US$625) a year. The survey assumed that to finance the initial connection costs, the customer would take a loan from a moneylender at a very high interest rate payable over a three-year period. These costs were integrated into the survey to arrive at the monthly repayment schedule. Therefore, the total monthly cost to the electricity user established is the monthly loan repayment plus the average monthly charge for electricity consumption. Although there were wide variations in ‘willingness to pay’ among the 500 households surveyed in five informal areas, some informative findings emerged from the analysis of this data (see Table 6.1). The precipitous drop in inclination to pay as the connection fee increases above INR 2,000 (US$50) indicated a clear break point for pricing, after which the penetration of formal electricity connections would be low without subsidies, suggesting the need for state funding if widespread access was to be achieved. Ahluwalia (2000) estimated that 50 per cent

TABLE

6.1 ‘Willingness to pay’ for legal electricity services

Connection Monthly instalment Monthly fee payment for electricity connection bill

Total monthly cost

Households willing to pay (%)

INR 1,000

INR 60

INR 108

INR 168

98

INR 1,500

INR 91

INR 108

INR 199

88

INR 2,000

INR 121

INR 108

INR 229

84

INR 2,500

INR 151

INR 108

INR 259

28

INR 3,000

INR 181

INR 108

INR 289

6

Source: Author analysis.

baruah | 107 of all households in India (81 million households at that time) were unable to afford commercial rates for electricity, further illustrating the need for public funding, particularly with a commercialized public electricity provider (see also Barnes and Halpern 2000; Baruah 2015a; Dubash 2002). Suitable tariffs The establishment of appropriate pricing guidelines for initial connection fees were complicated by a claim by AEC – based mostly on anecdotal information – that 40 per cent of slum households were willing to pay up to INR 8,000 (US$200) in initial connection costs (Bhatt 2007). MHT and Saath played a crucial role in negotiating a more realistic pricing policy. The AEC had initially worked out variable pricing from INR 3,500 (US$87.50) to INR 10,000 (US$250) for different informal households, depending on their distance from the electricity mains. The NGOs convinced AEC to adopt a uniform pricing policy for all households included in the pilot project. The costs of connecting an individual household and installing internal wiring was split among the households, which contributed INR 3,350 (US$83.75), and USAID and AEC, each contributing INR 2,200 (US$55). A total of 820 households in four slums were provided with legal electricity at this rate. Average revenue losses to AEC were reduced from 27 to 4 per cent, while average electricity consumption per day doubled. AEC reports that total non-technical losses in areas that have been legally electrified are 5 per cent, while they are six times higher in areas with widely prevalent illegal connections. Following this pilot project, AEC decided that it would charge a lower uniform price of INR 5,200 (US$130) – inclusive of all subsidies – for all new service connections. NGO advocacy in pricing policies for low-income consumers has also benefited mainstream consumers in the state of Gujarat. As AEC became more convinced about the profitability of slum electrification, one-time connection fees there were further reduced to INR 2,300 (US$57.50) for all new connections. SEWA and Saath are currently working on electrification projects in rural and urban areas of Gujarat in collaboration with private-sector electricity companies and commercialized state electricity boards that have all adopted INR 2,300 as the standard charge for new connections. It is important to emphasize the important role played by the public, albeit commercialized, utility

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in the city of Ahmedabad in influencing affordable pricing in both public and private utilities in other cities in the state of Gujarat. AEC also issues bi-monthly bills to its consumers. But because of their low and volatile incomes, most slum residents are unable to pay these larger bills, and most expressed a clear preference for monthly billing. MHT intervened and appealed to AEC to do this. AEC responded by revamping its management information software to facilitate the issuance of more regular, monthly bills. Access to microfinance To enable as many households as possible to benefit from the slum electrification programme, SEWA Bank facilitated access to electrification loans, up to a maximum of INR 4,000 (US$100). To borrow this amount, an account holder must deposit at least INR 500 (US$12.50) into the account. Like other housing loans, the interest rate on the loan was 17 per cent and borrowers were required to pay INR 200 (US$5) every month. The loans are designed to be repaid within 21 months through daily, weekly, fortnightly, monthly or bimonthly instalments. Although resistance to neoliberal micro-finance may emerge at the grassroots in other contexts, and lead to the creation of more radical socio-political formations, in this particular case in India local communities appear to be buying into rather than resisting such practices. SEWA’s decision to lend only to women can similarly be interpreted as progressive and enlightened, or more cynically as just ‘efficient’ – since it is well known within development circles that poor women are easier to discipline and collect debts from because of their low social status within their families and within society at large. The enthusiasm for providing women with microcredit continues unabated at the moment but it is difficult to determine whether practices and models that ‘empower’ women in deeply individualistic ways will endure in the future (see Baruah [2010, 2015a] for a broader discussion of the contradictions presented by NGO intervention in poor women’s lives). Establishing a legal framework for slum electrification The issue of land tenure looms large in slum electrification programmes. India’s Electricity Act prohibits the electrification of illegally occupied lands. To uphold this law, the AEC was following

baruah | 109 very strict norms and requiring consumers to provide documents demonstrating legal ownership of land as well as other proof of residence such as tariff bills, ration and election cards. Of course, the vast majority of slum dwellers would have been unable to provide such documentation. MHT and Saath lobbied the AEC to find creative ways to meet the requirements and after six months it was decided that a No Objection Certificate issued by the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation stating that it would not evict the beneficiaries of the Slum Networking Project for a period of 10 years could be used. Since such letters could only be provided for slums that had received the project’s infrastructure, the AEC introduced an indemnity bond to specifically undertake electrification in other slums at a later stage. The indemnity bond basically required slum residents to sign an agreement stating that they would not pursue legal proceedings against AEC if they were evicted from their homes or relocated in the future by the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation. The combination of No Objection Certificates and indemnity bonds provided an adequate legal framework for the provision of legal electricity to slums. The challenges faced by the NGOs in addressing the right-of-way issue in Ahmedabad does, however, point to a need to amend the Electricity Act to allow for the legal electrification of informal settlements in other states in India. Tragically, a devastating earthquake hit Gujarat in January 2001 just before the implementation of the pilot project. Many poorly or illegally constructed buildings collapsed during the earthquake. In the aftermath, the High Court ruled that regular electricity connections could only be provided if there was a valid building use permit for construction. This presented another obstacle. Since slum residents do not qualify for building use permits, the AEC and Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation assumed that they were also ineligible for legal electricity connections. Saath filed a Public Interest Litigation asking the High Court to clarify if the ruling also applied to slum residents. The High Court later responded by stating that slums did not require building use permits to access basic services, including legal electricity. Role of CBOs MHT and Saath were able to actively engage the communitybased organizations that had already been formed as part of the slum electrification project. The NGOs and the AEC worked with each

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CBO to identify a member – usually a woman – who was trained to read individual household meters. AEC then paid the member INR 10 (US$0.25) per meter read for each billing cycle. The CBOs’ efforts in collecting electricity dues are complemented by the efforts of Bank sathis (friends) who are employed by SEWA Bank to conduct outreach activities in slum communities. Bank sathis typically come from slum communities themselves and possess basic literacy and accounting abilities. They offer door-to-door financial services and have been extremely ‘effective’ at securing loan repayments. They do not receive salaries but earn commissions based on the volume of business they generate and the repayments they secure. SEWA Bank currently employs more than 75 sathis, 27 of which were identified by MHT in areas served by the Parivartan and Ujala Yojana projects. CBOs also assumed a series of other responsibilities in the slum electrification project: creating awareness and motivating residents to access legal electrification; submitting applications to AEC on behalf of residents; and acting as watchdogs against electricity pilferage after subsidized formalization. The watchdog role is considered especially important because it has been observed by the NGO that illegal private service providers may initially provide little resistance to legal electrification but can quickly re-emerge, potentially undermining the formalization process. While there are some obvious benefits to be derived from CBO involvement, some caution is warranted so as not to naively romanticize community participation. Activism in support of collective, communitybased forms of resource management can fetishize communities as coherent, relatively equitable social structures, despite the fact that inequitable power relations and resource allocation exist within highly impoverished communities (Baruah 2007a). There is no doubt that the CBOs that participated in this project carried out their duties in a well-organized and efficient manner. However, a closer look at the composition and dynamics of the groups revealed a few problematic trends. One of the most obvious characteristics of CBOs in all of the participating communities was the over-representation of women who were related to men in politically powerful positions within the slums, such as political organizers, moneylenders and chit fund managers. More marginalized groups, like female-headed households, were conspicuous in their non-involvement in the CBOs in almost every community included in the research. The poorest and most vulnerable households

baruah | 111 in slums frequently did not participate in slum upgrade activities. This is also true of their participation in CBOs. More incentives must be built into the process to ensure that they do not just represent the voices of the relatively better-off members of the communities. Nebulous terms like ‘community participation’ can, in practice, be exclusive and regressive, or inclusive and progressive, depending on how they are conceptualized and operationalized (McCarthy 2005). In multi-stakeholder projects that bring together ‘partners’ with very different core philosophies, motivations, working styles, strengths and constraints, urban poor communities and their representative CBOs can easily be co-opted to perform a very limited range of policing and collecting agency services as a proxy for ‘participation’. Indeed, there is growing concern that civil society engagement in infrastructure provision, through NGO participation for example, may become just another mechanism for commodifying the delivery of basic services by paying lip service to feel-good terms like participation while continuing to reflect and reproduce urban inequality (McFarlane 2010). Strengthening women’s entitlements to land and housing Although land tax documents and water bills for households that participated in the Slum Networking Project were issued in the name of the female household head – as MHT and Saath had also advocated for electricity bills – a wide range of legal, cultural, economic, political and ideological factors influence women’s marginalization in property ownership in India (Baruah 2007b). Such complexities seem to reinforce the fact that urban land tenure in India is best understood as a multifaceted social and political process rather than as a system of laws and rules, since it more closely resembles a continuum with many intermediate positions than a dichotomy of what is legal or illegal, formal or informal. A similar analogy can be made for women’s property rights in urban areas, where concretizing a woman’s right of residence in her home may similarly serve as an intermediary position en route to the final destination of the right of independent or joint ownership. While the right of ownership can be established only through the execution of a sale deed on secure land, the right of residence can be strengthened through a variety of mechanisms. Since land ownership in its standard form is still not available to an overwhelming majority of slum populations, and the concept of joint titles to urban land and housing is just beginning to gain

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currency, organizations like MHT and Saath attempt to empower women by whatever means available. It is usually more of a matter of ‘putting women’s names’ on legal and quasi-legal documents such as promissory notes, electricity bills, and house and land tax documents. The best that slum dwellers can expect in terms of tenure security at the moment is a 10-year guarantee of non-eviction. The NGOs worked within this limited framework, while advocating for the appropriate policy instruments and legislation at the state and national level. Sensitization of other stakeholders The NGOs also played a strategic role in sensitizing other stakeholders to the realities of the lives of the urban poor. For example, MHT convinced AEC not to cut off access to illegal supplies of electricity until they had laid the cables and were ready to connect formally. Through workshops and seminars organized by MHT, slum residents were able to share the difficulties they faced because of the lack of regular access to electricity. Most revolved around challenges in working at home after sunset, problems children faced with studying and doing their homework, and difficulties in performing household chores. As a result, the partners in the slum electrification programme have worked proactively to ensure that a maximum number of legal electricity connections are provided. Conclusion Through their combined efforts, MHT and Saath have succeeded in making a contribution to slum electrification that few other NGOs in India can lay claim to. Their experience suggests that NGOs can play a very effective role in slum electrification as intermediaries between CBOs, municipalities and utilities. They can assist in developing innovative ways of addressing land tenure issues; devising equitable ways of paying for electricity; improving management processes including metering, billing, collection and rate making; dealing with non-payment and theft; and developing information and reporting systems by providing feedback to utilities and municipalities. Scaling up and optimizing NGO participation in progressive electrification activities requires strong state involvement in securing financial resources and developing a policy framework for NGOs to participate in the design and implementation of partnership projects and in the oversight of the electricity reform process in general.

baruah | 113 MHT and Saath staff identified the absence of policy guidance and financial resources as the biggest impediment for NGO participation in these projects. Without a recognized role and legal framework to guide their actions, NGOs are forced to ‘work in the dark’ (Bhatt 2007). The success of slum electrification motivated AEC to progressively reduce connection fees for slum households after the completion of the pilot project. However, AEC completely ignored the pricing guidelines of the survey conducted by Saath in initially setting high connection fees. The lack of a recognized role for NGO participation made it easy for the utility to reject Saath’s recommendations. Experiences in other countries corroborate that there is much ambivalence about the role of civil society organizations in electricity reform (Wood 2005). While utilities welcomed initial NGO involvement in clearing municipal barriers and building community trust, some were uncomfortable with NGOs playing an intermediary role indefinitely. AEC has expressed a desire to ‘go it alone’ in the future (Bhatt 2007).6 The fact that there are no administrative or capacity-building funds available to the NGOs to participate in this project – both MHT and Saath had to absorb their own project costs – only serves to entrench the perception that the role NGOs play in slum electrification is not particularly valued, and not sustainable. Because the AEC staff did not appreciate MHT’s role they were also unwilling to share credit for the success of the project. During interviews many AEC staff openly wondered why it was necessary to involve NGOs at all. The AEC did not share any technical information about electrification with the NGOs nor did it seek to build NGO staff capacity in any way while implementing the project. The need for state and national-level policies on the role of NGOs in electricity reform in India is urgent. The conflicts between the different partners in the Ujala Yojana slum electrification project are also compounded by the absence of a project-specific Memorandum of Understanding that defines the specific roles and responsibilities of each partner. The involvement of partners with such a wide range of ideologies, sizes, structures and experiences underscores the importance of developing such a document. Constructive debate about how to address specific project challenges can be better encouraged, and outputs and consequences of the project more clearly defined when the relationship between the different parties is set in a formal framework. The lack of a formal agreement causes overlaps in function,

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weakens accountability and exacerbates conflict between the partners. Since the partnership concept envisages involvement of partners with different core competencies, and since there are plans to scale up the slum electrification programme to cover slums in the entire state, the importance of implementing appropriate legalized institutional structures for defining responsibilities and accountability could not be more pronounced. Experiences of stakeholders in other Indian cities where partnership projects have worked well support the importance of drawing up clear roles and responsibilities for different actors. While describing two decades of experiences and achievements by the city of Vishakhapatnam in slum upgrade and regularization, Banerjee (1999) stresses that while it is possible for diverse institutions with different philosophies to work in an integrated way, this does not happen automatically. She goes on to emphasize that the support of the state government is a crucial element in the process, as are clear procedures and mechanisms for institutional development. The establishment of a Special Purpose Vehicle – as an autonomous legal and administrative entity to bring together the parties involved in the partnership project to manage it and share risks and rewards – would also enhance the credibility and legitimacy of the Memorandum of Understanding. An estimated 82 per cent of urban India was electrified in 2000 compared to only 33 per cent of rural India (Dubash 2002). The low rate of access in rural areas is due in part to the high per capita costs of remote rural infrastructural development – one of the reasons why countries such as South Africa have said they will focus on off-grid, solar electricity in these areas. While endorsing the role that NGOs can play in electricity reform, it is also important to highlight currently neglected issues that multi-stakeholder electrification projects must engage with in order to be considered truly socially, economically and environmentally accountable. These include: rural electrification, which one can argue has unintentionally become the worst casualty of the reform process; formal sector job losses and associated social costs that result from downsizing public sector electricity utilities; and environmental considerations – most notably the counterintuitive biases toward fossil fuel-based technologies (nearly 80 per cent of current energy generation in India) that electricity reform has, perhaps unintentionally, encouraged. The need for broad-based public sector intervention in the renewable energy sector in India, which is currently

baruah | 115 largely driven by the private sector, social enterprises and NGOs, is described elsewhere by the author (Baruah 2015b). While acknowledging that power sector reform was perhaps inevitable in India, given the rather sclerotic and opaque nature of the state-heavy system, privatization and commercialization are far from being the only alternative solutions. Democratizing the nature of state delivery – in part through the insertion of democratically organized CBOs and NGOs working in partnership with residents and local authorities – can help build new equity-oriented forms of publicness. Experiences from the electrification projects in this chapter demonstrate how possible this is, while also showing that we have a long way to go in figuring out the culture, politics and institutions of making such services in India more explicitly public in their orientation. Notes 1 There are many excellent resources that document SEWA’s history and organizing philosophy (e.g. see Bhatt 2006; Rose 1992). Additional information about SEWA and Saath can also be found on their websites: www.sewa.org and www.saath.org. 2 For more information about this project, see Baruah (2007a) and Kundu and Mahadevia (2002). 3 Full legal tenure, in the form of land titles (pattas), was not offered to any of the slums that were included in the Slum Networking Project.

4 US$1 was worth approximately INR 40 in 2007. 5 Illegal providers typically charge INR 50 (US$1.25) per ‘power point’ (light bulb connection), resulting in a payment of INR 200–300 (US$5–7.50) per month for a household with four to six connections. 6 Soon after this conversation, Saath withdrew from the project citing lack of resources as the reason for its inability to continue as a partner in the project. MHT was able to continue but its participation in the future remains tenuous.

References Ahluwalia, S. 2000. Power sector reforms: a review of the process and an evaluation of the outcomes. Refereed paper for the NCAER-ADB supported project on Economic Reforms, March. Banerjee, B. 1999. Security of tenure in irregular settlements in Vishakapatnam. Paper presented at the workshop on Tenure Security Policies in South African, Brazilian, Indian and Sub-Saharan African Cities: A Comparative Analysis, Johannesburg, South Africa, July 27–28.

Barnes, D. F. and Halpern, J. 2000. The role of energy subsidies. In Energy Sector Management Assistance Program (ed.), Energy Services for the World’s Poor, 60–66. Washington, DC: World Bank. Baruah, B. 2007a. Assessment of public– private–NGO partnerships: water and sanitation services in slums. Natural Resources Forum 31: 226–237. Baruah, B. 2007b. Gendered realities: exploring property ownership and tenancy relationships in urban

116 | s i x India. World Development 35: 2096–2109. Baruah, B. 2010. Women and Property in Urban India. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Baruah, B. 2015a. NGOs as intermediaries for pro-poor electrification in India: urban development in a postneoliberal era? Asian Journal of Social Science 43: 179–2014. Baruah, B. 2015b. Creating opportunities for women in the renewable energy sector: findings from research in India. Feminist Economics (January) http://dx.doi. org/10.1080/13545701.2014.990912. Bhatt, E. 2006. We Are Poor but So Many: The Story of Self-Employed Women in India. New Delhi. Oxford University Press. Bhatt, B. 2007. Personal communication. July 31. Black, M. 2008. The Last Taboo: Opening the Door on the Global Sanitation Crisis. London: Earthscan. Dubash, N. K. (ed). 2002. Power Politics: Equity and Environment in Electricity Reform. Washington, DC: World Resources Institute. Ferguson, R., Wilkinson, W., and Hill, R. 2000. Electricity use and economic development. Energy Policy 28: 923–934. IEA (International Energy Agency). 2010. World Energy Outlook 2010. Paris: IEA. Kundu, A. and Mahadevia, D. (eds.) 2002. Poverty and Vulnerability in a Globalizing Metropolis: Ahmedabad. New Delhi: Manak Publications.

McCarthy, J. (2005). Commons as counter-hegemonic projects. Capitalism Nature Socialism 16(1): 9–24. McDonald, D. A. 2014. Rethinking Corporatization: Public Utilities in the Global South. London: Zed Press. McFarlane, C. 2010. Infrastructure, interruption, and inequality: urban life in the global South. In S. Graham (ed.), Disrupted Cities: When Infrastructure Fails, 131–144. New York and London: Routledge. Rose, K. 1992. Where Women are Leaders: The SEWA Movement in India. London and New Jersey: Zed Books. UNDP (United Nations Development Programme). 2000. World Energy Assessment: Energy and the Challenge of Sustainability. New York: UNDP, UNDESA and World Energy Council. USAID. 2004. Innovative Approaches to Slum Electrification. Washington, DC: USAID. Waddams Price, C. 2000. Better energy services, better energy sectors – and links with the poor. In Energy Sector Management Assistance Program (ed.), Energy Services for the World’s Poor, 26–32. Washington, DC: World Bank. Wamukonya, N. 2003. Power sector reform in developing countries: mismatched agendas. Energy Policy 31(12): 1273–1289. Wood, D. 2005. Taking power: social and political dynamics of the energy sector. Paper presented at the New Frontiers of Social Policy conference, Arusha, Tanzania, December 12–15.

7 | P RI N C I P L E S A N D P I T F A L L S : S EA R C HING F OR P U B LI C I N ‘ CO M M UN I T Y- L E D T OT A L SA N I TATI ON ’

Mary Galvin

An estimated 2.5 billion people around the world do not have a simple improved latrine, and about one billion people are practising open defecation, with inadequate sanitation resulting in some 2.2 million deaths per year (Bartram et al. 2012; WHO/UNICEF 2013). Most governments in the developing world are failing to implement the UNrecognized human right to sanitation (UN Resolution 64/292) and will fall far short of meeting the Millennium Development Goal to halve the proportion of people without access to sanitation between 1990 and 2015. In this context, a new approach called Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) has taken the sanitation world by storm. Using participatory methods, CLTS forces primarily rural communities to recognize that the practice of open defecation causes sickness and disease in their area and ‘triggers’ them to take action, ensuring that every household builds at least a pit latrine so that the community becomes open defecation free. Originally implemented by NGOs in a handful of specific local areas, CLTS can now be considered hegemonic in the global sanitation sector, having been adopted by the World Bank’s Water and Sanitation Program, UNICEF, WaterAid and PLAN international. Its remarkable claims to widespread success in eradicating open defecation – alongside the powerful influence of these organizations – has resulted in its implementation in over 56 countries (IDS 2014). Many have recognized it as their national sanitation strategy and are working to scale it up (HEART 2013). At one level, CLTS can be considered a typical neoliberal manoeuvre on the part of the sanitation fraternity, working closely with the state but downloading the costs and physical labour of actual service delivery onto communities. Engel and Susilo (2014, 165) characterize donors’

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ideological shift to CLTS as a combination of ‘ideas from grassroots empowerment and neoliberal self-help doctrine’. They argue that the ‘neoliberal revolution’ and structural adjustment programmes of the 1980s resulted in hostility to state provision of sanitation. Claiming to be responsive to the needs of communities through a demand-responsive approach was a way to ‘encourage the poor to “take responsibility” for their own development – and, of course, to pay for it’ (Engel and Susilo 2014, 14). With sanitation marketing aimed at communities that have built their own latrines and now wish to upgrade, CLTS creates a ‘way in’ for the private sector. However, CLTS can also be viewed as an acknowledgement of the need to revive the publicness of sanitation services by making it more democratic and participatory, and acting as a form of redress for the ineffectiveness of public delivery in the past. It is this possibility of CLTS advancing progressive forms of community public engagement that this chapter is most interested in. Drawing on primary and secondary literatures on CLTS, as well as key informant interviews, the chapter explores the degree to which Community-Led Total Sanitation programmes should be considered ‘public’ services. And by invoking the ‘messiness’ of community, I seek to avoid the false dualism of either strengthening neoliberalism through self-help programmes, or uncritically celebrating an abstract public ideal (McDonald 2014, 5). My focus is on the potential of communities to respond to challenges of essential service delivery in a context in which there is increasing recognition of both the disappointments of privatization as well as the ‘limitations of failed public water authorities to respond to the needs of the poor’ (Spronk, Crespo and Olivera 2012, 445). This chapter examines the scope for progressive community provision of sanitation services via CLTS, while more widely exploring what is entailed for a community (as public) to engage in a public–public partnership with the state or other non-profit actors. Letting community back in Over the past few decades, attempts by international organizations and national governments to eliminate open defecation by providing and funding toilet building and health and hygiene education programmes have fallen far short of expectations. These programmes are criticized for pouring funds into sanitation hardware, with poor involvement and

galvin | 119 take-up by communities and little change in health statistics. Years of failed projects, together with chronic underfunding and disinterest on the part of most governments (Chambers 2011), have resulted in a desperation and enthusiasm for new approaches that can deliver on sanitation targets. There are many ways to explain weak state delivery, particularly in the unglamorous sector of sanitation. While the capacity of African states and strong patronage networks undoubtedly affect public delivery on that continent, state-centric delivery in general has been characterized by top-down planning and a didactic approach, which provided poor grounding for a relationship between the state and its citizens (Mehta et al. 2007). This resulted in a lack of communication and, without citizen take-up, many sanitation programmes failed. One of the main premises of CLTS is that sanitation approaches fail to lead to sustained behavioural change because they are driven by outsiders. In short, outsiders and ‘experts’ have a tendency to impose their ideas and meddle in communities with negative effects. Anecdotes abound of toilets built in areas where communities do not use them, of culturally insensitive designs, of people valuing a sound structure so much that they use the toilet for storage, and of toilets being built for people preferring open defecation that has been practised for generations (Mehta 2010, 2). Although the provision of sanitation has typically been done by the state, this has been seen as an ‘old school’ approach, characterized as bureaucratic with centralized state control. Even when services have been decentralized they tend to remain ‘state-centric’ with little engagement of citizens. Galvin and Habib (2003) argue that this approach requires a corrective: involving citizens in a ‘communitycentric’ style of provision. This can be characterized as the ‘need for social rather than simply public [ie. state] forms of management’ (Spronk, Crespo and Olivera 2012, 445). A different approach to sanitation therefore requires changes in the attitude of the state toward its citizens, while at the same time demanding less of the state and more of the community. CLTS has features that meet these criteria, as it puts communities in the driving seat and places few, if any, demands on governments. CLTS practitioners see it as an exemplar of a community-centric approach, which has reportedly achieved success with thousands of rural areas declaring themselves ‘open defecation free’ (Chambers 2009).1

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A brief description of CLTS From a small and modest start in Bangladesh in 1999, where it was pioneered by Kamal Kar, CLTS aspires to the ideal that communities should define and drive their own ‘development’. It tries to remove the role of outsiders, other than as facilitators who ‘trigger’ community responses, and passes full responsibility for sanitation to communities (Galvin 2015). These principles are summarized as changes in attitudes, behaviours, policies and practices: • Outsiders do not ‘persuade and motivate’ nor do they teach or tell people what to do. Instead their role is one of ‘facilitating, empowering and enabling communities to reach their own conclusions’ (Bongartz et al. 2010, 29). The message is that ‘it’s up to you and you decide’ (Engel and Susilo 2014, 668). • Outside solutions and standards are not imposed in a top-down or standardized way. Instead the focus is on bottom-up diversity that produces ‘local solutions’, ‘people design’ and ‘context-appropriate innovations’ (Bongartz et al. 2010, 29). • The approach moves from ‘we must help/subsidize the poor’ by building latrines to ‘communities can do it’. Spending is on facilitators and processes, with low budgets, rather than bigger budgets for hardware to meet disbursement targets (Sah and Negussie 2009, 668). • Instead of counting latrines or focusing on individual behaviour change, the approach is one of ‘social solidarity, co-operation and collective action’ (Bongartz 2010 et al., 29). It is Open Defecation Free communities that are counted, not individuals. Together these principles inform an approach that: recognises an individual’s or a household’s right and responsibility of living in a totally sanitised environment. CLTS is participatory in nature and facilitates communities to take a decisive role in ensuring that each and every member internalises the implication of poor sanitation (e.g. open defecation). The CLTS methodology unites the community to commit to using sanitary latrines and hygienic behaviour and the community understands that the process is a shift towards a zero subsidy approach rather than providing them with money to construct latrines. Once ‘triggered’,

galvin | 121 adults and children become passionately involved in the management of their own sanitary well-being … The process of planning for an open defecation community is jointly undertaken by all community members through their participation which is facilitated by CLTS implementers. (Sah and Negussie 2009, 667) Triggering communities to recognize the link between open defecation and disease is the primary contribution of CLTS, galvanizing community energy and resulting in rapid toilet construction to achieve Open Defecation Free status (Mehta 2010, 8). Although the facilitator decides how to trigger the community, the core elements of triggering are standard. To begin, there may be some discussion of the health status of the community. The facilitator insists that participants use the local-language equivalent of the word ‘shit’ over any protestations of taboo or reference to societal norms (Bongartz et al. 2010, 29). They then use established participatory methods developed by Chambers (1997, 2011) to raise participants’ awareness of the community’s faecal status. Participants visit places where people openly defecate, and then trace the faecal–oral transmission route to a glass of water on the table. The message is: ‘As long as any household in the community is practicing open defecation, we are in danger of eating each other’s shit’ (Bongartz et al. 2010, 29). This ‘sanitary mirror’ enables people to see their own unsanitary lifestyle, while evoking emotions such as embarrassment (possibly ‘shame’) and disgust fuels an ‘ignition process’ that mobilizes the community into collective local action and behaviour change (Mehta 2010, 6). The community then formulates its own plan for each household to build a latrine, so eradication of open defecation is ‘total’. The CLTS approach specifies that ‘natural leaders’ will emerge from the community to monitor and help sustain progress in their area on a voluntary basis (Kar and Chambers 2008). Surprisingly, though, given the support and involvement of international organizations including the World Bank and UNICEF, systems were not put in place to monitor and collect data on the impact and sustainability of CLTS to assist with such leadership capacity. Now that CLTS has been adopted more widely, there is increasing recognition of the need for monitoring (Thomas and Bevan 2013). A 2013 review of CLTS in Asia highlights the ‘lack of mechanisms that encourage the regular

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collection, analysis and reporting’ of data that can serve as a basis for detailed monitoring and evaluation of CLTS progress and effectiveness. The review calls for annual strategic reviews linked to monitoring progress against sanitation targets and for incorporation into local government benchmarking systems (UNICEF, Plan, WaterAid and WSP 2013). While not yet implemented, this would entail a role for government in monitoring. In a report for Oxfam on CLTS in Southern Africa, Galvin (2013) found that what is frequently referred to as CLTS is actually a ‘hybrid’ approach2 that development organizations have fashioned in response to their direct experience of what is lacking on the ground. In contradiction to one of the main premises of CLTS – no provision of subsidies or external resources – the increasing use of hybrid approaches means that such resources are increasingly being drawn on, usually through the provision of basic materials or technical advice from NGOs. The application of CLTS varies according to country context, depending on the government’s limitations, achievements and commitments to subsidies. Some countries adopted approaches that have delivered a specified minimum standard of service and chose to incorporate CLTS into that approach, such as the Mtumba Approach in Tanzania that uses CLTS triggering alongside Participatory Hygiene and Sanitation Transformation (PHAST) and sanitation marketing (Galvin 2013, 34). Sanitation practitioners from Malawi and Mozambique explain how CLTS is used instrumentally: they implement their own hybrid approach that includes the provision of expertise and/or materials on the ground, but they access resources from donors by reporting on implementing CLTS at provincial or national levels (Galvin 2013). Middle-income countries such as South Africa have a commitment to provide services and to assist people to move up the sanitation ladder. If countries have sufficient funds to provide access to sanitation, introducing CLTS with no support for hardware can be retrogressive. Whether it is in a country like Nigeria, afloat in oil revenues, or in wealthy South Africa where the government has committed to providing sanitation, ‘We must question international agencies working with governments to shame poor people into digging their own pits to shit in, while stopping subsidies that assist them to build a proper toilet’ (Galvin 2012). Instead of encouraging governments to adopt CLTS

galvin | 123 and allowing them to appear to be taking responsibility for sanitation while abrogating responsibility to communities, such governments need to be encouraged to develop their capacity and to redirect resources toward the poorest. Many African governments are deciding to adopt CLTS and local government or extension officers, often in conjunction with northern NGOs or donors, facilitating the triggering process at the local level. Actual provision is done by communities, using their own resources. In short, governments get CLTS going, playing a minimal role at the beginning of the process, and communities do the work. However, there is potential for the state to take more responsibility, to remain accountable, and to support the sustainability of sanitation through ongoing monitoring and the provision of limited physical or human resources. As discussed in the following section, this would ensure that the community in CLTS operates in public ways, and that its relationship with the state can be considered a kind of community– state public–public partnership. The publicness of community Whether the ‘downloading of service responsibilities’ to a community should be classified as public or private remains unresolved (McDonald and Ruiters 2005, 15). To distinguish what makes CLTS public – rather than mere neoliberal manoeuvring as a form of privatization – we must examine the nature of community dynamics and the role of the state in a community-led partnership. The following sections outline four principles that I would argue need to be in place to strengthen the potential publicness of CLTS-like programmes.

Awareness of community dynamics Communities are complex, heterogeneous entities with internal power dynamics, elitism and conflicts. CLTS programmes tend to ignore this complexity, often romanticizing community and treating it as a homogenous blank slate that can be ‘triggered’ to take up the sanitation challenge. CLTS also works on the notion of an ideal-type community that will assist its poor, aged, and disadvantaged to find local resources and knowledge to build toilets, and where natural leaders will emerge. What often happens in practice is that development programmes such as CLTS act to reinforce the pre-existing socio-political dynamics at the community level (Galvin 2010). Even with the best intentions,

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external interventions can lead to negative consequences such as destroying the very social network that development organizations claim to support. CLTS can also reinforce class divisions or result in stigmatization. It impacts on relations between youth and elders, men and women, rich and poor. Of course, some unintended consequences might also be positive, strengthening, for example, community leaders’ sense of agency or creating a sense of unity around a positive experience of working together which can lead to other individual or community development steps (Galvin 2010). But without a clear understanding of the internal dynamics of a ‘community’, the ability of CLTS to enhance the publicness of sanitation can be highly unpredictable. In short, the uneven and unpredictable nature of community dynamics means that there is a need for the state to play a role alongside the community in CLTS programmes, both for support and to ensure that they keep each other in check in attempting to ensure an equitable process.

State responsibilities For community to be considered public, the state must shape decision making and retain responsibility for services, not donors or private interests. However, this principle covers a broad range of state–community relationships. At one extreme the state is so dominant that community involvement is a charade. At the other the state is virtually absent, and the community is acting alone; this is when ‘community’ can mask private interests and the state has relinquished responsibility entirely, which contradicts the principles outlined above. Community–state partnerships should be located somewhere between the two ends of this continuum. Involving the community as a public option is valued instrumentally in terms of its effectiveness and politically in terms of its democratic nature. The notion of ‘active citizenship’ (Kearns 1995) has tended to focus on participation in planning or decision making, with community engagement taking place in ‘invited spaces’ where citizens work within pre-defined parameters provided by the state (Cornwall 2004). However, depending on its implementation, these invited spaces can be a way of co-opting or weakening critical community voices and organizations. Fung and Wright (2003, 265) argue that, while shifting power from top down to participatory collaboration, countervailing power or capacity is essential to avoid a ‘state shrinking, deregulatory manoeuver in which oppositional forces are co-opted and neutralised

galvin | 125 and the collaborative participation becomes mere window dressing’. In other words, transferring full decision making and implementation responsibility to communities means that the state has abdicated its role, with potentially undesirable outcomes when those representing the community do not act accountably to the larger group. Yet the state may not have abdicated responsibility as much as left a vacuum due to its own weakness. In many African contexts, where there is a weak or largely absent state, it makes little sense to talk about community members being ‘involved’ in decision making or democratic management. They are operating largely on their own and their role is complex. Unfortunately, although we have empirical accounts of this nature, analyses still draw on the largely Western conceptualization of ‘active citizens’. In these cases Gofen’s (2013) work on ‘entrepreneurial exit’, or selfprovision, seems to offer a more applicable conceptual framework than that of active citizenship. He looks at cases where the state is unable to deliver and argues that dissatisfied citizens are entrepreneurial in creating their own viable alternative and exit through their opposition to existing provision (Gofen 2013, 16). This ‘not only changes the public service sphere but also revolutionizes the meaning of choice; from choosing among existing alternatives, it is extended to include the creation of innovative forms of services’ (Gofen 2013, 16). Citizens choose entrepreneurial exit as a way to pursue change that is either incremental (operating as an alternative alongside public provision), participative/co-productive (where citizens are involved and take responsibility for some parts of the service), or reformative (where, dissatisfied with government service, citizens temporarily provide their own service until the present system is reformed, if ever) (Gofen 2013, 9). Another option, not discussed by Gofen, is autonomism or operating independently from the state, which is perhaps the most extreme exit strategy.3 The idea of public–community partnerships, a possible variation on public–public partnerships between two state organs, has a participative motivation. It allows for a type of co-production that delivers public services more effectively than the state alone (Ostrom 1996) while contributing to the strengthening of the public sector. Gofen (2013, 4) explains that co-production is based on joint responsibility and, by increasing citizen involvement in service provision, results in citizens taking more responsibility and becoming more engaged and active.

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By contrast, a reformative motivation refers to cases in which citizens provide services that the government typically provides in an alternative way, as a means of pressuring the state to change its approach. Citizens do not pressure the state through direct advocacy alone, but their form of self-provision gains social acceptance as it is adopted by more and more citizens. Eventually the government is expected to reform its service delivery to meet citizen’s demands, and self-provision is no longer required (Gofen 2013, 13–14), although there may be a shift to co-production. Whether the motivation of community members is participative or reformative assigns a level of awareness to communities that may not exist in the case of CLTS, which is initiated by outsiders. The aim of community members is to eliminate open defecation so their health is not in jeopardy, not to participate with the state or to reform it. However, depending on the role of the state, CLTS can be operating as participative co-production with the state or as a reformative effort to provide sanitation as a means of pressuring the government to take the next steps in playing an ongoing supportive role in sanitation provision

Accountability The state must also be accountable to citizens in service delivery, and this typically takes place through elections and the mandating of officials to act on their behalf. If state service delivery is poor, there are generally established mechanisms for citizens to hold them to account, which may or may not be effective in practice. However, the accountability mechanisms for community provision are weak or non-existent, potentially undermining broader social innovation by a non-inclusive and undemocratic group of citizens (Lang, Roessl and Weismeier-Sammer 2013, 231). While transactions within the community are expected to be based on ‘norm based trust’ or ‘generalised reciprocity considerations’ (ibid., 232), there is often no formal community structure of accountability. Without some kind of organizational facility that aims to ‘embody collective autonomy, mutual self-help, democratic control, voluntary and open membership’ (ibid., 232), community leaders implementing CLTS can encourage community members to adopt an approach that some argue leads to human rights infringements (Galvin 2015). It triggers change but does not monitor or intervene if it sparks damaging local actions. Without the involvement of the state or another external agency, communities establish their own sanctions on community members

galvin | 127 who do not comply and build their own toilets. There are cases in which these sanctions have included denying community members justice, removing their means of livelihood, and physically and emotionally threatening them (Bartram et al. 2012). This dilemma can be addressed by either introducing CLTS in areas with socio-political dynamics that allow for effective accountability, or by having an outside group monitor developments to avoid possible human rights infringements and to intervene alongside the community if required (Galvin 2015). The local state could ensure that developments are monitored and appropriate interventions are made, if necessary.

Financial and social sustainability The financial and social sustainability of CLTS achievements is also a concern. While the number of Open Defecation Free communities is impressive, it is not clear whether the latrines will be maintained and people will continue to use them. Poor people generally build very basic latrines that may amount to no more than a shallow pit protected by local materials which sometimes collapse in heavy rains or wind. Since resources come from communities themselves, rather than the state, how and if they will be maintained or rebuilt is uncertain. It has also been argued that the short time spent by facilitators in the community, and the methods used, mean that CLTS behaviour change is unlikely to be sustained. They question whether CLTS triggering amounts to little more than a shock tactic that is effective in the short term. Engel and Susilo (2014, 174) take issue with this approach, noting that ‘the use of shaming and taunting both disqualifies it as an empowerment approach and is likely to undermine its effectiveness in promoting long-term behaviour change’. Lang, Roessl and WeismeierSammer (2013, 244) focus on the short time spent by facilitators to initiate these programmes, which does not ensure there is a sustainable institutional base. They argue that bottom-up creativity is not enough. Without a ‘bottom-linked institutionalisation’ it is unlikely that ‘sustainable user and citizen empowerment’ can be achieved. Given the absence of monitoring and data collection to date, the long-term effect of catalysing communities into ‘dealing with their own shit’ through CLTS is simply unknown (although international organizations are working with national governments to develop monitoring and data collection).

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Conclusion The ‘new look’ of public provision is seen by many to be vested in the local community ‘getting on with it’, without dependence on the state. Some critics see this as a neoliberal guise, but it is also true that communities can play a range of roles, from active citizenship and invited participation, to co-production and public–community partnerships, to entrepreneurial exit with a reformist motivation, to autonomism. Using CLTS as an example, this chapter has shown how these characteristics can unfold in practice. On the negative side, there is little in the way of effective partnerships between states and communities. This means there are few supporting mechanisms for communities after the initial trigger, with the state failing to play a role in decision making, accountability to citizens and sustainability of sanitation. As such, CLTS seems to perpetuate the argument that the governments in Africa are unwilling or unable to direct adequate funding to sanitation, letting them off the hook. Yet it would be premature to write CLTS off as a potentially progressive public service reform. There are signs that the state may begin to play a role in monitoring and data collection and, with greater local engagement, community workers may intervene in cases of inappropriate community sanctions. In terms of broader reform, community take-up of CLTS self-provision may serve to push the state to play a stronger role in partnership or co-production of services, and can create better awareness among citizens of the need for more sustainable service delivery. Without undermining this engaging potential of CLTS, governments can make resources available for skills training, technical support, and the provision of basic building materials. It may also develop plans to support community members to move up the sanitation ladder, perhaps after sustaining basic toilet and hygiene behaviours for an agreed time period. Assessing the public or private nature of such programmes has tended to depend heavily on the observers’ agendas, interests and ideology. It may be possible to move past this pre-determination to an assessment based on principles of awareness of community dynamics, shared responsibilities, accountability and sustainability, in situ. Whether CLTS can result in positive state–community partnerships for service provision will depend on how and if they meet these principles and the extent to which they can prioritize people’s lived experiences. To

galvin | 129 redress a history of weak public provision in many African countries it is time for the state to re-imagine its local role by listening to – and hearing – communities. Notes 1 Chambers (2009) highlights the problems in maintaining an accurate count of Open Defecation Free villages, but points to the many case reports. These typically report hundreds of Open Defecation Free villages, so CLTS’s operation in over 50 countries naturally takes the count into the thousands. This reported reach and effectiveness is the logic driving advocates to promote its adoption and scaling up throughout the developing world. 2 Hybrid approaches are often adjustments for local contexts or politics. Minor adjustments may include providing a slab or following triggering with sanitation marketing. More fundamental alterations were made, for example, in India’s Total Sanitation Campaign; it has been described as ‘government-led, infrastructure-centred, subsidy-based and supply-led, leading to poor outcomes’ due to a low political priority, distorting

incentives and ingrained technocratic and paternalistic attitudes (Huesoa and Bell 2013, 1001). Yet other accounts report on the success of using shame and subsidies in certain areas of India (Pattanayak et al. 2009, 581). 3 Naidoo (2010) discusses how academics use this concept without understanding its local meaning. She refers to Berardi (2003), who describes autonomy as meaning that‚ ‘social life does not depend only on the disciplinary regulation imposed by economic power, but also depends on the internal displacement, shiftings, settlings and dissolutions that are the process of the self-composition of living society. Struggle, withdrawal, alienation, sabotage, lines of flight from the capitalist system of domination. Autonomy is the independence of social time from the temporality of capitalism.’

References Bartram, J., Charles, K., Evans, B., O’Hanlon, L. and Pedley, S. 2012. Commentary on community-led total sanitation and human rights: Should the right to community-wide health be won at the cost of individual rights? Journal of Water and Health, 10(4): 499–503. Berardi, F. 2003. What is the meaning of autonomy today? http://republicart. net/disc/realpublicspaces/berardi01_ en.htm (accessed June 17, 2015). Bongartz, P., Musyoki, S. M., Milligan, A. and Ashley, H. 2010. Tales of shit: Community-Led Total Sanitation in

Africa. Participatory Learning and Action, 61(1): 27–50. Chambers, R. 1997. Whose reality counts? Putting the last first. London: Intermediate Technology Publications. Chambers, R. 2009. Going to scale with Community-Led Total Sanitation: Reflections on experience, issues and ways forward. IDS Practice Paper, 2009: 1–50. Chambers, R. 2011. Sanitation MDG is badly off track, but a community-led approach could fix that. The Guardian, May 30. http://www.theguardian.

130 | s ev i x en com/global-development/povertymatters/2011/may/30/mdg-sanitationofftrack-but-community-led-approachis-working (accessed June 17, 2015). Cornwall, A. 2004. Introduction: New democratic spaces? The politics and dynamics of institutionalised participation. IDS Bulletin, 35: 1–10. Engel, S. and Susilo, A. 2014. Shaming and sanitation in Indonesia: A return to colonial public health practices? Development and Change, 45(1): 157–178. Fung, A. and Wright, E. O. 2003. Countervailing power in empowered participatory governance. In Deepening democracy, 259–289. London: Verso Press. Galvin, M. 2010. Unintended consequences: Development interventions and socio-political change in rural South Africa. In B. Freund and H. Witt (eds.), Development dilemmas in postapartheid South Africa, 173–195. Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press. Galvin, M. 2012. Is Community-Led Total Sanitation a stunning solution to southern Africa’s sanitation crisis? Water Justice News, August 29. http://www.blueplanetproject. net/index.php/community-led-totalsanitation-a-stunning-sanitationsolution-for-africa/ (accessed June 22, 2015). Galvin, M. 2013. Addressing Southern Africa’s development challenges through Community Led Total Sanitation. Oxfam Occasional Chapter 2: 1–44. Galvin, M. 2015. Talking shit: Is Community Led Total Sanitation a radical and revolutionary form of sanitation? WIRES Water 2: 9–20. Galvin, M. and Habib, A. 2003. The politics of decentralization and donor funding in South Africa’s rural water

sector. Journal of Southern African Studies 29(4): 865–884. Gofen, A. 2013. Citizens’ entrepreneurial role in public service provision. Public Management Review 17(3): 404–424. Health and Education Advice and Resource Team (HEART). 2013. Community-led Total Sanitation in Africa. Helpdesk report produced for DFID. Oxford: HEART. http:// www.heart-resources.org/2013/05/ community-led-total-sanitation-inafrica/ (accessed June 22, 2015). Huesoa, A. and Bell, B. 2013. An untold story of policy failure: The total sanitation campaign in India. Water Policy, 15: 1001–1017. IDS (Institute for Development Studies). 2014. STEPS Seminar – The Potential of Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) in achieving an Open Defecation Free (ODF) World, May 20. https://www.ids.ac.uk/events/stepsseminar-the-potential-of-communityled-total-sanitation-clts-in-achievingan-open-defecation-free-odf-world (accessed June 22, 2015). Kar, K., and Chambers, R. (2008). Handbook on community-led total sanitation. London: Plan UK. Kearns, A. (1995). Active citizenship and local governance: Political and geographical dimensions. Political Geography, 14(2), 155–175. Lang, R., Roessl, D. and WeismeierSammer, D. 2013. Co-operative governance of public–citizen partnerships: Two diametrical participation modes. In L. Gnan, A. Hinna and F. Monteduro (eds.), Conceptualizing and researching governance in public and non-profit organizations, 227–246. McDonald, D. A. 2014. Public ambiguity and the multiple meanings of corporatization. In D. A. McDonald (ed.), Rethinking corporatization and

galvin | 131 public services in the global South, 1–30. London: Zed Books. McDonald, D. A. and Ruiters, G. (eds.). 2005. The age of commodity: Water privatisation in Southern Africa. London: Earthscan. Mehta, L. 2010. Shit matters: Community Led-Total Sanitation and the sanitation challenge for the 21st century. Warwickshire: Practical Action Publishing. Mehta, L., Marshall, F., Movik, S., Stirling, A., Shah, E., Smith, A. and Thompson, J. 2007. Liquid cynamics: Challenges for sustainability in water and sanitation. STEPS Working Paper 6. Brighton: STEPS Centre. Naidoo, P. 2010. The making of ‘the poor’ in post-apartheid South Africa: A case study of the city of Johannesburg and Orange Farm. PhD dissertation, University of Kwa-Zulu Natal, South Africa. Ostrom, E. 1996. Crossing the great divide: Coproduction, synergy and development. World Development, 24(6): 1073–1087. Pattanayak, S. K., Yang J. C., Dickinson, K. L., Poulos, C., Patil, S. R., Mallick, R. K. and Praharaj, P. 2009. Shame or

subsidy revisited: Social mobilization for sanitation in Orissa, India. Bulletin of the World Health Organization, 87(8): 580–587. Sah, S. and Negussie, A. 2009. Community Led Total Sanitation (CLTS): Addressing the challenges of scale and sustainability in rural Africa. Science Direct, 248: 666–672. Spronk, S., Crespo, C. and Olivera, M. 2012. Struggles for water justice in Latin America: Public and ‘socialpublic’ alternatives. In D. A. McDonald and G. Ruiters (eds.), Alternatives to privatisation: Public options for essential services in the Global South, 421–452. Cape Town: HSRC Press. Thomas, A. and Bevan, J. 2013. Developing and monitoring a protocol for the elimination of open defecation in subSaharan Africa. Nairobi: UNICEF. UNICEF, Plan, WaterAid and WSP. 2013. Community-Led Total Sanitation in East Asia and Pacific: Progress, lessons and directions. Bangkok: UNICEF. WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme for Water. 2013. Progress on sanitation and drinking-water. http://www.wssinfo.org.

8 | P U B LI C FA I T H : CH R I S T I A N A ND MUS L I M H E A LT H S E RV I C E S I N U G A N DA

Yoswa M. Dambisya, Mulalo Manenzhe and Allie B. Kibwika-Muyinda

This chapter examines the delivery of health services by faith-based organizations (FBOs) in Uganda and discusses their ambiguous role as a ‘public’ healthcare provider. These not-for-profit healthcare facilities have been servicing communities in Uganda since the second half of the 19th century, where they focus on primary care and operate in under-serviced rural areas, charging affordable user fees and treating those who cannot pay. The research finds that FBOs in the country promote solidarity through multi-stakeholder engagement and via cross-subsidization, using mechanisms such as community health financing schemes that protect the community against catastrophic out-of-pocket health expenditures, which is rampant on the continent (WHO 2009). There is generally equitable access to FBO health services for all denominations without discrimination on the basis of religion, ethnic group or place of origin. The FBO sector also fosters the development of a strong quasipublic ethos in service delivery, with local ownership of the facilities and representation on the governing boards all promoting an explicit sense of ‘publicness’ of its facilities. The FBOs not only provide health services but often are engines of rural development as well, facilitating the extension of amenities such as electricity and water. Hence, FBOs can be seen as crucial actors in an expanded public healthcare delivery system in Uganda, especially at the primary level of care. They are important health policy implementation partners, receiving 7 per cent of the national health budget to offer services guided by the National Health Plan. But government grants have stagnated at 2007 levels, putting the sustainability of the sector in question. Additional funding from international donors is also declining due to the global economic crisis.

dambisyabaruah et al . | 133 There are other concerns with these FBO partnerships, not the least of which is the powerful role that religion can play in controversial health-related topics such as contraception. There are also questions as to whether FBOs let the state off the financial hook, and whether it is inherently unfair for government not to establish its own facilities in all parts of the country. There are also signs that the bigger FBO facilities are now exploring ways to generate revenues via profitoriented activities, thereby pandering to market forces that some feel are inherently antithetical to the FBO ethos. Nevertheless, the Ugandan FBO sector is deeply integrated in the public health system, and it is embedded in the national psyche. It has stood the test of time for more than 150 years, and it has the support and involvement of both the state and the communities they serve. FBOs in Uganda contribute more than a quarter of all health services, including the training of health professionals. They also perform relatively well on dimensions of equity, solidarity, quality of services, quality of the workplace, and transparency. Over the years, the sector has embraced democratic principles, putting in place more transparent governance structures, accountability mechanisms and fostering effective participation by stakeholders. Although not perfect, it is our view that the FBO model should be promoted as a public alternative to an expanding private forprofit healthcare industry in the country, and that it could potentially be replicated in other African countries due to the strong religious attachments among many communities on the continent. Overview of Uganda’s health system Uganda has a health system composed of both public and private sectors. The public sector includes all government health facilities overseen by the MoH as well as health services managed by the ministries of defence, education, internal affairs (police and prisons) and local government. The private health sector consists of not-for-profit providers (mostly FBOs) as well as for-profit facilities that include private health practitioners, private hospitals, pharmacies and drug shops, as well as traditional and complementary medicine practitioners. The distribution of health facilities by ownership is shown in Figure 8.1.

The private healthcare system The private sector as a whole delivers roughly 45 per cent of health services in Uganda, and covers about

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Private forprofit 28% Public 55% Private not-forprofit 17%

8.1 Distribution of health units between the public and private sectors Note: 70–75% of not-for-profit facilities belong to the three religious bureaus (UCMB, UMMB and UPMB).

50 per cent of the reported outputs. It is noteworthy that in 2008– 2009 private funds from households, not-for-profit organizations, local NGOs and private firms made up half of total health expenditure, while public funds made up only 16 per cent. Households contributed the largest proportion of health expenditure, mainly through out-ofpocket payments. Other funds came from donors, international NGOs and global health initiatives, up to 34 per cent in the same year (MoH 2013). The Government of Uganda subsidizes the not-for-profits and some for-profit hospitals. They are considered key partners in the Health Sector Strategic and Investment Plan (MoH 2010a, 33), which recognizes that: There remains a significant inequality in access to health care … In an effort to increase access to health care, the Government of Uganda subsidizes [not-for-profits] and its training institutions and a few private hospitals that should in turn reduce user fees. The reduction in user fees could further enable the poor to access services in [not-for-profits] and private hospitals. (MoH 2010a, 33)

da m bisyabaruah et al . | 135 Faith-based health services The faith aspects of the FBO health mission are very explicit. As stated by a Catholic Archbishop during an interview for the study: For us the mission has always been clear. Following in Christ’s footsteps means we care for the whole person, the body, the soul and the mind. So from the outset we included the development of the mind through schools and of the body through health service, in addition to our primary role of winning the souls for Christ. That view was supported by other key informants who emphasized that evangelization was always accompanied by health, education and social care, ostensibly for altruistic reasons. However not all scholars share the heroic narrative of colonial religious medicine in Africa (e.g. WHO 1983). Missionary medicine sought not only to care for the body but also to cleanse the ‘savage soul’ and cast out devils (Butchart 1995, 79). The first facility established in Uganda was by the Anglican Church in 1897 (Sir Albert Cook at Mengo), followed by a Catholic facility in 1899 (Lubaga Hospital). The sector expanded over time, and bureaus were established to coordinate the activities within the facilities affiliated to the various faiths: the Uganda Protestant Medical Bureau (UPMB in 1955), the Uganda Catholic Medical Bureau (UCMB in 1956), the Uganda Muslim Medical Bureau (UMMB in 1996), and more recently the Uganda Orthodox Medical Bureau (UOMB in 2009). Colonialperiod FBOs also pioneered the training of health professionals, starting with nurses in Mengo in 1917, by Sister Katherine Timpson. Indeed, the Makerere University Medical School had its foundations at Mengo where Sir Albert Cook started training ‘native assistants’. The remarkable resilience of FBO facilities is reflected in their ability to continue operations even during times of extreme civil disturbance. During the civil war in northern Uganda, for instance, most FBO facilities remained open, while government facilities were closed or vandalized. FBOs have services countrywide, with a large network of well-distributed rural and urban health units providing a wide range of amenities. UCMB has 282 accredited facilities, including 32 hospitals and 250 lower level health units, coordinated through 19 Diocesan Health Coordinating Offices. The UPMB has

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over 260 accredited facilities, while the UMMB has 47 accredited not-for-profit facilities (including five hospitals) and 15 for-profit ones affiliated for accreditation and quality assurance purposes. The majority of faith-based health facilities remain predominantly rural and cater to otherwise under-serviced communities (MoH 2010b). FBO health services as a public service? The three faith-based bureaus also clearly see themselves as an alternative to privatization, claiming that those who founded them ‘did exactly what no business-oriented mind would ever do … they had in mind the dire need of service of the rural poor’ (UCMB, UPMB and UMMB 2007). Herein lies the crux of the tension around whether or not FBOs meet the criteria for what could be considered a successful public service. Employing a normative evaluative framework developed for analysing and comparing public services in other parts of the world (McDonald and Ruiters 2012), we ask whether the FBOs we studied in Uganda meet a reasonable expectation of performance on the following criteria: equity, quality of service, quality of workplace, affordability, solidarity, transparency and public ethos. These are examined in turn below.

Equity FBOs contribute to equitable access to health services through reducing geographical barriers for rural and remote areas of the country, as exemplified by hospitals such as Kalongo, Matany, Kisizi, Ngora and Lacor that for a long time were the only health service providers to large populations. The network of FBO facilities is still predominantly rural and composed of primary-level facilities accessible by the majority of the population (UCMB, UPMB and UMMB 2007). Partly due to the network of FBO facilities, the majority of the population is within a five-kilometre radius of a healthcare facility (MoH and WHO 2013). FBO services are accessible to all without discrimination. FBOs pioneered and rendered specialized services for conditions especially afflicting the poor, including tuberculosis and leprosy, and care for the deaf and blind. Church-based facilities such as Buluba and Kumi Leprosy Hospitals, Ngora School for the Deaf and Iganga School for the Blind remain renowned names in this respect. FBO facilities are also at the forefront in the provision of HIV-AIDS services (MoH 2010c; Otolok-Tanga et al. 2007).

dambisyabaruah et al . | 137 However, FBOs charge user fees, unlike government facilities, and some communities have argued that not having access to the government network puts them at a disadvantage.

Quality of service The quality of services in FBO facilities is perceived to be high. That is borne out by a number of reports (Orach 2007; UCMB, UPMB and UMMB 2007; MoH, Health Systems 20/20 and Makerere University School of Public Health 2012). An oft-cited factor for the quality of services is the positive attitude of health workers in FBO facilities. Furthermore, FBOs tend to have regular supply of prescribed drugs. In the words of a key informant from the MoH: ‘Medicines are always available and absenteeism rates are very low compared to public health facilities. Even where they use lower cadre staff, the FBOs tend to be more efficient than government services.’ The differences between the two sectors were also variously attributed to the public ethos of the FBO facilities, strong institutional culture nurtured through employment of those who trained at FBO institutions, and a focus on service above reward in the spirit of ‘working for God’ or ‘sacrifice for the good of others’ (Ogrodnick, KiwanukaMukiibi and Altman 2011; Ritva and Svennson 2002; Ssengooba et al. 2002; UCMB, UPMB and UMMB 2007). Efficiency One of the main findings in our study was the fact that FBOs are able to use lower-skilled staff to accomplish tasks that are undertaken by higher-level cadres in government facilities, without compromising on quality of care due to adequate supervision and support. Therefore, the unit cost of service delivery is lower in FBOs than in the public facilities (UCMB 2012; UCMB, UPMB and UMMB 2007). According to key informants, staff in the FBO sector also work longer hours than their counterparts in government facilities. However, there was no evidence to suggest that such efficiency gains were at the cost of other positive outcomes such as health and safety – particularly of the health workers who often take on heavy loads and long hours. Uganda is among the countries with a long experience of task shifting, and the system fully prepares those to whom tasks are delegated, so there is no risk of dilution of the services (Chu et al. 2009; Dambisya and Matinhure 2012; Pereira et al. 1996).

Quality of the workplace FBO facilities are perceived to have good work environments, with discipline strictly enforced. According to the

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director of a Muslim hospital interviewed for this study: ‘We don’t tolerate nonsense; sometimes we have to move from tough to rough to ensure that our staff remain disciplined.’ This raises questions of possible abuse of workers’ rights, but according to key informants at various facilities, the health workers know the disciplinary code and procedures upon taking up employment. On the whole, management of FBO facilities, in spite of recent democratic tendencies, remains largely hierarchical. For the workers, there may be a sense of autocracy, but for the patients that may translate into good-quality service from apparently dedicated staff. Accreditation criteria for FBO facilities include inspection and registration with the Uganda Medical and Dental Practitioners Council, with a focus on the state of the workplace. The buildings in many of the facilities, though reportedly old, were said to be well maintained. Key informants credited FBO facilities with better inter-personal relationships among the staff than in government facilities. They cited factors such as a culture based on faith, with practices such as morning prayers and fellowship, presumably on a voluntary basis. When the question was raised regarding those of a different faith, the response was always to the effect that they are accommodated and given time off for prayer. The pay for staff at FBO facilities is lower than in the public sector, except for doctors who are paid on par with their public sector counterparts. In the past, this has raised issues of morale, attrition of health workers, and loss of organizational culture (UCMB, UPMB and UMMB 2007). In mitigation, the FBOs have non-remunerative incentives such as free housing, free medical treatment for staff and their immediate family, opportunities for professional development, and the chance for medical staff to execute their professional duties well due to availability of drugs and other supplies.

Affordability FBO facilities keep user charges low partly due to the government primary healthcare grant that covers roughly a fifth of FBO expenditures (MoH 2010c). However, the grant does not cover staff salaries, which are funded through user fees. The question of user fees and their effect on access is vexing because, with declining donor and government support, there is more reliance on such fees for the sustainability of the FBO facilities (Rookes and Rookes 2012). The facilities charge minimal fees for outpatient and inpatient services, with

dambisyabaruah et al . | 139 flat rates for patients above 65 years of age at UGX 2,500 per visit (about US$1 at time of study), and normal delivery at UGX 10,000 (US$4) at one hospital, which represents only 20 per cent of the costs for the service. Nevertheless, the principle reiterated throughout the study was that patients cannot be turned away because of inability to pay. In some facilities, those who are economically well-off can access ‘private wing’ services at higher cost, and in the process support care for the indigent, although this opens up additional questions around equity.

Solidarity The FBO sector fosters solidarity with the communities where they operate. According to the Executive Director of UPMB, their facilities are part of the community, and are deeply rooted there due to the fact that they often arose as community initiatives. Part of the solidarity work is through the care for indigent patients, and exempting those unable to pay from user fees. Among the strategies mentioned were donations to the Good Samaritan Fund, ‘fast lane’ fees for non-emergency cases, and the ‘private wing’ services that are billed at higher rates, to offset what the facility may forgo on account of treating those who cannot pay. UPMB in western Uganda has also piloted facility-based community health financing schemes through which communities pool resources. These schemes are community-driven with the health facility acting as facilitator and provider of services; pooled funds are deposited with the facility to stock drugs and meet other operational costs for the benefit of the scheme members and the community in general. The communities themselves also look out for the good of the facilities, as exemplified by some of the measures taken to avoid abuse of cost exemptions for patients who claim they cannot pay. At one facility, the community members on the Health Unit Management Committee verify whether a person truly cannot pay, or may be able to recover the outstanding amount, based on which assets they may have to sell (typically cash crops or livestock) after discharge from the hospital. It may seem intrusive of the committee to undertake this function, but in many rural areas everybody knows everyone else’s business anyway, so it is more about fairness than about discovering what assets others own. Further, one interviewee noted how a hospital was protected during a civil war insurgency by the local community as well as the rebels, and

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continued operating despite being in a war zone. This squares with reports by others that FBO health facilities in other parts of Africa have a reputation for enhancing community cohesion, social support and solidarity during times of personal and health challenges (Ogrodnick, Kiwanuka-Mukiibi and Altman 2011; Rutebemberwa et al. 2009; WHO 2007).

Financial sustainability Arguably the greatest challenge faced by FBO facilities is sustainable financing. Traditionally, FBOs relied on international donor funding, material donations or government grants to keep their services affordable. As the facilities expanded, and the demand for their services grew, it became difficult to sustain the services on donor aid. The global financial crisis has meant that donor support has shrunk. It is estimated that the total income for the sector in 2007 was 39 per cent from donor aid, of which more than two thirds was tied to HIV-AIDS services (UCMB, UPMB and UMMB 2007), 38 per cent from user fees and 23 per cent from government subsidies, including the primary healthcare grant (Orach 2007). But government subsidies have stagnated at 2006 levels (MoH 2010b). In this context, FBOs should have to rely heavily on user fees due to inflation and soaring costs of healthcare provision, especially for drugs and staff salaries. The reality, however, is that the majority of people within FBO catchment areas are poor and cannot afford higher fees, so fees have generally stayed low. Urban facilities such as those in Kampala are self-sustaining on user fees and other income they generate, while smaller facilities in towns and rural areas reportedly struggle due to high operating costs. Calls have been made by the FBOs for sustainable funding through increased government support. The three bureaus also requested that the government grant be made unconditional, and that government support their wage bill (UCMB, UPMB and UMMB 2007). A more controversial suggestion has been the call for contracting health service delivery to the FBOs using a market-related argument of ‘value for money’ since output indicators show that the FBO sector has higher efficiency and productivity (Orach 2007). That may, however, cost the sector its ‘soul’ as it would have to pander to private sector principles associated with profit. There were examples cited of strong partnerships in some hospitals to fill the gap due to loss of donor support. A case in point is Lacor

da m bisyabaruah et al . | 141 Hospital where the Friends of Lacor initiative was launched. The hospital holds annual general meetings during which management presents a ‘state of the hospital’ report to stakeholders including donors and benefactors. Through this mechanism, Lacor Hospital has been able to stay operational without the financial constraints experienced by other rural facilities. Another challenge faced by the sector is staffing. For many years FBOs relied on missionaries who offered pro bono services, in addition to a local team of health workers. As the services expanded, so did demand for health workers with different skills and qualifications. In parallel, whereas previously the spirit of volunteerism contributed to community involvement with the facilities, according to the archbishop interviewed during the study: ‘We can no longer count on the selfless spirit among the people. Now people are very materialistic and will be looking for compensation. It means we have to find money for almost everything.’ More worryingly, the FBOs are unable to compete favourably in the health labour market and have lost experienced staff every time state facilities recruit health workers (MoH 2010a; UCMB 2012; UCMB, UPMB and UMMB 2007). The FBO sector has historically thrived in settings of scarce services. However, there has been an expansion of the private for-profit sector, and its penetration into rural areas is another major challenge to the sustainability of the FBO sector. Apparently, as the competition within the private sector became stiffer, private practitioners were forced to reduce their fees in order to attract clients from the FBO facilities. The government policy geared towards Universal Health Coverage, through the Uganda minimum package of health services, creates a further level of complexity. This policy calls for removal of barriers to access to healthcare including user fees, and for the FBO sector it renews the call for government to adopt a grant-in-aid approach, instead of the conditional PHC grant mechanism. The FBO training institutions on the other hand did not seem to face a similar financial crunch. There is high demand for the available vacancies at those schools; in fact most have to turn away the majority of applicants. The schools are funded via tuition fees, and where challenges are reported they relate to access to experiential learning sites outside the primary teaching facility/hospital.

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Political sustainability There is respect for religious institutions and religious diversity in Uganda, and most political figures are associated with one religious faith or another (Mudoola 1996). Politicians are therefore interested in the contributions the FBO facilities make to diversification and improvement in access to healthcare. Political leaders, ranging from the president, vice-president, prime minister, ministers and the local government leadership, show their support through visits and pledges or donations to various FBO facilities. The downside could be that in the presence of FBO facilities government may not feel the need to provide additional services to populations served by the FBOs. The policy framework acknowledges the key role of FBOs as exemplified by Legal Notice No. 3 of 1963, which first recognized the FBOs, and the recent adoption of the Public–Private Partnership for Health Policy. Both the National Health Policy and the Health Sector Strategic and Investment Plan recognize the contribution of FBOs as partners, and not competitors, with government. That seems to extend to the district and lower levels of the polity, as one district chairman stated: ‘Those are our partners in development, and we worry when they are not doing well.’

Transparency FBO facilities operate under structures that include community and political leaders. There may be some challenges when the line between the Board and management gets blurred, or when accountability mechanisms were either unclear or not followed. At the larger facilities the accounts are externally audited and presented to the Boards of Governors and of Trustees. The FBO sector is building capacity in this regard as facility managers are trained in modern management approaches. Discussion with political leadership in one district pointed to reluctance to disburse government money to the FBO facilities, which run their finances as a closely guarded secret. Otherwise, services are offered in a transparent manner: the range of services and the charges for such services are easy to obtain from the facilities and are often displayed on public noticeboards.

Public ethos The FBO model may enable the development of a stronger public ethos around service delivery, with ownership of the facilities and representation of the church/mosque as the body of the people,

dambisyabaruah et al . | 143 the committees which include the community, and representation on the governing boards, all of which promote the publicness of the FBO facilities. Health workers at FBO facilities participate in decision making as well, through various mechanisms such as staff meetings and representation on management committees. However, unionization is not common – as is true for most health workers in the country (NOTU 2011; VSO and HEPS 2010; see also Nuwagaba 2012). The staff are expected to be loyal, meek and humble, in the fashion of the early missionaries who were driven by service to humanity or Islamic notions of public modesty. Service with obedience and service to humanity are seen to be at odds with workers taking control of the facilities/services in the name of a ‘public’ service. Nevertheless, the FBO model implicitly and explicitly opposes the market values of privatization and commercialization. It also raises challenging questions around liberal Western notions of how the state and religion should interact. FBOs offer private services that are intended for all, deeply embedded in communities, disrupting linear concepts of public and private realms. The absence of government health facilities in many areas so many years after independence reveals the failure of liberal notions of the public as an aggregate of individuals (Mamdani and Bangser 2004) or the idea that public equals the state (Newman 2007). Conclusion Over time FBOs have acquired a lot of experience in the governance and delivery of quality, yet affordable, accessible, equitable, efficient and community-focused primary health services, especially in remote areas. One of their major successes has been their ability to train and retain their staff notwithstanding the challenge posed by a diminishing resource base (Songstad et al. 2012). The sector has adopted contemporary methods of management with transparency and increased community participation. Suggestions for improvement to ensure sustainability of the facilities include a call for facilities to identify areas of comparative advantage for specialization. This view is problematic because it suggests that the FBOs should become exclusive rather than being at the grassroots. A middle ground would be to pursue specialization only in higher-level facilities in urban areas, such as is already the case in two specialist

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FBO hospitals, Benedictine Eye Hospital in Tororo, specializing in eye care and community-based rehabilitation, and CURE Childrens’ Hospital, Mbale, with expertise in neurological disorders in children. A major criticism of FBO operations is their ‘authoritarian’ and ‘undemocratic’ governance approaches (Rush 1983; Sebastian 2010). But the sector has begun to embrace more democratic principles, with transparent governance structures and effective participation by many stakeholders. The need to further explore the FBO model as a public service provision model is further motivated by the post-2015 health agenda that is set to promote Universal Health Coverage (UHC) (Evans et al. 2013; Vega 2013). UHC includes equitable access to health services, especially for the most vulnerable populations, with the three main requirements being that services be physically accessible, financially affordable and acceptable to patients (McManus et al. 2013; Vega 2013). The findings in the present study support the view that the FBOs could contribute to the realization of UHC in Uganda. In conclusion, Uganda has a long history of FBO health services and the sector contributes to more than a quarter of healthcare delivery in the country, including the training of health professionals. It is our view that the sector represents an important alternative to market individualism and privatization, and that it represents a partner for any government seeking to deliver UHC in the future. Most communities have contributed to such facilities, and FBOs should be promoted at the very least as a short-term solution until state services can be provided. Acknowledgements The authors wish to acknowledge financial support from the IDRC through the MSP, the support of the Uganda

Ministry of Health, especially the Permanent Secretary, and all the key informants for their valuable inputs.

References Butchart, R. A. (1995). On the anatomy of power: Bodies of knowledge in South African socio-medical discourse: PhD thesis, University of South Africa. Chu, K., Rosseel, P., Gielis, P. and Ford, N. 2009. Surgical task shifting in sub-Saharan Africa. PLoS Med 6(5). http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/

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dambisyabaruah et al . | 145 Mamdani, M. and Bangser, M. 2004. Poor people’s experiences of health services in Tanzania: A literature review. Reproductive Health Matters 12(24):138–153. McDonald, D. A. and Ruiters, G. 2012. Introduction: In search of alternatives to privatization. In D. A. McDonald and G. Ruiters (eds.), Alternatives to privatisation: Public options for essential services in the global South, 1–16. Cape Town: HSRC Press. MoH (Ministry of Health). 2010a. Health Sector Strategic & Investment Plan 2010/11 – 2014/15. Kampala: Ministry of Health. MoH (Ministry of Health). 2010b. Second National Health Policy. Kampala: Ministry of Health. MoH (Ministry of Health). 2010c. Status of antiretroviral therapy service delivery in Uganda. Kampala: AIDS Control Programme, Ministry of Health. MoH (Ministry of Health). 2013. National Health Accounts: Tracking resource flows in the health system in Uganda for the financial year 2008/09 and financial year 2009/10. Kampala: Ministry of Health. MoH (Ministry of Health), Health Systems 20/20 and Makerere University School of Public Health. 2012. Uganda health system assessment 2011. Kampala, Uganda and Bethesda, MD: Health Systems 20/20 Project, Abt Associates Inc. MoH (Ministry of Health) and WHO (World Health Organization). 2013. Midterm analytical review of performance of the Health Sector Strategic and Investment Plan 2010/2011 – 2014/15 Vols. 1 & 2. Kampala: Ministry of Health. Mudoola, D. M. 1996. Religion, ethnicity and politics in Uganda. Kampala: Fountain Publishers. Newman, J. 2007. Rethinking ‘the public’ in troubled times: Unsettling state,

nation and the liberal public sphere. Public Policy and Administration 22(1): 27–47. NOTU (National Organization of Trade Unions). 2011. Annual Report. Kampala: NOTU http://www. notu.or.ug/downloads/NOTUANNUAL%202010.pdf (accessed May 2, 2014). Nuwagaba, V. 2012. Uganda’s labour unions a threat to workers’ rights. Pambazuka News, 566. http://www. pambazuka.org/en/category/ features/79224 (accessed April 17, 2014). Ogrodnick, A., Ron, I., Kiwanuka-Mukiibi, P. and Altman, D. 2011. Understanding intrinsic motivation and performance factors for public sector and faith-based facility health workers in Uganda. Bethesda, MD: Health Systems 20/20. http://www.healthsystems2020. org/content/resource/detail/2992/ (accessed February 2, 2014). Orach, S. O. 2007. Is there a case for contracting health services delivery to PNFPs in Uganda? Kampala: Uganda Catholic Medical Bureau (UCMB). http://fs.ucmb.co.ug/ucmbdocs/ Articles (accessed July 1, 2014). Otolok-Tanga, E., Atuyambe, L., Murphy, C. K., Karin, E., Ringheim, K. E. and Woldehanna, S. 2007. Examining the actions of faith-based organizations and their influence on HIV/AIDSrelated stigma: A case study of Uganda. African Health Sciences 7(1): 55–60. Pereira, C., Bugalho, A., Bergström, S., Vaz, F. and Cotira, M. 1996. A comparative study of caesarean deliveries by assistant medical officers and obstetricians in Mozambique. British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology 103: 508–512. Ritva, R. and Svensson, J. 2002. Working for God? Evaluating service delivery of religious not-for-profit health facilities

146 | ei s i xg h t in Uganda. Washington, DC: World Bank. Rookes, P. and Rookes, J. 2012. Have financial difficulties compromised Christian health services’ commitment to the poor? Development in Practice 22 (5–6): 835–850. Rush, M. 1983. Management: A biblical approach. New York: SP Publications, Inc. Rutebemberwa, E., Ekirapa-Kiracho, E., Okui, O., Walker, D., Mutebi, A. and Pariyo, G. 2009. Lack of effective communication between communities and hospitals in Uganda: A qualitative exploration of missing links. BMC Health Services Research 9(1): 146. Sebastian, A. M. 2010. Towards effective management of faith-based organisations: A case study of Baptist Relief and Development Agency. Master of Philosophy thesis, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Ghana. Ssengooba, F., Atuyambe, L., McPake, B., Hanson, K. and Okuonzi, S. 2002. What could be achieved with greater public hospital autonomy? Comparison of public and PNFP hospitals in Uganda. Public Administration and Development 22(5): 415–428. Songstad, N. G., Gunnar, N., Moland, K. M., Massay, D. A. and Blystad,

A. 2012. Why do health workers in rural Tanzania prefer public sector employment? BMC Health Services Research 12: 92. UCMB (Uganda Catholic Medical Bureau). 2012. Annual Report 2012. Kampala: UCMB. UCMB, UPMB and UMMB. 2007. Facts and figures of the PNFPs: Knowing and understanding the facility-based PNFP subsector in Uganda. Kampala: UCMB, UPMB and UMMB. Vega, J. 2013. Universal health coverage: The post-2015 development agenda. Lancet 381: 179–80. VSO (Voluntary Service Organization) and HEPS (Coalition for Health Promotion and Social Development). 2010. Our side of the story: Ugandan health workers speak up. http:// www.vsointernational.org/what-wedo/health.asp (accessed January 11, 2014). WHO (World Health Organization). 1983. Apartheid and health. Geneva: WHO. WHO (World Health Organization). 2007. Towards primary healthcare: Renewing partnerships with faith-based communities and services. Geneva: WHO. WHO (World Health Organization). 2009. Global Health Expenditure Database. http://www.who.int/database (accessed December 7, 2013).

9 | GE N D E R EQ UI T Y, CI T I Z E N S H I P A ND PU B LI C WAT E R I N B A N G L A D E S H

Farhana Sultana, Chandra Talpade Mohanty and Sarah Miraglia

Over the past 30 years, the international community has affirmed and reaffirmed water as a human right, but nearly one billion people continue to suffer the health, development and social consequences of the lack of safe, affordable water (Sultana and Loftus 2012). Increasingly, the commercialization of water services is resulting in conflicts and calls for alternatives to privatization and for making water public (McDonald and Ruiters 2012; McGranahan and Owen 2006; Rakodi 2000). Attention to gender has been identified as a significant lacuna in the broader literature on water governance and alternatives to privatization (Cleaver and Hamada 2010; O’Reilly et al. 2009; Truelove 2011). This chapter focuses on the gendered nature and importance of public water and the process of (re)publicization. It looks at the use, access and management of water, and promotes a historicized and politicized understanding of water struggles. We map and contextualize the gender– water relations in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and discuss the historically situated constraints and possibilities surrounding water governance, and outline the beginnings of a broader conceptual framework for socially just and equitable water systems that are responsive to women’s needs and interests and conducive to the emergence of a politicized sense of self and autonomy. While this research is primarily motivated by a commitment to gender-water equity, it should not be understood as a plea for attention to women’s water needs as additional or extraneous to a more generalized set of needs. To be certain, a gender-equitable system of water provision would not eschew generalization; rather, it requires that we, as theorists and/or practitioners, commit to examinations that are accountable to history and that maintain a flexible relationship to the realities of social life (Mohanty 2003). To that end this study affirms equity, affordability, sustainability and efficiency as generally desirable

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aspects of public water provision, but questions the means of creating and evaluating public systems to achieve these goals, and warns against entrenching local power hierarchies or further marginalizing the poor or exacerbating their exploitation. Poor women are not a separate interest group outside of the generalized body of water users or consumers. To the contrary, ‘the particular standpoint of poor indigenous and Third World/South women provides the most inclusive viewing of systemic power’ (Mohanty 2003, 232). Our investigation of the Korail slum, the largest informal settlement in Dhaka, highlights the ways that public water is imagined, experienced and desired. The study reveals a strong preference among women surveyed for public water, which is shaped by affordability, a desire for full citizenship and legal standing, and a hope for water justice and equity not offered by the public–private water delivery mix currently operating in the city. The field research that informs this chapter was guided by a feminist ethnographic methodology, which gives careful attention to diverse experiences and voices by heeding the constraints, opportunities and challenges in women’s lives, and which looks for thick description, specific data and stories that are profoundly gendered and context relevant (Kabeer 1994). Extensive field research involved semistructured interviews with men and women, case studies, focus group discussions, key informant interviews and participant observation between 2010 and 2012. We created a space for women in Korail to talk about their lived experiences, individually and collectively, because these are what give rise to preferences for public versus private water, and people’s perception of the state and other development actors. Key gendered differences in experiences with water came to light because women are the primary managers of water in the home, and their labour, time and livelihoods are significantly impacted by the lack of safe water. We were particularly interested in eliciting stories and responses that shed light on gender-water realities and the local power hierarchies that complicate a simplistic focus on gender as a male–female binary. Centring gender in research practice brings women’s demands into view in a nuanced manner and with greater accountability than relying on conventional notions of gendered water needs. In addition, it was essential to carry out an intersectional analysis of gendered inequalities, juxtaposing the class- and gender-based experiences of women. Intersectionality permits analysing the mutual construction and interlocking nature of oppression and requires a methodology that

sultana et al . | 151 is attentive to differences among women (Crenshaw 1991; Hill-Collins 1998). By unearthing women’s experiences and opinions in relation to men, we find that relationships at multiple levels of social life impact their access to water. We learn that the lack of water not only increases their physical workloads, but also deepens their emotional strain and reduces their well-being. We learn that decision making is only empowering when the inequalities between women are accounted for and represented. We learn that public water is desired by women because they believe it holds the promise of access for all and would be a first step toward their recognition as citizens of this burgeoning city. In sum, we learn that building structures and systems that take seriously the needs and wants of those most marginalized would improve equity, quality, participation, efficiency, transparency and accountability in water service systems overall. On water’s edge: the lived experiences in Korail slum Whereas responsibility for the planning, construction and modernization of water supply and sanitation typically resides with the national government’s Department of Public Health Engineering, the capital Dhaka and Chittagong (the second-largest city) are treated as exceptions. As rapidly growing urban areas, public managers opted for local systems of water service provision believing a decentralized structure would be better suited to keeping pace with change. The Dhaka Water Supply and Sewerage Authority (DWASA) was formed in 1963 (Haq 2006). Organizationally, DWASA is divided into 11 operational zones that are each managed locally by individual WASAs (Hoque 2003). The mission of DWASA as a whole is to ‘provide potable water and sanitation services to the city dwellers at an affordable price’ with the goals of ‘100% water supply coverage by the year 2005 and 80% sanitation coverage by 2020’ (Haq 2006, 295), both of which remain unmet. The seemingly progressive and banal pledge to provide coverage for Dhaka’s ‘city dwellers’ is, in fact, an administrative façade. In reality, to be counted as a city dweller, one must first be counted as a landowner or legal tenant. Dhaka’s informal population, estimated at approximately 3.5 million people out of a total population of 17 million, does not hold legal tenure rights and therefore does not have access or legal claim to the municipal water and sanitation system,

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rendering this population administratively invisible in routine water policy and planning. As illegal squatters, these Dhaka ‘city dwellers’ are effectively erased and excluded. If water is a basic right conferred to citizens, which Bangladesh affirmed when it adopted the UN resolution on access to water as a human right, then denying access to public municipal water is a denial of the full rights of citizenship. In the process, Korail slum dwellers are positioned as quasi-citizens, bringing into sharp relief the material implications of informality as a social and political identity, and indeed that of the very notion of ‘public’ services. Conventional development theory suggests informality is an undesirable consequence of urbanization, and contrary to state goals and ambitions (Kudva 2009; Parnell and Pieterse 2010). These arguments belie an economic reality; informality subsidizes urban development. To this end, Roy (2005, 148) employs the term urban informality ‘to indicate an organizing logic, a system of norms that governs the process of urban transformation itself’. The ‘illegitimacy’ of the slum is therefore not solely a political liability; it also serves a variety of political and economic purposes, much like undocumented labour fills particular economic, social and political needs in many countries in the global North. Thus the labour of Korail residents constitutes a significant share of the ‘critical infrastructure’ of Dhaka’s urban development (Zukin 2010). Informality, as a strategy of development, asserts control over a body politic by usurping control of individual bodies; in this case, the illegality of living in the slum constrains social mobility as well as the political and economic participation of its inhabitants in the broader public life of the city. Korail slum is located in the wealthiest part of Dhaka city, the upper-class neighbourhoods of Banani and Gulshan, and is built on land adjacent to Gulshan Lake and extending onto it through illegal landfill. Situated on approximately 90 acres of land owned by three government agencies, it is one of the largest slums in Dhaka (Angeles et al. 2009). Korail first emerged during the 1990s in response to the growing needs of an internal migrant population whose homes and land were expropriated or whose means of survival had been made obsolete by trade liberalization, riverbank erosion, and a host of other causes. To meet the new demand for city housing, unscrupulous and enterprising groups ‘illegally captured’ available land and extended their rentals through the landfill of Gulshan Lake (Mridha et al. 2009,

sultana et al . | 153 12). The slum population has grown to roughly 16,000 families making up a population of more than 100,000 people who have lived in the slum for an average of 15 years (DSK 2010). Lower costs of living compared to other slums and close proximity to places of work make Korail an appealing option for the urban poor. Most Korail residents work as day labourers, rickshaw pullers, garments workers, maids, shopkeepers, drivers, hawkers, vendors, and other informal jobs. Monthly earnings range from BDT 4,000 to 12,000 (US$50–150),1 a wage that does little to mitigate conditions of poverty (DSK 2010). While their labour generates profit for the state and subsidizes the costs of living for the middle and upper classes, Korail residents are systematically deprived of the basic necessities of life. As one Korail respondent notes: ‘The inhabitants of the Korail slum do not get basic needs met, we are treated as animals with the constant threat of eviction ... Rich people are dependent on us in every phase of their life, yet they think about development without the poor people! … They need us, but do not care about us.’ In these ways, the social, economic and political costs of informality are borne by the residents of Korail despite their contributions to urban development. Korail water struggles: gender and class matter Because the task of procuring water is primarily borne by women, the conditions of scarcity and burdens of informality intensify the struggle they face in their everyday lives, as is noted in the following exchange regarding water procurement: ‘Supplied water comes at night, at 3am. Our schedules and lives are disturbed for water.’ A gendered division of labour in the household, patriarchal community structures, and the lack of political representation limit women’s access to water and their meaningful participation in decision making around water. The physical and emotional costs of obtaining water constituted a tax on women’s time, labour and emotional well-being, and reflect a systematic disregard for the life and health of the slum population (Crow and McPike 2009; Hanchette et al. 2003). Gendered relations mediate the ways that women and men access and use water, and decisions that affect women’s everyday lives are typically made by men, as is highlighted in this simple, yet revealing comment from a young female respondent: ‘Men are water businessmen here. Women do not do business.’ In lieu of legal and formal access, Korail residents obtained water informally and illegally from water

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vendors (water businessmen), who tapped water from public municipal supplies and resold it to the slum dwellers at considerably higher prices. Issues of access are gendered matters in that decision making over cost, quantity and the location of water delivery are generally negotiated in the absence of women. The male head of household negotiated cost and quantity with the landlord who, in turn, contracted with the water vendor for a bulk rate. The fee for water is included in the monthly rental fee and is based on the quantity of water generally specified by the male head of household. Informal access thus excluded women from actively participating in negotiations over quantity and cost; women engaged in the process of accessing water as collectors and users of water. As one woman noted: ‘In the morning men go to work so they have no time and don’t help us. We have to find out and manage water every day. We have to solve the problem of water for our families. And we have to deal with whatever the problems are.’ While men also worry about water, they do not participate in the daily work associated with managing water in the home. The problems involved with accessing an informal supply of water for an illegally placed household exacerbated the physical and emotional costs of women’s work, bounded by normative assumptions around the gendered division of domestic labour which typically equates ‘water work with women’s work’ (O’Reilly 2006). Water-related tasks include household cleaning, cooking and caring for children, the sick and the elderly, each of which are naturalized as women’s work. Unlike upper- and middle-class women who have access to a regular supply of municipal water piped into their homes, and often have female domestic workers who do domestic chores, women in Korail have dealt with a chronic, irregular or contaminated water supply on their own. There was nowhere for them to voice complaints or concerns. As one respondent noted: ‘If there is a problem with supply or dirty water, complain to whom? We live here illegally.’ Similarly, women were expected to manage the consequences of contamination from leaky pipes: ‘Dirty water comes inside pipes due to leakage. We are attacked by various diseases like diarrhea and dysentery.’ The costs associated with sickness and diseases are routinely borne by women who, in addition to being primarily responsible for water collection and management in the home, are also expected to care for sick family members. The frequent need to boil or treat contaminated water also incurs additional costs.

sultana et al . | 155 Much attention has been paid to the monetary and physical costs of water provision, but far less has been paid to the emotional costs that women bear. As the primary procurers of water, women’s identities are linked to their ability to provide sufficient quantities of good quality water (Sultana 2009a). The challenges associated with procuring water are often humiliating and demoralizing, and the inability to procure an adequate supply of water is internalized as a failure to properly care for the home and family (Sultana 2011). Women also deal with the emotional costs of reconciling the tensions that arise in relation to cleanliness and sanitary needs, gendered expectations for modesty, and conditions of chronic water scarcity. While men can freely bathe in Gulshan Lake or another public water point, women do not enjoy the same freedom. They are constrained by domestic responsibilities in the slum and normative proscriptions of socially appropriate feminine behaviour that often prohibit them from bathing in open public spaces. Women in Korail stated that they sometimes had to go without bathing or have insufficient water for sanitation, an added suffering in a culture that places importance not only on personal hygiene and cleanliness but which also values water for religious ablution and spiritual purification. This is a gendered struggle particularly during hot summer months when city-wide water shortages mean that Korail gets no fresh water for days on end. The intersectionality of gender and class is poignant in demonstrating the difference that social location can make in urban water politics. The following response from an older male is indicative of the class and gender tensions: ‘Rich/established neighbours get more water as they pay more … Those women do not need to be involved in water collection the way our women do, or labour to fetch water the way our women do.’ The entanglement of class and status resulted in more work for poor women, an asymmetrical disregard for poor women’s health, and a generalized denial of femininity for poor women versus the hyper-valuation of an ‘ideal femininity’ for wealthier women (who are seen as ‘good’ wives and mothers who can provide safe clean water for their families). Although patriarchal norms affect women across class boundaries, wealthier women are not affected by water scarcity and do not have to worry about water in the same way as poor women do. One woman respondent articulated the class dimensions of access in this way: ‘Women of Gulshan/Banani get water as much as they want. They just

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open the tap and get water.’ Wealthier neighbourhoods can use water for non-survival activities such as watering their lawns, washing their cars and filling up their swimming pools while slum residents struggled for, and rarely obtained, an adequate supply of water to meet their daily needs. These vast inequalities were not lost on the women and men who live in the slum. As one man interviewed for this research noted: ‘They have personal water supplies so there is no comparison with them. When they stop using water then our women get water here. Sometimes their water spills over from the [overhead water] tank and they don’t even care.’ Uneven access to public municipal water radically differentiated the lives of wealthy and poor women. The importance of being public In the Korail context, concepts of public and private service delivery can be a murky, misunderstood and inadequate dichotomy. Public provision is complicated by the presence of other actors, such as private vendors, privately owned and operated water systems, as well as NGOs, which blur the lines because they operate public systems that are funded by the private sector or development agencies. That DWASA continues to undergo a process of corporatization – the integration of private regulatory processes, commercialized cost accounting and collection procedures – rather than becoming fully privatized (see Bakker 2011; Budds and McGranahan 2003) further complicates the public–private binary. Compounding this difficult distinction is the fact that the majority of respondents have little to no direct personal experience with either system of provision. Korail residents largely come from rural areas that are not serviced by municipal pipes. But despite the lack of first-hand experience with a public or private system of provision, a broad consensus emerged in our interviews with residents of Korail: the majority strongly favoured public service provision. Voicing the perceived cost and equity benefits of municipal water, one respondent summed up these sentiments: ‘We want DWASA water from the government and everyone should get it. We would then drink the water and pay the bills regularly.’ The reliability, cost, efficiency and equity gains attributed to public systems have the potential to buffer the hard realities that women faced individually and collectively, and are thus regarded as better suited to meet the needs of all users including those left out by private schemes. While cost and affordability were primary concerns, equity was almost

sultana et al . | 157 equally cited. The majority of respondents felt that a public system of provision would be more affordable and thus more accessible for the urban poor. Women also thought that the time and energy gains achieved through regular and legal access to municipal water would lift the daily burden of water collection and allow them to pursue new social and economic activities. One woman lamented that she was unable to open a tea stand; for many others, the endless search for water frustrated any efforts at securing additional income for the home. In addition, access to municipal water was often equated with gaining a modicum of citizenship rights and directly related to a vision of water justice. This vision is about access to clean and safe water for all, active participation in decision making, opportunities for betterment, and the elimination of class-based inequalities affecting women’s lives in particular. The preference for public options does not imply giving carte blanche to the state, but rather calls for an accountable government that looks after all its citizens. The material experiences of the lack of water and people’s perceptions of what the state’s role should be underlie the claims that Korail residents made on public water. Thus, the desire for public water is wrapped up with notions of citizenship as much as it is seen as an avenue to alleviate daily – and highly gendered – suffering. The desire to be connected to DWASA water was almost universal, as captured in this statement and echoed by several respondents: ‘We want water with a low price from the government as we can’t buy water with a high price. We are poor. We want freedom from dirty water of the lake and the drains. We want regularly supplied water in every household from DWASA.’ As these responses suggest, the majority of respondents believed the government has a role to play in subsidizing the costs of water, and associate paying for water with a vision of responsible citizenship. Knowing all too well how they are regarded, Korail residents want to become bill-paying citizens like their wealthy neighbours. Willingness to pay, however, does not signify an endorsement of commodification; it represents an eagerness to be granted the same rights and obligations enjoyed by Dhaka’s wealthy citizens. In other words, respondents do not actively champion the neoliberal project that equates citizens with consumers and predicates citizenship on an ability to pay. Instead, the desire to pay echoes broader concerns with the prejudices they face as perceived ‘freeloaders’ in a society that views slums in a harsh

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light (see Jones 2011). Slum residents want to engage in the system as consumers, even if it is with token amounts in highly subsidized schemes, because being on the formal water network grants legitimacy. As one man stated: ‘We don’t want pity water or illegal water. We want a proper water system. We don’t want anything for free.’ Citizenship, legality and water justice Formally conceived, citizenship is a contract between the state and its people. The state secures and promotes individual rights and protections while individuals are bound to the obligations and duties outlined in law and policy. In practice, citizenship is a means of determining who belongs to a state and who does not; it is about inclusion and exclusion (Yuval-Davis 2012). The refusal to grant Korail families access to municipal water was experienced as a denial of belonging and citizenship, as is noted in this response: ‘We are not seen as citizens of the country.’ The desire for access to water reflected the hope to be granted permanency and legality as residents of the city and to be recognized in policy and law. For the slum residents, the provision of legal and regular access would attenuate the power inequalities that position the urban poor as undeserving. Though formally entitled to water as a basic human right, the illegality of the slum prevented Korail residents from claiming and exercising that right. At the same time, because of the enormous and regular costs of obtaining water through private water vendors, some respondents felt that their obligations were already fulfilled: ‘We are not illegal. We spent more money to bring water so why [is it] illegal? We ensure payment regularly.’ In part, this reflects a misunderstanding of the means of access, but it also serves as a critique of the exploitative nature of the water vendors. Several respondents also expressed frustration at being socially castigated for making use of a service that they desperately needed and was not otherwise available: ‘We are not thieves, but since we are getting and paying for stolen water, we are thieves by default. We don’t want that.’ The majority of respondents were, in fact, adamant about their desire to have formal access to municipal water and were clearly prepared to pay for access: ‘If the government provides connections for piped water, that would be very beneficial for us. They should give us meters and connections as in other areas.’ For most residents, there was tremendous frustration with the existing system. They were cast as social deviants without regard for circumstance,

sultana et al . | 159 while they would much prefer access to the municipal system legally if it were available to them. While government authorities view slum residents as lost profit potential, they also fear the political ramifications of granting permanent access to the municipal water supply. Attempts to legalize slum access were started in the Low Income Community (LIC) scheme of the 1996 DWASA charter. The LIC called for providing water services to slums via the official registration of their community-based organizations (CBOs). Under this scheme, leading Bangladesh NGO Dushtha Shasthya Kendra (DSK) worked to assist Korail residents in their efforts to lobby for communal water points connected to the existing municipal system (Ahmed and Terry 2003). In 2010, after many years of effort, DSK helped Korail negotiate the installation of a DWASA pipeline in the slum. Although the infrastructure to carry water was in place, the political will necessary to make the water flow remained absent for several years. Considerable resistance from a range of groups – illegal water vendors and lower-level DWASA officials working with them, political opportunists, nearby wealthy communities – blocked the implementation as planned. The prolonged difficulties and challenges in accessing water under the LIC programme furthered the sense that people in the slum were not regarded as equal citizens and they blamed government for the lack of political will: ‘We vote for the government for our betterment, but they do not help us.’ The prioritization of wealthy residents when it comes to water supply illustrates the classbased exclusions embedded in citizenship. While Dhaka’s wealthy residents are able to make demands to the state, this right is routinely denied to the people in slums. DWASA officials interviewed noted the complexities and challenges of managing escalating demand for water in informal settlements, but also recognize the fiscal motivation to do so. By legalizing water lines with meters and formal payment schemes DWASA could capture much of the revenue lost to illegal water vendors. This motivation was not lost on Korail residents: ‘I would prefer to have a legal water supply system. Why should the mediators reap profits from the illegal water supply? If anyone should profit, then it should be the government.’ Additionally, DWASA officials cited various health concerns associated with illegal access points; these points are not regulated or monitored by official agencies and become contamination sites that jeopardize the

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health and safety of the water infrastructure system as a whole. In sum, extending water coverage would have simultaneously addressed public health concerns and boost revenue collection efforts for DWASA, but the politics and optics of the slum hindered any real progress for a long time. For the women and men in the Korail slum, the struggle for access to clean water has been a politicizing and mobilizing force through which women have developed a sense of agency and identified strategic interests. Their words, their needs, their struggles and their collective calls for action redefine gendered citizenship. For the women in Korail, citizenship is not solely about rights and belonging; it is about selfdetermination and portends a life free from the dehumanizing emotional and physical toil associated with meeting the basic need for water. The preference for municipal water was imbued with the tensions associated with access, gender and citizenship, and municipal access was regarded as a key factor in mediating this. The views articulated by the respondents in Korail begin to weave together a narrative of water justice and an ethic of collective need. The alternative they envisioned would prioritize affordability, sustainability, and would take the form of a legal and formalized public water system. However, they recognized that a formal system required large infrastructure work and networks of pipes and meters that bear costs too high for slum residents on their own. Thus they invoked the state and called upon it to perform its duties to all its citizens. Conclusions Water access demands are centrally about making public water available to all – not quasi-legal and informal means of water access but rather publicly provided services, accounted for and democratically allocated. Given the necessity of water, and the gendered nature of water access, provisioning and struggles, making water public thus has gendered implications. The gendered nature of both mental and physical aspects of such struggles cannot be ignored. Having water that is accessible, affordable, reliable and equitable are the hallmarks of what poor women want in their demands for public water services. These aspects are also foundational to the human right to water that exists in policy prescriptions. Making water public is thus important to gender equity and empowerment, and gestures toward more equitable water justice in the urban sphere.

sultana et al . | 161 While all slum residents want to be recognized as citizens, understanding the gender-water inequalities embedded in notions of citizenship unlocks very different experiences. Women are not a homogenous group and their needs are not solely determined by their sex because gender is mediated by class in the same way as access to water is. Wealthy women have formal access to water, which shows they are valued by the state; in contrast, poor women are constrained by illegality and water scarcity. Such class inequalities shape women’s lives in extreme ways: well-off women can use water for a variety of basic needs (drinking, cooking, bathing, cleaning, etc.) and leisure activities (gardening, swimming, etc.), while women in the slums struggle to find basic amounts of water to survive on. Looking at the intersectionalities of gender and class and the resulting inequities thus becomes central to understanding broader power relations that influence and challenge cross-class coalitions or movements for social justice and inclusive citizenship. It is necessary to understand inequalities among women but in doing so one should not lose sight of gendered inequalities between men and women. This focus on gender-based inequalities requires a focus at multiple levels: the household, the community and the state. Who is responsible for arranging water? Who labours for it? Under what circumstances? And at what physical, emotional, social and financial costs? The unequal gendered burdens are evident in the responses offered by women and men who each articulate a gendered division of labour that places the onus of responsibility for water collection on women while denying them the right to make decisions about where, when and how much water is accessed. Thus, there is a need to further open up the ‘black box’ of household and community, while avoiding the pitfall of idealizing community participation (Sultana 2009b). Exploring gendered inclusions and exclusions is important in ensuring that collectivizing efforts will bear fruit for all. Water justice was a common theme throughout this study. People’s desire to have public water was not just for life and survival, but also about exercising rights and redressing injustices in the urban fabric that were reinforced by inequitable water provision. Claiming public water was thus partly a larger claim on full citizenship status. The overwhelming majority of Korail respondents wanted public water provision via DWASA that would be equitably distributed throughout the slum. They wanted their water crises resolved through formal

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means and wanted to put an end to the uncertainties and illegalities they were forced to live with. In the end, the everyday problems linked to water that is insufficient, poor in quality and only sporadically available affects many other aspects of life, such as health, employment opportunities and children’s ability to attend school. Thus, it is important to engage with broader gendered water concerns that impinge on a range of issues that affect not only physical and emotional wellbeing but also life and livelihood opportunities. This study underscores the significance of a gendered perspective, the need to focus on women’s lived realities, and the importance of analysing how the politics of place shape access, delivery and preferences for public water. Attention to gender, experience and place is crucial to any conceptualization of public service and water justice. Acknowledgements We thank the Municipal Services Project (MSP) and Syracuse University for funding that enabled this research. We are particularly grateful for the assistance of the following people during field research in Bangladesh: Dibalok Singha, Ranajit Das, Pijush Das, and local staff of Dushtha Shasthya Kendra (DSK);

Begum Shamsun Nahar, Nazia Mahmud and Raju Anwar of SDP; Taqsem Khan and several officials of DWASA; officials of the World Bank and WaterAid; and, most important, Korail participants who made this research possible. Any errors in interpretation or representation remain ours.

Note 1 US$1 = BDT 80 (BDT = Bangladeshi taka).

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solidarity. Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press. Mridha, M. K., Hossain, A., Alam, B., Sarker, B. K., Wahed, T., Khan, R. et al. 2009. The perceptions of community groups to improve MNCH in urban slums. MANOSHI Working Paper No. 9. Dhaka: Research and Evaluation Division, BRAC and ICDDRB. O’Reilly, K. 2006. ‘Traditional’ women, ‘modern’ water: Linking gender and commodification in Rajasthan, India. Geoforum 37: 958–972. O’Reilly, K., Halvorson, S., Sultana, F. and Laurie, N. 2009. Introduction: Global perspectives on gender-water geographies. Gender, Place, and Culture 16(special issue on gender– water geographies): 381–385. Parnell, S. and Pieterse, E. 2010. The ‘right to the city’: Institutional imperatives of a developmental state. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 34(1): 146–162. Rakodi, C. 2000. Getting the pipe laid is one matter and getting the water flowing through the pipe is another: User views on publicsector urban water provision in Zimbabwe, Sri Lanka, Ghana and India. International Planning Studies 5(3): 365–391. Roy, A. 2005. Urban informality: Toward an epistemology of planning. Journal of the American Planning Association 71(2): 147–158. Sultana, F. 2009a. Fluid lives: Subjectivities, water and gender in rural Bangladesh. Gender, Place, and Culture 16(4): 427–444. Sultana, F. 2009b. Community and participation in water resources management: Gendering and naturing development debates from Bangladesh. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 34(3): 346–363.

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through a feminist political ecology framework. Geoforum 42(2): 143–152. Yuval-Davis, N. 2012. The politics of belonging: Intersectional contestations. London: Sage. Zukin, S. 2010. Naked city: The death and life of authentic urban places. New York: Oxford University Press.

1 0 | S TRU GG L I N G F O R P UB L I C, RE C LAI M I N G CI T I Z E N S H I P : E V E RYDA Y PRAC TI C E S O F A CCE S S T O W A T E R IN M E D E LLÍ N , CO L O M B I A Marcela López

Notions of ‘public’ have become highly contested in debates around access to water in Medellín, Colombia’s second-largest city. These discussions have gained added significance since the emergence and consolidation of the city’s public multi-utility company – Empresas Públicas de Medellín (EPM, Public Enterprises of Medellín) – as a multilatina operating across the region. Although the successful insertion of EPM into the Latin American services market has been a source of pride and admiration for many Colombians, the implementation of market-oriented operating principles in all activities of the company raises difficult questions about its public character and responsibility in the provision of basic services. EPM claims that, as a public company, it has contributed significantly to Medellín’s development over the years by transferring as much as 30 per cent of its annual revenues to the municipality for social investment programmes (Concejo de Medellín 1997). The company sees the commercialization of water as a strategy that simultaneously secures economic efficiency and social equity. Nevertheless, thousands of households are denied access to water for non-payment of bills or because their land tenure status remains illegal. Critics argue that access to water should never be denied, and should be conceived as a public good provided by a public company. To make sense of these divergent accounts, this chapter focuses on the everyday practices of unserved households as they attempt to secure access to water in the city. Approximately 30,000 households are excluded from the city’s infrastructure network because their claims to land tenure are not recognized because they are located in the socalled ‘high-risk zones’ (Alcaldía de Medellín 2012a). To gain access to water, these households are forced to deploy localized socio-technical

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arrangements in which not only pipes, taps and meters are mobilized, but also neighbours, families, fontaneros (plumbers) and staff of EPM. Such practices, I argue, are significantly influenced not just by the biophysical and spatial characteristics of water itself, but by how the company differentiates it as well: raw/potable, safe/unsafe, legal/illegal, scarce/abundant, physical loss/commercial loss. As we shall see below, the ways in which water is officially designated comes to play a critical role in how unserved households come to secure access (or not) to this resource on a daily basis, and to potentially subvert the neoliberal visions of the water company. In this sense, water is not a passive subject lacking agency, but a resource that embodies powerful social, cultural, spiritual and symbolic meanings (Lahiri-Dutt 2006; Swyngedouw 2004). Additionally, water’s dynamic character poses a set of challenges, opportunities and potential barriers to neoliberalism (Bakker 2010; Castree 2010). In adopting this approach, I demonstrate that nature’s materiality (Bakker and Bridge 2006; Castree 2005; Sultana 2013) can come to influence daily practices of access to water and contribute to current debates on alternatives to privatization and commercialization (McDonald and Ruiters 2012). The analytical strategy deployed in this research is one grounded in the relationship between infrastructure networks, citizenship and access to water to reveal how unserved households reclaim what they consider to be a public good and challenge the neoliberal logic established by EPM. Drawing on in-depth interviews with community members and leaders, staff of the water company, and municipal officials, as well as media reports, participation in community meetings and direct observations of household activities, the chapter examines two barrios (neighbourhoods) located just outside the urban perimeter of Medellín: Bello Oriente and Pinares de Oriente. Both barrios are located in the northeastern section of the metropolitan region, an area characterized by steep, unstable slopes but with high water availability due to their proximity to dense water provision infrastructure owned by EPM. They are predominantly inhabited by campesinos (farmers) displaced by the civil war who struggle to be recognized as citizens, in part to help them secure access to water. EPM justifies its denial of a formal extension of its infrastructure networks to these unserved areas on technical and land tenure grounds. What makes these two cases especially interesting is that despite sharing similar geographical and socio-economic conditions, residents

l ópez | 167 of the two neighbourhoods employ different practices to secure access according to the officially designated types of water they use. Similarly, the ways in which the water company intervenes in these unserved areas is also differentiated based on the ways in which water is used. Paying attention to these material characteristics allows us to better understand how different practices to secure access are constructed, mobilized and consolidated and how distinctive notions of public are emerging in the process. The public/private nature of EPM EPM was created as a multi-utility public company in 1955 and is owned by the Municipality of Medellín. The company supplies water and sewerage, electricity, natural gas, telecommunication services and solid waste collection to over four million people in the metropolitan area. EPM has been praised both nationally and internationally for its efficiency and quality of services, and as a model to emulate in other Latin American countries (BID 2012; Satterthwaite 2014). One of the most salient features of the company is the partnership it has created with the municipality. According to Forbes Magazine (2014), this partnership ‘has yielded opportunities in marginalized neighbourhoods, fostered inclusive communities, and attracted international recognition and investment’. The municipality has largely used EPM transfers to finance urban transformation projects such as a network of public schools and libraries in low-income neighbourhoods, new museums and parks, and a massive public transportation system composed of metro lines, aerial cable cars, buses and bikes (Alcaldía de Medellín 2012b; Coupé, Brand and Dávila 2012). As a result, EPM has become a key actor not only in the provision of basic public services, but also in the urban transformation process (Brand and Dávila 2012). Over the last two decades, EPM has been increasingly operating like a privately owned company by adopting a competitive and profit-driven logic, with an institutional form of state-entrepreneurial behaviour known as corporatization (Furlong 2015; McDonald 2014). In 2010, the company began to search for new frontiers in order to expand its activities to the international market. It is now a leading energy distributor in Central America after taking over the electricity utilities in Panama, El Salvador and Guatemala (EPM 2013). EPM has also won bids for the operation contracts of three water treatment plants in Mexico, a wind park in Chile, and has undertaken a

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controversial merger with the Swedish telecommunication company Millicom (El Colombiano 2013a). Outside the country, the company behaves as a private multinational, operating in a highly competitive environment with an increasingly internationalized capital structure. This geographical expansion has crowned EPM as one of the most ‘successful’ multilatinas in the sphere of basic public services. Paradoxically, while EPM registered US$6.9 billion in total revenues in 2013 (EPM 2013), and reported 99 per cent water coverage (EPM 2011), official statistics estimate that in that same year 36,560 households were disconnected for non-payment of bills (EPM 2013) in addition to the approximately 30,000 households that were already unserved due to their illegal land tenure status. The company has also deployed a ‘public ownership’ narrative to defend and legitimize policies of disconnection in the case of non-payment, as expressed by Mónica Ruíz, director of Marketing, Transmission and Distribution of Energy at EPM (Samudio and Cuevas 2013): When you start to forgive the debts, what you are saying to the user is that it is the same to pay or not to pay. A disciplined user who has paid his bills all his life will become demotivated if his neighbour does not pay and the company does not react … First, we are talking about public money ... In EPM, when we forgive debts we are putting at risk the money of all of the citizens of Medellín ... We cannot play with public money. (author’s translation, emphasis added) In response to growing social pressure to reduce disconnection rates, and EPM’s desire to prevent illegal reconnections, the municipality and the company have implemented the Litros de Amor (‘litres of love’) programme, a basic allocation of 2.5 m3/person/month of water free of charge, and a prepaid water system is being promoted as an innovative tool to redress inequalities in the city. The Mayor of Medellín, Aníbal Gaviria, has been broadly supportive of prepaid technologies, arguing that this initiative can address the social inequity and violence affecting the city (El Colombiano 2013b). Both programmes have mobilized not just differentiated technological infrastructures and particular discourses of efficiency to educate consumers on a new ‘ethic’ of water use, but have also reinforced different categories of citizenship by constituting differentiated access to water services by forcing some

l ópez | 169 consumers to pay for their services in advance and to risk running out of water supply when the pre-paid amount is used up. These dynamics raise a number of vexing questions: why does EPM, a public company that belongs to the municipality and the citizens of Medellín, disconnect households for non-payment and exclude lowincome households from the formal network despite access to water having been endorsed by the Constitutional Court as a fundamental right? Why are acciones de tutela (tutelary actions) that forbid disconnection for non-payment not respected by EPM?1 Why are water tariffs becoming increasingly unaffordable for low-income households and prepaid water meters being promoted as the only solution to reduce disconnection, especially when they have been heavily criticized, and even been banned, elsewhere in the world (Barnes 2009; Loftus 2006)? Why does EPM speak about competitiveness and sustainability but pay little attention to equity? These questions go to the heart of emerging debates around the public character of corporatized utilities such as EPM, and are best explored through the lens of actual, day-to-day struggles of unserved households attempting to (re)claim citizenship through access to water. Learning from ‘high-risk zones’ In Medellín, households that are located in so-called high-risk zones are denied formal access to basic public services based on the Plan de Ordenamiento Territorial (Land Use Plan). Technical and land tenure arguments are commonly used by EPM to justify its inability to provide water services to this marginalized population. Additionally, the company lays the blame on the municipality for not authorizing them to supply services. Providing water access to households that lack property rights has generated heated debates in Colombia (Arias Mejía 2009; Bernal Pulido 2012; Ramírez Grisales 2010). Some actors argue that it is inappropriate to invest public resources in illegal settlements as it can contribute to chaotic and disorganized urban growth. Opponents claim that it is unacceptable to forbid investments to upgrade basic services in informal settlements because it constitutes a violation of the fundamental rights enshrined in the National Constitution.2 Residents of these unstable peripheries are predominantly campesinos who have been forced to migrate to the city as a consequence of more than 50 years of armed conflict between the state and left- and

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right-wing armed groups in smaller towns and rural areas of the country. From the 1990s, as the conflict intensified, thousands of people were displaced and found refuge in the perilous slopes that ring the city. Houses in these areas are mainly built with cardboard, wood and recycled materials. Accessibility is difficult as they are only reachable by foot through steep and narrow paths. Drainage systems are inadequate and the electricity supply is poor. Unserved settlements are constantly exposed to floods, droughts, fires and mudslides, and residents consequently live under permanent uncertainty and despair. As their tenure status is illegal, they also live under constant threat of eviction from the municipality and extortion from local paramilitary groups. These areas have transformed into permanent occupation in which communities have consolidated and are growing in size. Access to water is increasingly secured through informal/illegal practices. For EPM these practices have come to be seen as a major threat not only to the ‘culture of payment’, but also to the company’s revenues, as they contribute significantly to increasing levels of unaccounted-for water. According to the company, around 35 per cent of Medellín’s potable water is reported as unaccounted-for water (EPM 2012), lost through leakages in the distribution networks (physical losses) as well as meter inaccuracies and illegal connections (commercial losses). The growing number of illegal connections demonstrates that the water company faces significant challenges in fully commercializing water and creating ‘obedient’ citizens.

Bello Oriente: Citizen recognition through collective struggle The inhabitants of Bello Oriente have secured access to water for almost five decades by constructing community-based models of infrastructure. Due to their proximity to one of EPM’s water tanks, this community has built a parasitic plug-in infrastructure with its own resources. This self-built system captures wasted raw water that overflows the daily levelling of the company’s tank. The infrastructure consists of a cascade aerator in which raw water flows in a thin layer down steps to a secondary storage tank and a tangled mass of water pipes. Although this system appears chaotic and inefficient it has a strong organizational logic behind it. The management is handled by a fontanero (a person who is paid on a weekly basis by the community). This person’s tasks include repairing tubes from fissures and cracks,

l ópez | 171 fixing blockages, cleaning the tank of suspended objects after heavy rain and ensuring that every house has access to a sufficient amount of water. Currently, the system supplies approximately 150 households with almost 24-hour water service, although no records exist of how much water is available per household. When a new resident moves in to the area, access to water has to be arranged through the fontanero, who charges a small fee for instalment and maintenance of the system, but not for the amount of water being consumed. However, the fontanero does not receive a fixed income as it depends on the ability of households to pay. But for many inhabitants in Bello Oriente, the water that flows from EPM’s tank is considered a public good, rather than an economic one. This assumption is on the grounds that a strict payment system would add to the exclusion and marginality in which people are already forced to live. As one community leader said: The majority of people who settle down in this area have been displaced by paramilitary and guerrilla groups. They were forced to abandon their land and to look for refuge in a city that has denied them all sorts of rights. We try to help these families as much as we can. Access to water is the main right that is guaranteed to the inhabitants of this barrio. Everybody in Bello Oriente has access to water regardless of their capacity to pay... Also, households should not experience scarcity while water that runs abundantly in the area is being wasted by the company. This community-based system not only serves to secure access to water, it is considered a powerful tool for citizenship recognition. In conversation with a group of community leaders they recounted how the establishment of a water system that does not exclude anyone has generated strong community cohesion and facilitated the articulation of the demand for other essential services (e.g. housing, education and health). One of the leaders further added: ‘Having a unifying position has helped us to voice concerns and to gain social and political legitimacy, which has facilitated negotiations with municipal authorities and staff of the water company.’ EPM has been reluctant to intervene regarding this self-built infrastructure. One of the reasons given is that water obtained from the tank is categorized by the company as a physical loss, which means that

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technical damage is responsible for the overflow of water, rather than the community being involved in water ‘theft’. This helps to explain why one community leader defends the functioning of the system by claiming that: ‘This connection is not illegal, it is legitimate.’ For many, this legal technicality is why, despite being aware of this practice, and normally keen to penalize ‘theft’, EPM has not imposed any punitive sanctions. But nor is EPM willing to provide concrete support to the community’s water system. Community leaders have approached EPM for assistance on several occasions – notably with regard to demands for better water quality – but to no avail. In an interview with Don Segundo, the fontanero of Bello Oriente, he noted that: Sometimes water comes down from the tank very dirty, particularly after rain. This water is not safe for drinking, people usually get very sick, particularly children. I tell them not to drink this water because it is unsafe, but they are thirsty, they do not have a choice but to drink it (...) EPM told us that we have to improve this water because it is not suitable for consumption. We have proposed the construction of a water treatment plant but they told us that it is very expensive. I can build it, I have the skills for that, but I need the support of EPM. We want our water to have similar quality standards as EPM water. Another community leader suggested that EPM only takes action when there are potential profits.

Pinares de Oriente: citizen recognition through individual struggle As a survival strategy, inhabitants of another barrio, Pinares de Oriente, secure access to water by connecting illegally to EPM infrastructure networks that supply potable water to regularized areas. These practices are characterized by individual rather than collective connections to the system, leading to a ‘spaghettization’ of the network. A multitude of pipes that differ in material, length and diameter have been connected to the main distributional system to deliver water to individual households. The problem with this system is profuse leakage of potable water, which produces not only significant levels of unaccounted-for water, but also increases the probability of mudslides. Additionally, the illegal construction of parallel systems has affected the efficiency of the formal service. As illegal connections are difficult

l ópez | 173 to control for EPM, they are usually detected by formal users who complain to the company about bad water quality and insufficient water pressure, leading to the regular interruption of water flow. Consequently, unserved areas have become a source of tension with adjacent formal neighbourhoods that experience poor water supply due to the proliferation of illegal connections. As a result, illegal connections in unserved settlements have become an important target for EPM. In 2008, they introduced the Brigadas Comunitarias de Mitigación al Riesgo (Community Brigades for Risk Mitigation) programme as part of EPM’s ‘social responsibility’ policy. The programme includes replacing the pipes installed by the community with better-quality infrastructure. Additionally, the company installs communal meters to monitor overall water consumption levels. These services are provided free of charge. Technical interventions are complemented with educational and training programmes aiming at introducing new ‘values’, such as the intelligent use of water, leadership, civil culture and appreciation of what constitutes a ‘public’ and scarce good. According to an interview conducted with a staff member of EPM, this programme generates a win–win situation: the company recovers commercial losses while low-income households secure access to potable water. In 2012, the company invested US$1.1 million to connect 1,886 households located in unserved areas, throughout the city, and installed 12 communal meters (EPM 2012). EPM is now trying to capture the attention of donors to expand the programme in other low-income areas. The possibilities of obtaining international support are high as the programme is being presented as a strategy for realizing the right to water and as an instrument to achieve the targets of the Millennium Development Goals and the social responsibility principles stipulated in the United Nations Global Compact.3 The Brigadas Comunitarias programme has been widely accepted by the residents of Pinares de Oriente despite being presented as a temporary solution. As with Bello Oriente, the desire to be connected to EPM water in this barrio is strongly linked to notions of citizenship and land tenure status. As one woman expressed: ‘We believe that having access to EPM water will give us citizen recognition, so that we no longer have to fear being evicted.’ This position clearly shows that EPM becomes an influential actor in defining and materializing citizenship rights. Additionally, preferences for EPM water are strongly

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associated with particular notions of ‘public’. This perspective is captured by a community leader who claimed: ‘We want to have access to EPM water like other regularized areas in the city because it is public water. We do not want to rely any more on illegality to obtain water.’ The majority of residents interviewed in this barrio also expressed a desire to have individual meters instead of a collective meter. When asked why, one woman said: ‘It gives us hope that one day we can reclaim rights over our property, so EPM will never disconnect us from the water service.’ However, many residents also expressed fear of prepaid water meters. As one woman noted: ‘We hear that EPM is installing prepaid water meters. We do not want prepaid meters in our houses as we cannot afford the costs associated with this service.’ It should also be noted that high levels of water consumption in unserved areas are a concern, as the water consumption habits of residents are largely derived from rural areas where water typically flows more abundantly. People who are displaced from rural areas and settle in Medellín’s low-income areas are not therefore accustomed to treating water as a relatively scarce good. Consequently, per capita water consumption in these households is higher compared to the average domestic consumption in the city. According to a staff member of EPM, unserved areas report an average monthly consumption of 40 cubic metres per household while formal households report 20 cubic metres. As a result, it is difficult to maintain the consumption levels established by EPM in the programme, especially as the number of inhabitants continually grows. In a field visit to Pinares de Oriente with an EPM team, it was observed that the communal meter had registered a significant increase in water consumption. When one of the company staff asked why, a community member explained: We know that EPM established a limit for water consumption. But, two weeks ago three families came here, displaced from other municipalities by armed groups. We could not refuse to connect them to the EPM system; nobody can live without water (…) Also, my son got married. We cannot live together; I do not have enough space for more people. He constructed a house next to mine and he also got connected to the EPM system. Families are getting bigger and they need more water. It is hard to keep these consumption limits.

l ópez | 175 By law, EPM is not authorized to charge individual households for water services in unserved areas. Nevertheless, the company is working with the Regulatory Commission for Water and Sanitation to implement a system of payment called venta en bloque (block sales). Instead of charging individual households, this mechanism consists of issuing a collective bill with the consumption registered in the communal meter. EPM expects to transfer responsibilities to the Juntas de Acción Comunal (communal councils) for the management of these shared meters and for collecting fees. However, one of the major challenges for the company is how to implement a market policy that does not exclude low-income populations. Failing to do so could trigger more disconnections for non-payment. Conclusion This chapter has illustrated how unserved households attempt to reclaim citizenship status by deploying particular practices to secure access to water on a daily basis in Medellín. Results show that the form and shape of these diverse practices are influenced not only by the biophysical and spatial characteristics of water itself, but also by how water is technically and legally differentiated by the company. Whether water is raw/potable, safe/unsafe, abundant/scarce, legal/ illegal or classified as a physical/commercial loss can come to influence the ways communities secure access to water and determine the extent to which EPM intervenes in the provision of infrastructure and modes of community organization. Attention to water’s materiality helps to contribute to current debates on alternatives to privatization and commodification by identifying how unserved households construct, consolidate and challenge particular systems of water access, technical infrastructures and notions of citizenship according to the kinds of water they use. In Bello Oriente, access to raw, abundant, unsafe but legal water has facilitated cooperation between community members, created less dependence on EPM and more awareness about water leakages and waste. For these unserved households the exclusion from the formal infrastructure system, illegal tenure status and precarious living conditions have contributed to the emergence of social organizations and networks that are increasingly important in the demand for access to a fuller range of basic public services. Exclusion from urban development has become an important terrain in the struggle to make

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visible their rights. Mutual help, cooperation and solidarity have become important strategies in their demand for recognition. The case of Pinares de Oriente shows that access to potable, scarce, safe and illegal water has forced EPM to work with the inhabitants of this barrio. In this case, a desire on the part of EPM to reduce commercial losses has facilitated the implementation of new strategies that allow temporary integration into the formal water system. But despite the intent to reduce unaccounted-for water, the company has found it remarkably difficult to fully control the flow of water in this area. Efforts to produce obedient citizens that respond to the market are constantly subverted. This can be partly attributed to the different values and meanings that residents of this barrio attach to water. For them, having access to EPM water constitutes an important step toward securing citizenship recognition. And because of the strong link between water rights and property rights, the struggle to be recognized as citizens is characterized as an individual, rather than a collective struggle. Many residents claimed that the installment of a communal meter has brought hope that one day they will be permanently connected to the formal network, but via individual meters. In their struggle to secure access to water, unserved households articulate particular perceptions of public according to the kinds of water they use. In Bello Oriente, attitudes are constructed around the necessity of providing water to a community that has been historically excluded. For these inhabitants the term public is closely associated with inclusion, high quality and efficiency. In Pinares de Oriente, notions of public are inextricably linked to securing access to EPM water. However, if this water is to be considered ‘public’, it should be affordable, sufficient in quantity and legally accessed in their minds. These different meanings of public constitute a powerful tool not only to defend fundamental rights, but also to subvert notions of publicness that adjust to the commercialized ideology of the water company. In sum, daily practices to secure access to water are built on extensive individual and collective knowledge about how to redress inequalities and how to deal with deficiencies in water supply provision. It is important to acknowledge these dynamic forms of securing access to water, especially those based on new forms of solidarity if water is to be delivered in a just and equitable manner.

l ópez | 177 Notes 1 A tutelary action is a legal mechanism that enables direct requests to any judge in Colombia for the protection of fundamental rights when they are violated. The Constitutional Court prohibits any service provider from disconnecting a household when it is inhabited by individuals under special constitutional protection such as children, single mothers, elders and Internally Displaced People (e.g. see Decision T546 of 2009, Decision T-717 of 2010 and

Decision T-092 of 2011). 2 For further information see: República de Colombia, Corte Constitucional, Decision C-1189 of 2008 [MP Manuel José Cepeda Espinosa]. 3 EPM has participated since 2006 in the United Nations Global Compact, a platform that promotes the engagement of business and non-profit organizations in areas of human rights, labour, environment, and anti-corruption.

References Alcaldía de Medellín. 2012a. Plan de Desarrollo 2012–2015, Medellín, un hogar para la vida. Medellín: Alcaldía de Medellín. Alcaldía de Medellín. 2012b. Medellín laboratory: An exhibit of ten ongoing practices. Medellín: Mesa Editores. Arias Mejía, L. 2009. Prestación de servicios públicos domiciliarios en zonas catalogadas como de alto riesgo. Letras Jurídicas 14(1): 131–140. Bakker, K. 2010. Privatizing Water: Governance failure and the world’s urban water crisis. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Bakker, K. and Bridge, G. 2006. Material worlds? Resource geographies and the ‘matter of nature’. Progress in Human Geography 30(10): 5–27. Barnes, B. (2009). Community ‘participation’, resistance and the water wars. Journal of Health Management 11(1), 157–166. Bernal Pulido, C. 2012. El derecho findamental al agua y su intrincada satisfacción. Letras Jurídicas 17(1): 23–48. BID (Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo). 2012. Fortalecimiento institucional y de gestión de Empresas Públicas de Medellín (EPM) basado en la implementación de prácticas de

gobierno corporativo. Technical notes IDB-TN-391, April 2012. Brand, P. and Dávila, J. D. 2012. Los metrocables y el ‘urbanismo social’: Dos estrategias complementarias. In J. D. Dávila (ed.), Movilidad urbana y pobreza: Aprendizajes de Medellín y Soacha, Colombia, 38–46. London: DPU, UCL and Universidad Nacional de Colombia. Castree, N. 2005. Nature. London: Routledge. Castree, N. 2010. Neoliberalism and the biophysical environment 1: What neoliberalism is, and what difference nature makes to it. Geography Compass 4(12): 1725–1733. Concejo de Medellín. 1997. Municipal Accord 69 of 1997, Article 13. Coupé, F., Brand, P. and Dávila, J. D. 2012. Medellín: Contexto institucional y cambio de paradigma urbano. In J. D. Dávila (ed.), Movilidad urbana y pobreza: Aprendizajes de Medellín y Soacha, Colombia, 47–58. London: DPU, UCL and Universidad Nacional de Colombia. El Colombiano. 2013a. Admiten demanda de nulidad contra fusión de Une y Millicom. July 18. El Colombiano. 2013b. EPM le apuesta a la innovación. March 9.

178 | tnen ine EPM (Empresas Públicas de Medellín). 2011. Informe de sostenibilidad. Medellín: Grupo EPM. EPM (Empresas Públicas de Medellín). 2012. Informe de sostenibilidad. Medellín: Grupo EPM. EPM (Empresas Públicas de Medellín). 2013. Informe de sostenibilidad. Medellín: Grupo EPM. Forbes. 2014. The transformation of Medellín, and the surprising company behind it. January 27. Furlong, K. 2015. Water and the entrepreneurial city: The territorial expansion of public utility companies from Colombia and the Netherlands. Geoforum 58: 195–207. Lahiri-Dutt, K. 2006. Fluid bonds: Views on gender and water. Kolkata: Stree Publishers. Loftus, A. 2006. Reification and the dictatorship of the water meter. Antipode 38(5): 1023–1045. McDonald, D. A. 2014. Rethinking corporatization and public services in the global South. London: Zed Books. McDonald, D. A. and Ruiters, G. (eds). 2012. Alternatives to privatization:

Public options for essential services in the global South. London: Routledge. Ramírez Grisales, R. S. 2010. Colisión de principios: Acceso al servicio de acueducto e inexistencia del servicio de alcantarillado. Letras Jurídicas 15(1): 105–123. Samudio, M. and Cuevas, A. 2013. Desconexión en movimiento (documentary). Medellín: Platohedro. Satterthwaite, D. 2014. Conclusions: Global trends in basic service provision. In United Cities and Local Goverments (UCLG). Basic services for all in an urbanizing world, 205–220. New York: Routledge. Sultana, F. 2013. Water, technology, and development: Transformations of development technonatures in changing waterscapes. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 30 (2): 337–353. Swyngedouw, E. 2004. Social power and the urbanization of water: Flows of power. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

11 | P U B LI C R E N E W A B L E E N E R G Y IN AFRI C A: TH E P O T E N T I A L F O R D E M OC RATI C E L E CT R I F I CA T I O N

Sandra van Niekerk

Sub-Saharan Africa is home to 35 per cent of the world’s population that does not have access to any form of electricity (Simelane and Abdel-Rahman 2011, 71). Combined access across the continent is the lowest in the world, particularly in rural areas, which ranges from 15 per cent on average in Tanzania and Mozambique to as low as 1.7 per cent in rural Mozambique (WEF 2014). North Africa, in comparison, has had much higher access to electricity on average, with Tunisia providing almost 100 per cent coverage (Bennasr and Verdeil 2014). Part of the reason for this lack of access is low levels of installed electricity capacity. For sub-Saharan Africa as a whole it is a mere 77 gigawatts (GW). If South Africa is excluded, it is only 33GW, the equivalent installed capacity of Sweden, with less than 10 million people (Kapika and Eberhard 2013, 1). In addition, much of this capacity is not available because of the age and inadequate maintenance of the infrastructure. As a result, access to electricity is unreliable and uneven, with the power systems in some countries down for as much as 10 weeks of the year (Eberhard et al. 2011, 56). Another factor is grid location, with approximately 41 per cent of the population of Africa living in areas far from high voltage lines – much of which was developed to service the mining industry (Fine and Rustomjee 1996; McDonald 2009) – making it difficult and very expensive for them to connect. Despite this, the focus on electricity provision in Africa has tended to be on extending grid access, an emphasis which accords with the dominance of national, centralized and (largely) state-owned utilities in most countries on the continent. And yet, paradoxically, Africa is rich in renewable energy sources – such as solar, wind and geothermal. Renewable energy also opens up possibilities for off-grid and mini-grid access, as well as localized solutions. This could have major implications for rapidly escalating

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access as well as democratizing electricity provision and making it more ‘public’. What then, might a more localized, more accessible and more renewable public energy system look like in terms of ownership and control? These are the questions this chapter focuses on in mapping out different options that are being considered – and actually being implemented – in different parts of Africa. The chapter outlines the state of renewable energy debates on the continent and highlights the possibilities of renewable energy as a viable alternative in the African context. It looks at different ownership and control scenarios that exist in relation to the roll-out of renewable energy, and points to some of the limitations of local level, small-scale mini-grids that need to be taken into account in mapping a way forward. The struggle for publicly owned renewable electricity systems in Africa that are democratic, accountable, affordable and accessible will not be an easy one, but it must start with a realistic account of what lies on the road ahead. Why renewable energy in Africa? With climate change having an increasing impact around the world, there has been growing interest in the need to shift to renewable energy. The major advantage is that it does not emit greenhouse gases, and is thus a major factor in climate change mitigation strategies. But renewable energy has other advantages. There are no costs for fossil fuels associated with electricity generation, or their volatile, destabilizing prices. It increases a country’s energy independence because it is no longer as reliant on fossil fuel imports. And, while in the past the cost of renewable energy technology was high, the price of technology has dropped considerably over the past decade. Wind turbine prices, for instance, dropped 30 per cent between 2010 and 2014 alone, and the cost of installing photovoltaic (PV) solar power fell by half (WEF 2014). In addition, renewable energy plants can be assembled quickly and become operational much more rapidly than conventional fossil fuel plants. This allows for a much quicker, more flexible response to energy needs in a country. Renewable energy plants can also be expanded or reduced in size fairly quickly and are thus much more adaptable to fluctuating energy needs (WEF 2014). But there is also another very important reason: with renewable energy it is possible to generate

sultana van niekerk et al . | 181 electricity at a small scale and a local level, allowing communities who live far from the national grid, or who are not connected to the grid, to access electricity. This potentially brings political power closer to end users as well, allowing them to more effectively take part in policy making and implementation. Fortunately, Africa is rich in renewable energy sources that are largely untapped. Table 11.1 indicates the extent of these potential supplies, for which small-scale and large-scale applications are possible. It is important to note that not all countries have the same potential or same sources of renewable energy, however. For instance, geothermal energy is mainly available in the Rift Valley in East Africa, while there are specific areas where the insolation rate for solar power is particularly high. Hydropower is extensively available in 23 countries, with largescale hydropower currently supplying more than half of total power supply in these countries (Simelane and Abdel-Rahman 2011, 11). TABLE 11.1 Estimated technical potential for renewable energy across sub-Saharan Africa

Solar – CSP (Concentrated Solar Power)

4,719 Terawatt hours

Solar – PV (Photovoltaic)

6,567 Terawatt hours

Wind

3,823 Terawatt hours

Hydro-power

1,844 Terawatt hours

Geothermal

88 Terawatt hours

Source: IRENA 2012.

A rapid transition to large- and small-scale renewable energy electricity generation could therefore go a long way to solving Africa’s energy problems. Already the development of renewable electricity projects is moving rapidly across the continent – driven by increasing oil prices (over the long term), low generation capacity, increasing demand and changing policies (IEA 2014, 38; UNIDO 2009). Renewable energy has to be a key energy source of the future. The central question then becomes who has, and who should have, ownership and control over its generation, transmission and distribution. Ownership and control of renewable energy The generation, transmission and distribution of electricity in Africa still rests largely in government hands, despite heavy promotion of

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privatization by institutions and bodies such as the World Bank since the 1990s (Bayliss 2007). The state also remains the main investor in the electricity sector, carrying out nearly 90 per cent of investments. More than three in four countries in Africa have retained the transmission and distribution of electricity in public hands, largely in the form of public utilities (van Niekerk and Hall 2013). At the same time, while the number of countries that have privatized their electricity utility is small, many have gone through processes of unbundling, decentralizing, corporatizing and commercializing their utilities (Kapika and Eberhard 2013, 5). It is also important to note that most of the generation that happens through state utilities uses conventional fossil fuels or largescale hydropower. South Africa’s state-owned electricity provision, for example, is over 92 per cent coal-fired (Department of Energy 2010). The private sector is involved in transmission and distribution to some extent, largely through concessions (e.g. distribution in Côte d’Ivoire, Gabon, Morocco and Uganda) and management contracts (e.g. distribution in Gambia) (van Niekerk and Hall 2013). With regard to the generation of electricity, there are increasing numbers of Independent Power Producers (IPPs) across the continent. Until a few years ago, IPPs were all fossil-fuel-based, using either diesel, gas, heavy fuel oil or natural gas (Eberhard and Gratwick 2010). This is now shifting. The current growth of the renewable energy generation sector is largely taking place through the mechanism of IPPs. This is true whether they are hydropower (e.g. Bujagali Hydropower plant in Uganda), wind farms (e.g. Lake Turkana Wind Project in Kenya) or utility-scale solar photovoltaic power plants (e.g. Gigawatt Global’s Rwamagana PV plant in Rwanda or the Sishen solar energy plant in South Africa). The development of off-grid and mini-grids based on renewable energy generation, by contrast, has generally been happening in a much more haphazard and uncoordinated way, driven by donor organizations and private companies (RERA and EUEI 2013). Some countries, such as Kenya, emphasize grid extensions as the way to increase access in rural areas, and a relatively small part of the government’s rural electrification plan is focused on off-grid and mini-grid systems. Many mini-hydro and solar PV systems, on the other hand, have been established by the private sector, NGOs, communities and donor agencies. In some countries, such as Ghana, the government has actively encouraged non-state bodies to install wind, solar or micro-hydro renewable energy

sultana van niekerk et al . | 183 projects in rural areas. In many of these projects, the community is encouraged to take on responsibility for contributing financially to the installation, and for taking control of operations once the system is established. In some instances, communities have initiated projects themselves (Tenenbaum et al. 2014; Yadoo 2012). Table 11.2 illustrates a range of different ownership models that are in operation in mini-hydro projects in Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Malawi. For all of these schemes the investment costs included grant financing, community contributions and local material. Individuals within the community were involved in the technical operation of the plant and in maintenance (RERA and EUEI 2013, 57). TABLE 11.2 Different ownership models for mini-hydro projects in Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Malawi

Scheme name

Country

Owner

Generation (kW)

Bondo

Malawi

Community cooperative

88

Nyafaru

Zimbabwe

School development committee

20

Chipendeke

Zimbabwe

Community cooperative

25

Dazi

Zimbabwe

Community trust fund

20

Ndiriri

Mozambique

Private

27

Nyamwanga

Zimbabwe

Community cooperative

30

Nerufundo

Mozambique

Private

24

Chitunga

Mozambique

Private

33

Hlabiso

Zimbabwe

Community cooperative

30

Ngarura

Zimbabwe

Community cooperative

25

Source: RERA and EUEI 2013, 57.

Blurred lines At times, the lines between a privately run, for-profit mini-grid, and a non-profit, non-commercial mini-grid are blurred (when, for instance, they are run along commercial lines, but is not-for-profit). It is therefore important to differentiate those run by the private sector, those initiated and run by communities, and those under the control of local government.

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Local, privately owned Organizations such as the EU Energy Initiative encourage private sector partnership in the establishment of minigrids on the basis that it will unlock financial resources and allow for effective technology transfer (RERA and EUEI 2013, viii). Gambia is an example of a country where electricity is supplied by a state utility, but the private sector is encouraged to get involved in renewable energy projects – particularly in the rural areas. The state-owned National Water and Electricity Company (NAWEC) is the sole distributor of electricity and the single buyer. It is the only provider of on-grid electricity in rural areas. However, the Department of State for Petroleum, Energy and Mineral Resources encourages the use of off-grid renewable energy in rural areas through the private sector. A number of private bodies have installed stand-alone PV systems, solar water pumping systems, and wind turbines. The United Nations Industrial Development Organization, UNIDO, not only actively encourages an approach that aims to achieve rural electrification targets by developing isolated minigrids in rural areas, but is encouraging that these be done through the mechanisms of a market (Republic of The Gambia 2012). Tanzania has a regulatory framework in place for small power projects, which can be both on-grid and off-grid mini-grids. These small power projects have a standardized tariff methodology applied to them, as well as a standard power purchase agreement with TANESCO, the national energy utility (RERA and EUEI 2013). In effect, however, they are mini-IPPs. Mali has about 150 mini-grids in operation, 60 of them operated by the private sector. Most of these privately run mini-grids are diesel-based. Most of the private providers have received subsidies for capital costs from the rural energy agency, a state body, but they receive no subsidies for ongoing operating costs. The result of this is that tariffs for electricity users are much higher than tariffs charged for accessing electricity on the national grid, in order to make the minigrid commercially viable. This has, not unexpectedly, led to tensions between different communities who might be near each other, but pay different tariffs depending on whether they receive electricity from the national grid or from the mini-grid (Tenenbaum et al. 2014, 37)

Local, community-owned Not all local projects are commercially based. There are a range of different non-commercial, community-based and community-owned initiatives as well. For example, the community

sultana van niekerk et al . | 185 of Thiba, in Kenya, established its own mini-hydro plant, knowing that the chance of being connected to the national grid was remote. They drew on the technical expertise of an NGO, GPower, and the system was commissioned in 2005. It is owned by the community and operates as a cooperative. It has a capacity of 135kW, which is enough to power 180 households. In setting up the mini-hydro plant, all community members contributed US$150 each, their labour (volunteering every Tuesday for a year), and two electricity grid poles. The tariff, a flat rate, is set at a level to cover the full operating costs. Ten community members have been trained to operate and maintain the system (Yadoo 2012). There are limitations to the electricity supplied in this system, however. It does not provide electricity all the time (only 14 hours per day). And since no step-up or step-down transformers were installed in the distribution system, most households experience voltage drops, which can damage appliances. No electricity from the system is supplied to the schools and health centres either. Each community member who has made the requisite contributions gets shares in the project, with the idea that once the system starts making a profit, they will earn dividends. The problem here is that the system has so far not shown a profit, due in part to the costs of repairs. Moreover, there are not enough funds for the more extensive investments needed to upgrade the system. As Yadoo (2012, 22) has argued, ‘this self-reinforcing relationship between the lack of funds and ongoing technical problems is a major hindrance to the project’s sustainability’. Similar types of community initiatives, often set up with the assistance of NGOs, exist in a number of other African countries. For instance, in Cameroon, where no government policy exists for small renewable projects, an NGO called ADEID helped a number of communities set up village electricity systems using micro-hydro power (Rostock and Njinkeng 2006). In The Gambia, a wind project initiated by a German NGO, the German Association for Rural Electrification, is now in community hands, and is overseen by an elected committee. At times this Batokunku Wind Power Project generates enough electricity to feed back into the national grid, made possible by an agreement signed between the project and the public power utility NAWEC (Hathaway 2012, 367). More recently, however, there have been complaints that not all villages in the area have benefited from the project (Sora 2013).

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Local governments and rural agencies In many countries on the continent, rural electrification agencies or boards have been established to focus on the extension of electricity to rural areas, while the national utilities remain responsible for electricity provision in urban areas. In total, 15 countries in sub-Saharan Africa have public Rural Electricity Agencies (Tenenbaum et al. 2014, 3). In some countries rural energy programmes have been established as a department within the utility, as is the case in Ghana. In these cases, the agency either focuses on connecting rural communities to the national grid, or establishing mini-grids for rural communities or individual household systems (Hathaway 2012, 363). In many cases, the intention is for these offgrid mini-grids to eventually become connected to the national grid and taken over by the publicly owned national utility. Where the focus is on local solutions, rather than connecting to the national grid, there is an obvious link between the country’s rural electrification programme and its renewable energy plans. The potential for these mini-grids to use renewable energy such as solar, wind, microhydro and biomass as their energy source is huge. However, despite what would seem to be an obvious overlap, most sub-Saharan African countries run them as two separate programmes (Tenenbaum et al. 2014, 361). In addition, many countries on the continent use diesel fuel for off-grid mini-grids, and have done so extensively in the past. The slow and uneven shift to mini-grids powered by renewable energy rather than diesel has been propelled by the increase in the price of diesel, the development of renewable energy technology and the increasing focus on the importance of its use as a sustainable alternative. Of 48 examples of community energy systems identified in the subregion by Hathaway (2012, 366), 17 used micro-hydro, six used solar, six used wind, and five used diesel. In Kenya, a Rural Electrification Programme was established in 1973 to increase access. It invested in 13 off-grid diesel-powered power stations. Ownership of these passed to the Rural Electrification Authority established in 2007 to speed up the rural electrification programme. The current Rural Electrification Master Plan calls for renewable energy and hybrid off-grid systems to be established to electrify 330 public facilities and 66,000 connections in 200 areas (Yadoo 2012, 14). Even where local government is not involved in the generation or distribution of electricity, many local government structures have taken steps to promote renewable energy and improvements in energy

sultana van niekerk et al . | 187 efficiency in a number of ways. For instance, they set targets to run municipal operations from renewable energy, establish building codes and standards that will reduce energy use considerably, and implementing solar water heating projects (REN21 2013, 75). South Africa is the only country in Africa where local government is actively involved in electricity – mainly in distribution of electricity, but with some municipalities also involved in generation. They buy electricity from Eskom, the state-owned utility, and then sell it on to residents, industry and business. For many municipalities, the income generated from the sale of electricity is a vital source of funding for cross-subsidizing other municipal services (National Treasury 2011). But even in South Africa, where local governments have extensive experience and expertise with electricity, the bulk of renewable energy generation has been handed over to the private sector through a competitive bidding process known as the Renewable Energy Independent Power Producer Procurement Programme (REIPPPP). Eskom is the sole buyer of electricity generated through these IPPs. So far three windows have been opened for private sector bids to generate electricity using wind, biomass, small hydro and solar power. Effectively, public agencies (Eskom and municipalities) have been shut out of the programme. Ironically then, municipalities across the country have taken seriously the call to be more energy efficient, and have implemented a range of measures designed to increase energy efficiency, but the more energy efficient they become the less revenue they generate, providing a perverse incentive to maintain the status quo. There are other ways that municipalities in South Africa could get involved in renewable energy, however. For instance, they could establish their own generating plants based on renewable energy technology outside of the REIPPPP (though murky from a legal standpoint). Municipalities could also buy surplus power generated by large or small-scale renewable generation companies. Such an agreement would effectively be a power purchase agreement with an IPP. While there is nothing technically precluding this, it would not be a simple option. The Municipal Financial Management Act does not allow municipalities to buy power at a higher rate than it pays for Eskom electricity. And, while IPPs would favour longer-term contracts (such as 20 years), the Municipal Finance Management Act makes it extremely difficult for municipalities to enter into contracts that are

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longer than three years. Finally, integration with the national grid is not simple (City Energy Support Unit 2011, 4). Buying power from small energy generators in South Africa, such as household or business solar PV panels, is not straightforward either. Until recently, it was not clear if national policy or legislation even allowed this to happen, with the result that municipalities across the country adopted different approaches. Some clarity was given by the National Energy Regulator, Nersa, in 2013, indicating that small generators (less than 100kW) only needed to be registered by the municipalities and did not need licences. Generation in these cases had to be for ‘own use’ (Payne 2013b). However, the Municipal Financial Management Act still stipulates that municipalities may not pay more for the electricity than they would pay to Eskom. National government has not made it easy for municipalities to go green. The eThekwini municipality (formerly Durban) was the first municipality in South Africa to move ahead with a process of inviting micro-generators to apply to supply any surplus power generated. Already it is receiving power from six such micro-generators and is opening up the process to other potential suppliers. The current private generators include a Tongaat-Hewlett sugar mill and a municipal waste dump project that produces methane (Payne 2013a). By driving a renewable energy strategy based on market provision, rather than state investment, the South African government has severely limited the role that municipalities in South Africa could play in the shift to a renewable energy future. A public role: large, small, limitations? The potential advantages of a publicly driven renewable energy sector in Africa are many: public finance can be used to accelerate investment and subsidize costs so that electricity is affordable for all; economies of scale can be achieved; more equitable distribution of electricity is possible; and decision making on electricity can be made more democratic through public participation and other mechanisms of accountability and transparency. With this in mind, what exactly constitutes ‘publicly driven’ renewable energy, and should the emphasis be on local generation, national initiatives, or a combination of both? My answer is, both. Renewable public energy can encompass local community-owned projects, cooperatives, municipal initiatives and

sultana van niekerk et al . | 189 national-level state utilities. Decentralized, largely off-grid renewable energy projects also offer attractive options in the African context, with the possibility of community empowerment and local democracy as well as increasing access. Nevertheless, there are real limitations to local solutions when they are stand-alone, self-sustaining initiatives. Although the capital costs of establishing local renewable off-grid mini-grids typically costs less than extending centralized networks to remote rural areas or using diesel-based systems, it is still not cheap. Very few rural African communities could completely cover the capital or maintenance costs and would require subsidies of some kind. Thus, without support from higher levels of government and/or donor agencies, most small, local mini-grids are simply not viable. Mini-grids are also meant to be stand-alone systems, with operating and maintenance costs financially self-sustaining. This means that the focus is often on full cost-recovery. In order to achieve this, the tariff charged for the electricity generated by a mini-grid is almost inevitably going to be more expensive than the tariff charged for electricity supplied by large, centralized systems with much larger economies of scale. At a national level, costs are averaged out, whereas for mini-grids all costs must be borne locally. Moreover, with mini-grids the potential for cross-subsidization that exists for grid-connected users does not exist (RERA and EUEI 2013). Communities can set tariffs much lower, at a rate that is affordable for them, but this could undermine the long-term sustainability and autonomy of the project. As the Thiba mini-hydro example in Kenya shows, the tariff, affordable to the community, was just enough to cover the costs of small ongoing repairs to keep the system operating, but not enough to do the more extensive longer-term repairs and upgrades required. The result is that the system limps along, with frequent outages and limited availability of electricity. In addition, PV panels need to be replaced after about 30 years, and batteries, DC lamps and regulators after about five years. The cost of replacing these parts is generally not built into the tariff and so a system that seems to be working well and viably in the short run can encounter significant problems a few years down the line. Another concern with small, off-grid projects relates to the amount of electricity generated and what that electricity is able to power. A system that generates 200 kW can power about 133 low-cost houses with basic lighting, TV or radio, limited water heating and basic ironing

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or cooking. The result is that for many communities, off-grid renewable energy systems are second-best, and regarded as a transition stage until they can be connected to the larger grid system, further undermining their long-term potential (Ahiataku-Togobo n.d.). A way forward In extending the use of public renewable energy to deal with the energy crisis in Africa, several key conclusions can be drawn. First, unlike conventional fossil-fuel generation, renewable electricity does not have to be centralized. It can consist of a number of decentralized generating plants of varying sizes, ranging from utility-sized to smallscale projects. This opens up the possibility for deeper, locally based democratic decision-making processes to shape choices around access to energy. All these potential benefits of renewable energy are best realized if it is located firmly in the public sector. It is also important that a national public utility is able to coordinate and finance the rollout of renewable energy to ensure equitable access, sufficient funding for installing, operating and maintaining renewable energy plants, as well as the introduction of smart grids. With renewable energy, the choice is not between small-scale, off-grid, decentralized generation and large-scale, utility size generating plants, but rather a matter of what the best mix of these options should be. Second, mini-grid systems will require start-up capital costs to be subsidized by government or donor agencies. The private sector will not do this. As Yadoo (2012, 34) points out, the private sector is only likely to take on the financial cost of setting up a mini-grid if they also receive substantial subsidies (as much as 50 per cent), equity or debt financing, and an anchor client such as a factory. Why use public funds to subsidize a private provider? Finally, community-based mini-grid systems employ local community members to operate and maintain the system. If employed by the state there is generally better job security, higher wages, and safer working conditions, particularly if done in parity with other public sector workers. Electricity work can be dangerous, requiring careful training and monitoring of work conditions, both of which have been ongoing concerns in the private electricity sector (Quiggin 2014). A publicly driven approach to renewable energy in Africa will not be an easy path to take, however. Powerful multinational funding

sultana van niekerk et al . | 191 agencies such as the World Bank continue to push private-sector-led approaches for electrification on the continent (Tenenbaum et al. 2014), as do many bilateral donors. The large USAID-funded Power Africa initiative, for example, is pushing a private sector approach to electrification, particularly with its focus on small-scale electricity production for rural and peri-urban areas. Known as ‘Beyond the Grid’, this initiative aims to partner with ‘over 36 private investors and practitioners that have committed to invest over $1 billion into off-grid and small-scale solutions’ (USAID n.d.). Coupled with the ongoing neoliberal bias of many African governments (Ashman, Fine and Newman 2011; Obeng-Odoom 2012) and a dearth of creative alternatives to privatization in general on the continent (McDonald and Ruiters 2012), a publicly led renewable agenda will be an uphill struggle. But the growing interest in (re)making public services in other parts of the world gives cause for optimism and offers concrete examples and possible synergies with existing public sector alternatives elsewhere in the drive to make electricity in Africa more public, more democratic, more accessible and more equitable. References Ahiataku-Togobo, W. (n.d.) Challenges of solar PV for remote electrification in Ghana. PowerPoint presentation. Accra: Renewable Energy Unit, Ministry of Energy. www.zef.de/fileadmin/webfiles/ renewables/praesentations/ Ahiataku-Togobo_ solar%20PV%20Ghana.pdf (accessed June 22, 2015). Ashman, S., Fine, B. and Newman, S. 2011. The crisis in South Africa: Neoliberalism, financialization and uneven and combined development. Socialist Register, 47: 174–195. Bayliss, K. 2007. Water and electricity in sub-Saharan Africa. In K. Bayliss and B. Fine (eds), Privatization and alternative public sector reform in sub-Saharan Africa: Delivering on electricity and water, 88–122. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Bennasr, A. and Verdeil, E. 2014. An ‘Arab Spring’ for corporatization? Tunisia’s national electricity company (STEG). In D. A. McDonald (ed), Rethinking corporatization and public services in the global South, 88–106. London: Zed Books. City Energy Support Unit. 2011. State of energy in South African cities. Cape Town: Sustainable Energy Africa NPC. Department of Energy, Republic of South Africa. 2010. South African energy synopsis 2010. Pretoria: Department of Energy. www.energy. gov.za/files/media/explained/2010/ South_African_Energy_Synopsis_2010. pdf (accessed June 22, 2015). Eberhard, A. and Gratwick, K. N. 2010. IPPs in sub-Saharan Africa: Determinants of success. Cape Town: USGB.

192 | el nin eve en Eberhard, A., Rosnes, O., Shkaraton, M. and Vennemo, H. (eds). 2011. Africa’s power infrastructure: Investment, integration, efficiency. Washington, DC: World Bank. Fine, B. and Rustomjee, Z. 1996. The political economy of South Africa: From minerals–energy complex to industrialisation. London: C. Hurst. Hathaway, T. 2012. Electrifying Africa: Turning a continental challenge into a people’s opportunity. In D. A. McDonald and G. Ruiters (eds), Alternatives to privatisation: Public options for essential services in the global South, 353–387. Cape Town: HSRC Press. IEA (International Energy Agency). 2014. Africa energy outlook: A focus on energy prospects in sub-Saharan Africa. OECD/IEA. Kapika, J. and Eberhard, A. 2013. Powersector reform and regulation in Africa: Lessons from Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, Namibia and Ghana. Cape Town: HSRC Press. McDonald, D. (ed.). (2009). Electric capitalism: Recolonising Africa on the power grid. London: Earthscan McDonald, D. A. and Ruiters, G. (eds.). 2012. Alternatives to privatization: Public options for essential services in the global South. New York: Routledge. National Treasury, Republic of South Africa. 2011. Intergovernmental Fiscal Reviews – 2011 – Local Government Budgets and Expenditure Review: 2006/07 – 2012/13. Pretoria: National Treasury. www.treasury.gov.za/ publications/igfr/2011/lg/default.aspx (accessed June 22, 2015). Obeng-Odoom, F. 2012. Neoliberalism and the urban economy in Ghana: Urban employment, inequality, and poverty. Growth and Change, 43(1): 85–109. Payne, T. 2013a. Durban pioneers electricity scheme. Mail and Guardian, 21–27 June.

Payne, T. 2013b. Municipalities get green light to cut through surplus power’s red tape. Mail and Guardian, 28 June–4 July. Quiggin, J. 2014. Electricity privatisation in Australia: A record of failure. Electrical Trades Union (Victorian Branch). RERA (Regional Electricity Regulators’ Association of Southern Africa) and EUEI (European Union Energy Initiative). 2013. Overview of framework to attract investment into mini-grids in the SADC region. Eschborn, Germany: EUEI. http://www.euei-pdf.org/sites/ default/files/files/field_pblctn_file/ SADC%20RERA_Overview%20of%20F ramework%20to%20Attract%20Inves tment.pdf (accessed June 22, 2015). REN21 (Renewable Energy Policy Network for the 21st Century). 2013. Renewables 2013 global status report. Paris: REN21. Republic of The Gambia. 2012. Renewable energy based mini-grids for rural areas in The Gambia. GEF Strategic Programme on Energy in West Africa. UNIDO, GEF, ECREEE. Rostock, S. and Njinkeng, C. 2006. Microhydro powers rural development in Cameroon. World Rivers Review, 15 August. Simelane, T. and Abdel-Rahman, M. 2011. Energy transition in Africa. Africa Institute of South Africa. Sora, A. 2013. Gambia: Batokunku residents complain of exclusion wind power project coordinator explains. allAfrica, 25 January. http://allafrica. com/stories/201301280984. html?viewall=1 (accessed 22 June, 2015). Tenenbaum, B., Greacen, C., Siyambalapitiya, T. and Knuckles, J. 2014. From the bottom up: How small power producers and mini-grids can deliver electrification and renewable

sultana van niekerk et al . | 193 energy in Africa. Washington, DC: World Bank. UNIDO (United Nations Industrial Development Organization). 2009. Scaling up renewable energy in Africa. 12th Ordinary Session of Heads of State and Governments of the African Union, January 2009, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Vienna: UNIDO. USAID. n.d. Power Africa. Beyond the grid. http://www.usaid. gov/powerafrica/beyond-the-grid (accessed June 22, 2015).

van Niekerk, S. and Hall, D. 2013. Overview of energy in Africa. London: PSIRU. WEF (World Economic Forum). 2014. The global energy architecture performance index report 2014. Geneva: WEF. www.weforum.org/ reports/global-energy-architectureperformance-index-report-2014 (accessed June 22, 2015). Yadoo, A. 2012. Delivery models for decentralised rural electrification: Case studies in Nepal, Peru and Kenya. London: IIED.

12 | (RE )M AK I N G P UB L I C B A N K S : TH E C AS E OF T UR K E Y

Thomas Marois and Ali Rıza Güngen

Public banking institutions have been made and re-made across very different historical settings, from ancient Babylon to contemporary Turkey. But aside from their capacity to pool and mobilize money, very little connects the public banks of today to those of antiquity. Why contemporary public banks emerge, what defines their operating functions, and who benefits from public banking are context- and casespecific questions that usually defy generalization. There is nothing timeless about these public institutions. Rather, individual and collective agents struggle to make and re-make public banks and to define their social content, mediated by broader economic systems and socio-political structures. So is it in developing countries. These societies’ varied experiences with decolonization, state building and class formation in their transitions to capitalism fundamentally shaped the nature of 20thcentury public banking. Likewise, the shift from state-led to marketoriented strategies of development continue to shape 21st-century public banking. Such is the case of Turkey. State elites created a wide range of public banks that figured prominently in Turkey’s early-20th-century transition to capitalist development. While retaining control of roughly a third of the banking assets today, the original institutionalized mandates of Turkey’s six remaining public banks today have become overlaid with neoliberal competitive imperatives. This has generated unanticipated and complex social, political and economic contradictions that are not easily unpacked by rigid public versus private narratives. Our argument in this chapter is that the historically shifting complexities of public banks in general, and Turkey’s in particular, are best understood from a social content point of view. We start with a brief historical summary of public banking, followed by a discussion of three competing theoretical models for understanding bank ownership. We

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opt for what we call a social content perspective and illustrate why we think this helps to overcome otherwise static and polarized approaches to banking. We then turn to the case of Turkey to interpret the evolving class-based and sometimes contradictory functions of public banks in concrete terms. Although problematic, we nevertheless point to the potentiality of public banking as an alternative to neoliberal financing norms and highlight possible ways to enhance their ‘public’ character. Public banks in historical context Public-like banking institutions go back as far as 2400 BC. In the temples of ancient Babylon and Sumer, interest-bearing credit services formed part of the society’s political and economic infrastructure. Periodically, over-indebtedness or sudden natural disasters would threaten financial stability, leading monarchs to offer popular debt amnesties (Graeber 2011, 65). It was similarly so during medieval times. The private Italian bankers systematized ‘buy now, pay later’ schemes, benefiting from very high interest rates. But in times of widespread individual non-repayment due to economic hardships, the harsh penalties could lead to popular instabilities. Italian state officials occasionally had to provide debt relief from public funds to ensure stability (an early precursor to today’s public bailouts). Add to this recurrent private banking crashes, and governing officials were desperate for a stable financial alternative. This eventually led to the first modern public banks. The first such bank materialized in Barcelona in 1401 – the Taula de la Ciutat, which survived some 450 years in one form or another (Spufford 2014, 245–6; Felloni 2005). A second public bank formed shortly thereafter in Genoa in 1408 – the Casa di San Giorgio – and operated until the early-19th century. Not until 1587 did a third public bank emerge in Venice – the Banco della Piazza di Rialto – as a response to a succession of private banking failures. Subsequently, public banks formed in Amsterdam (1609), Hamburg (1619) and Nuremburg (1621). In a rather different context, 18th-century British Quakers in the American colony of Pennsylvania founded a public Land Bank to collectively service farmers’ credit needs (Rappaport 1996). Any returns made in this process were then channelled back into the community’s public revenue. Despite their diversity, these institutions share a common rationale of having a financial institution able to function in the public interest

ma roi s and güngen | 199 (broadly understood), rather than for private ends alone. Indeed, the first public banks’ capacity to overcome economic instabilities, to offer accessible credits to priority economic sectors, and to provide financial services for the state apparatus (credits, payments clearing, international exchange, and so on) stand out as significant. In this way we can historically understand the emergence of public banking. However, not until the late-19th and early-20th centuries – amid global transitions to post-colonial state independence, deepening capitalism, and expanding socialism – did public banking become commonplace, although for very different reasons. At one extreme, governments sought explicit non-market forms of finance to support nationalist aspirations and large-scale development projects, be they national capitalist, socialist, fascist or imperialist. At the other extreme, locally rooted cooperative banks emerged to offer small-scale credits and local developmental expertise (Birchall 2013). Our interest lies with the numerous examples of public banks in developing countries, which materialized in the 20th century with varying ideological and operational orientations. For example, following a brief civil war in 1948, Costa Rica nationalized its banks to ensure the ‘democratization of credit’ and manage national development priorities (Marois 2005). In post-1949 China, the Communist Party mobilized the People’s Bank (established in 1948) to fund public infrastructure and economic development. In 1952, Brazilian authorities founded O Banco Nacional de Desenvolvimento Econômico e Social (BNDES), which has since undergone several transformations, depending on the political nature of the governing regime (von Mettenheim 2012). During the 1960s, Algeria, Libya, Tanzania, India and Egypt all undertook bank nationalizations, often intending them to support a national, socialist-oriented developmental policy. By the 1970s, estimates suggest that in peripheral economies 65 per cent of the largest banks’ assets were under public control, while in advanced economies public control reached 40 per cent of the banking sector (Levy Yeyati, Micco and Panizza 2007, 212). It is important to elaborate why forms of public banking took root within developing market economies. In these societies, the ‘fractional reserve’ system served a vital role in enabling private and public banks to accept deposits and to then make loans many times over that amount (for example, one dollar held in reserves can create 10 dollars in loans). In peripheral economies where little excess savings existed, this

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credit-creating function meant banks could respond to a growing structural need within capitalism for access to more credit. However, because loans are repaid in the future, they carry a risk of non-payment. For private, profit-oriented banks this results in a significant pro-cyclical pattern of lending: when economic times are good, private banks lend more freely but when times were bad, they tend to restrict lending. Empirical evidence suggests private banks are the most pro-cyclical of all (Bertay, Demirgüç-Kunt and Huizinga 2014). Much as in medieval times, public authorities sought extra-market alternatives. Public banks, even if they charge interest, have not always had a profit mandate, and could therefore lend on strategic developmental grounds, providing the potential for counter-cyclical lending against the prevailing economic tide (Butzbach and von Mettenheim 2014). It is on this basic principle that many modern governments have founded public banks; that is, to function as powerful extramarket and developmental coordinating institutions (Gerschenkron 1962; de Luna-Martínez and Vicente 2012). Public banks can fund national development and reach important segments of society, like farmers, tradespersons and cooperatives. Private banks often refuse to service these segments due to the potential lending costs, long-term commitments, and sometimes risky conditions. By contrast, for much of the 20th century, profit maximization did not define most public banking operations. Competing views on bank ownership in market economies Contemporary debates on banking and development are far from settled, with ownership being one of the most hotly contested issues, particularly in market economies. Three competing conceptual views stand out: the ‘private interest’ view, the heterodox ‘developmental’ view, and the critical ‘social content’ view. The first two share a normative concern with better managing market-oriented capitalism but apply divergent understandings of private versus public ownership. The third seeks to interpret public banks within the historical specificity of capitalism, with a normative concern for identifying progressive alternative practices of social reproduction and the role that democratized finance might play therein.

‘Private interest’ views Private interest views of banking are rooted in liberal conceptions of individual human nature and neoclassical

ma roi s and güngen | 201 tenets of the benefits of market competition. From Hobbesian notions of power-hungry individuals, Lockean edicts tying private property to liberty, and Smithian doctrines espousing free-exchange and individual competition, contemporary theorists hold fast to an underlying ideological proposition that states must not interfere with an individual’s private property or the market’s competitive functioning. Hayek (1984, 381) synthesized this liberal tradition, arguing that the coercive functions of government must be guided solely by concern for preserving peace, justice and liberty. Liberal political economy is thus premised on the societal benefits of formally separating the public and political from the private and economic. The theoretical deductive method by which these a priori individualist foundations are reached subsequently render liberalism a pre-social theorization. Neoclassical economics, through its methodological individualist and deductivist approaches, is ideologically commensurate with these ideals (see Lawson 2013; Solomon 2010, 130–34). This ideological lineage enables conventional economists to assert that private ownership is inherently superior to public, driving innovation and guarding against corruption (Mishkin 2009; Shleifer 1998; Vanberg 2005). It follows that the ‘fundamental political institutions’ of society are said to include universal private property protections and market enhancing frameworks (Calomiris and Haber 2014, 12–13, 35). This forms the backbone of neoliberalism in general and of private interest views of banking in particular. The private interest view therefore holds that attaching anything socially progressive to public bank ownership is idealistic and naïve (Barth, Caprio and Levine 2006, 34–5). Rather, socially desirable ends are best reached via private actors in the competitive market; governments can at best regulate this, but ought never to interfere by directly owning banks (ibid., 14; World Bank 2012). This view has informed three decades of neoliberal financial policy formation, despite meagre evidence. For example, the World Bank’s Finance for Growth report (2001, 123) stated that, ‘[w]hatever its original objectives, state ownership tends to stunt financial sector development, thereby contributing to slower growth’. Four pages later, however, the report admits that, ‘[u]ntil recently, the primary evidence on this issue [i.e. government failure in finance] has been anecdotal’ (World Bank 2001, 127; emphasis added), despite two decades of bank privatization advocacy. In this paradigm, the credibility of banks is a priori

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determined according to ownership form. Moreover, why societies might promote or preserve public banks is likewise seen as a matter of predetermined knowledge: governments control banks for corrupt political and personal gain (La Porta, Lopez-de-Silanes and Shleifer 2002, 266; World Bank 2012, 117). The nuances of history are lost to such pre-social theories.

Heterodox ‘developmentalist’ views Heterodox developmental views of banking, by contrast, are generally connected to Keynesian, Weberian, and institutionalist approaches. Advocates of this broadly defined perspective support the state’s extra-market coordinating capacities as necessary for managing the instabilities of capitalist development. John Stuart Mill imputed a strong normative orientation, arguing that state intervention and redistributive measures were needed to mitigate (though not eliminate) class domination within emerging capitalist relations. For much of the 20th century, public ownership and the ‘machinery of government’ figured prominently in heterodox perspectives. The belief that state institutions, like public banks, ought to pursue long-term developmental and socially beneficial goals dominated (Öztürk, GultekinKarakas and Hısarcıklılar 2010). Historically, this approach highlighted the scarcity of capital in developing countries and the unlikeliness that private banks would willingly fill the gap, thus necessitating public banking for developmental goals (Gerschenkron 1962). More contemporary neo-Keynesian approaches have largely jettisoned concerns of class inequality (and often reject public ownership), focusing more on how state institutions may best manage capitalism. State–society relations are seen as separate spheres of existence, where the state maintains an independent and elitist rationality, concerned with capitalist development and social inequality in ways that are seen to transcend the competing desires of individuals and markets (Evans 1995; see also Selwyn 2015). As a result, some developmental economists have largely dropped calls for public banking, focusing instead on bolstering the state’s regulatory capacity (Spratt 2009). Since the 2008–2009 crisis, however, there has been renewed interest in public banking to support development goals (Culpeper 2012; Marshall 2010), although these heterodox developmental views still tend to essentialize public bank ownership as a rational, elite-

maroi s and güngen | 203 driven programme that supports an otherwise neoliberal market order. Socially progressive and substantively democratized goals tend to be obscured in this neo-developmentalist view.

Critical ‘social content’ view A third approach to bank ownership is one that historicizes banking institutions and their operations within the context of capitalism. We refer to this as a ‘social content’ view, drawing on a diverse historical materialist, and largely Marxist, body of scholarship (see Hilferding 2006 [1981]; Lenin 2011 [1964]; Marois 2012, 24–35). In this approach, we recognize that the role of banks in society long pre-dates capitalism (as noted above). Accordingly, a social content approach does not take banks as unmediated institutional derivatives of capitalist processes, and not everything about banks is explicable vis-à-vis capitalism’s competitive imperatives and exploitative class relations. Different types of gendered and racialized forms of power and privilege find their way into banking institutions and their operations (Dymski 2009; Roberts 2013). These intersecting social forces are impacted by the evolving structural context of capitalism and in turn define the social logic of the market. A distinguishing feature of our social content view is that ownership category alone does not determine how banks act (or more precisely, their personnel, managers and owners). Rather, all banking institutions are historically and socially constructed: ‘banks are institutionalized social relations that reflect historically specific relations of power and reproduction between the banks, other firms, the state, and labor in general’ (Marois 2012, 29). These institutionalized social relationships are influenced by, but not limited to, the wider class relations specific to capitalism that impart a competitive social logic onto, without determining, individual banking operations. In short, individual and collective agencies shape the world around us, but not, to paraphrase Engels (1959 [1888], 230), in the conditions of our own choosing and not always as intended. Institutions, banks included, take form as complex hybridizations of social struggles that seldom correspond to any idealized notion (see Jessop 2002, 453; Peck, Theodore and Brenner 2012, 271). The momentarily fixed but fluctuating contextspecific institutional forms assumed exist within global neoliberalization processes involving historically specific waves and patterns of marketdisciplinary regulatory restructuring (Peck, Theodore and Brenner 2012, 268).

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Consequently, in a social content view, all banks, be they public or private, are institutionalized varieties of neoliberalized banks today. Given our focus on public banks, the theoretical, methodological and political challenge is to investigate how specific and variegated cases are constitutive of a generalized system of neoliberal social rule while simultaneously constituting potentially significant sources of social power capable of facilitating a break with neoliberalism. Turkey’s public banks, as a particular form of banking, must therefore be assessed in their own historical terms and as reflecting often contradictory power dynamics and practices of material reproduction that may offer significant possibilities for breaking with neoliberal capitalism. It is to this context-specific study that we now turn. A history of public banks in Turkey In Turkey, as in many other peripheral societies, finding capital to fund the transition to post-colonial capitalism was a challenge, especially if trying to avoid deepening foreign bank dependence. One solution involved official support for domestic banks, public and private, given their capacity to pool and mobilize money as loanable capital. But as local private banks emerged they were often too small or too integrated into specific industries to effectively fund other developmental projects and public infrastructure. Contrary to pre-social neoclassical ideas, many private banks were basically unwilling and unable to respond to Turkey’s financial needs (see Kuruç 1987). Consequently, the transition to capitalism generated a need for Turkish authorities to establish public banks (mostly large state-owned and deposit-taking commercial banks, see Table 12.1), which subsequently assumed an active and influential role in state- and market-building processes via politically determined developmental missions (Öztürk, GultekinKarakas and Hısarcıklılar 2010, 161). During the mid-1940s and 1950s, Turkey’s Democratic Party government encouraged private banking as part of an economic liberalization experiment. Frustrated by poor results, however, authorities decisively turned to a state-led developmental strategy in the 1960s. The new State Planning Organization (established in 1961) worked in tandem with 10 different public commercial banks and three development banks (constituting about 70 per cent of all banking assets) to coordinate investment, decide on subsidized credits, back new industrial investments and state-owned enterprises, and

maroi s and güngen | 205 TABLE

12.1 Public commercial banks in the early Turkish Republic

Public bank

Year established

Development mission or target funding

Ziraat Bank

1863/1888

Agriculture

Emlak Bank

1927

Home mortgages and real estate loans

Sümerbank

1933

Other state-owned enterprises and industrialization

Belediyeler Bank

1933

Municipal infrastructure projects such as water, electricity, drainage, and the preparation of building plans

Etibank

1935

Electrical power generation capacity and the financing of mining and mineral marketing

Denizbank

1937

Maritime development

Halkbank

1938

Cooperatives, artisans, tradespersons and small-scale producers

Sources: BAT 1999; BAT 2009.

allocate foreign exchange according to Five Year Development Plans (Aydın 2005, 34–5; Keyder 2000, 204; Marois 2012, 55–6). For decades, these public banks fulfilled their developmental mandates, sustainably managing any assigned ‘duty losses’ (defined as a claim on the Turkish Treasury derived from officially subsidized lending and the accrued interest [BAT 2001]) – that is, until Turkey’s 1980s turn to neoliberalism. Neoliberal restructuring of Turkey’s public banks By the mid- to late-1970s, the so-called golden age of state-led capitalist development was in decline internationally. A series of oil shocks had hit the global economy and the US suffered from both high inflation and recession. In response, the US Treasury allowed domestic interest rates to soar, causing interest rates around the world to rise to 20 per cent or more. The consequent 1980s debt crises that erupted across the developing world helped pave the way for neoliberal structural adjustment processes globally (Glyn 2006). Turkey was not exempt from this neoliberal transition (see Yalman 2009). The public banks’ profitability and stability had begun to erode in the late-1970s, and authorities started to once again envision a

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greater role for private banking and finance in the country. The 1980s opened with a military coup and an authoritarian transition. Despite some initial rapid liberalization measures (triggering a costly banking crisis in 1982), authorities attempted no major bank ownership shifts. Over the next 20 years public bank control fell only by 6 per cent, from 45 per cent in the early-1980s to 39 per cent in the late-1990s (private domestic banks assets, correspondingly, grew from 44 to 50 per cent) (BAT 1999, 24). But as the phase of capital accumulation shifted to neoliberalism, so too did governing authorities’ move away from public banks’ developmental mandates, with lasting consequences. Amid the turbulent mid-1990s – characterized by recurrent financial crises in the global South – Turkey’s coalitions began using public banks to hide government budget deficits (BRSA 2003, 10; OECD 1999, 57). Public bank duty losses exploded from 2.2 per cent of GNP in 1995 to 13 per cent in 1999 (from $2.77 billion to $19.2 billion) (World Bank 2000, 96). Far from being meant for developmental ideals, Turkey’s neoliberal advocates used the public banks to help smooth the country’s socially volatile transition to neoliberalism (Ergüneş 2008; Marois 2012, 205). The exposure of public banking losses, and the increasingly speculative practices of private banks, triggered Turkey’s own major financial crisis in 2000–2001, which opened a new phase of neoliberal deepening (Akyüz and Boratav 2003). It took $22 billion in public funds to cover the public banks’ ‘neoliberal’ duty losses and $25 billion in public money to bail out the failed private banks, for a total of $47 billion in publicly socialized losses, equalling roughly 30 per cent of 2002 GDP (Marois 2011, 178). The ensuing 2001 Banking Sector Restructuring Programme (BSRP) brought structural changes to the social content of banking in Turkey. For the public banks, the BSRP established a two-stage restructuring project that involved immediate financial reorganization and ongoing operational restructuring around market efficiency and profitability imperatives (see BRSA 2002; Marois 2012, 172–177). The political goal was for public banks to institutionalize private sector profit-maximizing behaviour, with the intent to privatize them within five years. More than a decade later, market-oriented restructuring has had the unintended consequence of making public bank functions vital to the reproduction of Turkish neoliberalism.

maroi s and güngen | 207 Turkey’s public banks today As of 2015 there were six majority-controlled public banks remaining in Turkey – three large commercial and three small development banks. The three commercial banks (Ziraat, Halkbank and VakıfBank) are among the top 10 largest banks in Turkey, which in 2014 together controlled 28 per cent of the sector’s assets (nearly US$227 billion) (BAT 2014, I-12, II-234). The public development banks (Kalkınma, Eximbank and İller) control an additional 2 per cent of the banking sector’s assets, specializing in development and infrastructure funding. All of Turkey’s public banks are joint-stock companies in which different state or governing authorities own controlling shares. Ziraat and Eximbank are fully owned by the central government and the Turkish Treasury holds 99 per cent of Kalkınma Bank shares. İller Bank is also fully public but controlled by Turkey’s provincial, municipal and village authorities. VakıfBank is a special case as a cultural branch of the state, the Foundations Directorate, has controlling ownership on behalf of thousands of individual non-profit foundations (e.g. heritage sites) and has been partially privatized since 2005. Halkbank has had its shares transferred to the state’s Privatization Administration (which receives dividend payouts from Halkbank’s yearly returns). Two public offerings have sold off almost 50 per cent of its shares.1 In all these cases Turkish state authorities retain controlling shares, and this offers a potentially powerful lever of domestic extra-economic coordination. Such potentiality is not embodied in public ownership itself but depends on the contending, and often contradictory, political struggles and economic processes that shape the public banks’ functions. Looking at the period after Turkey’s 2001 crisis, and specifically during the 2008–9 crisis, five potentially powerful functions are outlined below. These include: extra-market financial coordination; support in times of crisis and stability; access to finance; a savers’ safe haven that at the same time provides an alternative source of funding; and efficiency. The contradictory social content of these functions are subsequently highlighted.

Extra-market financial coordination Through Ziraat and Halkbank in particular, Turkish authorities can direct subsidized credits through what is now termed ‘income loss’ payments, which are

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direct government transfers made to these banks in compensation for providing low interest credits (PER 2008, 15). For example, in 2004 the AKP (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, or Justice and Development Party) government sought to boost agricultural production by enhancing financial supports. To this end the government permitted Ziraat to reduce certain agricultural interest rates by 25 to 100 per cent of the market rate, compensating the banks for the ‘income losses’ this entailed (PER 2008, 134). Ziraat’s income loss transfers reached TRY565 million in 2011 (roughly $340 million) (PER 2012). These supports, as but one part of a complex set of inputs, helped farmers to more affordably invest in increasing productive capacities. The direct government transfers, at the same time, kept the public banks on sustainable financial footing. Halkbank, too, offers subsidized credits to cooperatives, small and medium enterprises (SMEs), trades, and so on to help boost domestic production. Halkbank income losses reached nearly TL250 million (roughly $150 million) in 2011. Cheaper loans help these businesses fund technological upgrades and productive expansion, giving them a competitive edge. It is worth noting that the Treasury’s loss payments represent the subsidized interest rate costs alone, so the actual credits granted by the banks are considerably greater than the income loss amounts noted above. While such support can flow through the private banks, the geographical reach, institutional structure, and funding expertise of Ziraat and Halkbank enable a smooth roll-out of these supports. The public banks can also support long-term infrastructure financing. For example, Halkbank can offer subsidized loans to municipalities with a letter of guarantee from the public development bank, İller Bank. In such cases, Halkbank may neither receive an official subsidy nor make a return on the loan; rather, Halkbank can cross-subsidize the cost from earnings made elsewhere (confidential author interview, Halkbank, senior regional manager, June 2013, Samsun). In such ways political authorities can directly intervene in the provisioning of credits to priority sectors.

Support in times of crisis and instability The extra-market coordinating capacity of public banks can become strikingly apparent in times of crisis and instability, especially if private banks withdraw lending and call in existing loans to protect profits and reduce risks (as occurred during the 2008–2009 crisis in Turkey). By contrast, Turkey’s public

maroi s and güngen | 209 banks – including Ziraat, Halkbank, VakıfBank, İller and Kalkınma – acted counter-cyclically by expanding their loan portfolios in response to the crisis. For example, from September 2008 to June 2009 (the peak of the crisis) Ziraat offered TL5 billion of a total TL7.5 billion in new loans (from both public and private banks combined) while also offering special repayment terms (Ziraat 2010, 13–14, 27). In 2009, VakıfBank (2010, 18) reported increasing loans by 13.22 per cent, and Halkbank (2010, 5) by 25.6 per cent. Ziraat’s General Manager, Can Akın Çağlar, wrote in the bank’s Annual Report that this was a matter of ‘social responsibility … in order to minimize the pressures of economic recession on our farmers’ (Ziraat 2010, 14). Likewise, Halkbank senior management directed branch managers to increase lending and to support Turkey’s substantial SME sector (confidential author interview, June 2013, Samsun). Public banks can also offer unique support at times of individual crisis. According to one Ziraat branch manager, the private banks have few loan limit ceilings and they charge much higher interest rates, whereas Ziraat sets limits and charges lower rates; moreover, when people have trouble repaying their loans, Ziraat does not immediately repossess their property but ‘allows people time to sort out their problems’ (confidential author interview, April 2013, Istanbul). In other words, corporate profit imperatives are not always the be-all and end-all of banking operations, even under neoliberalism.

Access While many developing countries today struggle with providing access to credit and payment services on a smaller scale outside urban centres – apart from the recent, costly and ethically questionable private micro-finance schemes (see Bateman 2010) – Turkey’s public banks have been present in towns and villages for decades. Nearly 3,400 branches help constitute a nationwide financial infrastructure, notably providing rural services that most private banks, and especially foreign banks, eschew due to fixed capital and staff costs. More than 400 Ziraat branches are in small localities where no other banks are present (Ziraat 2010, 23–4). At the same time, state authorities make use of Ziraat’s infrastructure to distribute various social supports, pensions and payments to individuals nationwide, without having to pay commissions to the private banks. Extra-market coordination and support in times of crisis go hand in hand with physical accessibility and social benefits.

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A saver’s safe haven and alternative funding Turkey, like most emerging capitalisms, has had its share of banking crises and is prone to financial instability. Consequently, people often turn to public banks as safe havens for their savings because of implicit or explicit state guarantees backing public banks. It follows that public banks can attract high levels of individual deposits. This was evident during the 2008–2009 crisis: Ziraat’s deposits grew by 17 per cent (Ziraat 2010, 14), Halkbank’s by over 9 per cent (2010, 5), and VakıfBank’s by over 13 per cent (VakıfBank 2010, 18). In 2013 Turkey’s public banks reported handling over 70 million savings accounts, which is nearly half of all the bank accounts in Turkey (BAT 2014, II-242). At the same time, the public banks’ deposit base is augmented by state authorities requiring Turkey’s public sector entities to channel deposits and payments through them. In total, domestic savings can offer up to three quarters of the public banks’ funding base, constituting an important source of capital less reliant on world market booms and busts (BAT 2009, 71–4; BAT 2012, I-6). Efficiency Historically, Turkish public banks have been financially efficient, earning returns on assets (ROA) of around 1 per cent prior to the 1980s (BAT 2009, 98, 183). The neoliberal transition brought peaks and valleys but the public banks maintained an average of 1 to 2 per cent ROA until 2001. Since 2001 they have oscillated between 1.5 to 2.5 per cent ROA, equalling or bettering the private banks’ ROA levels of 1.3 to 2.4 per cent, while pulling in billions in extra public revenue (BAT 2001, 2014). As a former Undersecretary of the Treasury once acknowledged, the economic sustainability of Turkey’s public banks undermines much of the mainstream case for bank privatization in Turkey (confidential author interview, August 2007, Ankara). Indeed, recent empirical analyses of Turkey’s private (foreign and domestic) and public banks suggest that the latter are the more ‘efficient’ banks (Aysan and Ceyhan 2010; Kök and Ay 2013). The public banks, moreover, duly pay their taxes and recycle their earnings back into public revenues thereby having helped to reduce Turkey’s public debt by a range of 0.6 to 1.2 per cent per year from 2006 to 2010 (IMF 2012, 63). From this vantage point, public banks can offer a cost-efficient and powerful public policy tool.

maroi s and güngen | 211 The social contradictions of Turkey’s public banks These functions performed by Turkey’s public banks are not without social and class contradictions. From the perspective of the average household, SME or farmer, the public banks’ extramarket financial coordination and support at times of crisis may be the difference between survival and destitution. This is a genuinely socially progressive function, and one that neoliberals abhor, fearing distortions in market-based creative destruction processes. Yet from the systemic vantage point of capitalist reproduction, such supports may also offer the most fiscally cost-effective way of maintaining the legitimacy of neoliberal development strategies, given the specificity of Turkey’s volatile peripheral political economy. For private banks, increased public bank lending during a crisis releases pressure on them to lend and better protects their own returns. For the current neoliberal authoritarian ruling AKP government, the public banks have been used to push their conservative agenda (via, for example, opening new Islamic lending branches) but without democratizing the public banks’ operations. Issues of access and savers’ safe havens are likewise socially contradictory. People require credit and payment services to participate in contemporary society, in addition to needing a safe place to secure whatever money they might possess. Yet saving integrates and implicates individuals and households into the prevailing strategy of financial development in ways that engrain creditworthiness and debt discipline. Moreover, banking systems in developing countries can and have been used to transfer money resources from the already capital-poor areas (rural, farming) to already capital-rich areas (urban, industrial) in support of capital accumulation. Ziraat Bank, for example, has opened a new ‘gold savings account’ to draw in traditional ‘under the mattress’ savings held in real gold in order to draw these private resources into market processes. Finally, the mass of deposits held in the public banks have gone to easing periods of neoliberal crisis as they erupt, thus helping neoliberal social rule overcome periods of economic and social uncertainty. Under neoliberal finance capitalism, therefore, public banks are Janus-faced. On the one hand, there is no doubt that public banks offer important functions often unavailable from private banks, and these can have real and significant benefits for individuals, households, firms, and even society at large. Yet on the other hand, by helping

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to overcome the instabilities and inequalities generated by capitalism, public banks help reproduce the exploitative social conditions of capitalism that have led to the very problems that public banks are called on to help resolve. This appears to be the case in Turkey since 2001, where political struggles over the social content of the public banks appear to have yielded a cost-effective solution to reproducing unequal class relations. Yet the story does not end here, for the social content of public banks remains malleable, even if in the current historical conjuncture this content is heavily subject to neoliberal rule. The struggle for public banking alternatives The functions of Turkey’s public banks have evolved over time, given the specificity of Turkish society and the shifting structural context of capitalism. Almost certainly the public banks will further evolve, and their social content will remain open to contestation. The stakes are high. The current phase of neoliberal finance capitalism in societies such as Turkey acts against popular and working class aspirations because the interests of domestic and foreign financial capital are deeply fused into the state apparatus, guiding the priorities and actions of state managers and government elites, often to the detriment of labour (Marois 2012, 10). This defining social content represents the culmination of three decades of anti-worker and financeled neoliberal transformation processes. This, too, has influenced the public banks to the extent that they can help to reproduce finance capitalism and associated class relations in their very functioning, despite offering important economic respite to individuals, households, farmers, cooperatives, and SMEs. These contradictory functions belie any strict correlation with either developmental or private interest theories of bank ownership. Adding further complications and contradictions, the ruling AKP government is firmly committed to privatization, having sold off far more SOE assets in the first years after coming to power in 2002 than all Turkish governments in the previous 20 years combined (Öniş 2011), although the trend has been slow in the banking sector. While partial bank privatizations have occurred, the state retains controlling ownership levels over all the public banks. The main opposition, the centrist CHP, has a party programme critical of the AKP’s rapid privatizations but nonetheless supports many SOE sell-offs (if they

maroi s and güngen | 213 appear to increase efficiency and competition in neoclassical terms). That said, the public banks generate a lot of public revenue and offer an important economic stabilizing force. Any government, however neoliberal, will find it difficult to privatize their public banks in this context. It is perhaps through these contradictions that the public banks – given their substantial institutional and material capacity – prevail in neoliberal Turkey. This raises an important question for progressive social forces: Should public banks be defended? From a critical social content view, the answer is ‘yes’, regardless of the public banks’ social contradictions. Given the massive structural power of global finance today, and its class interests tied to reproducing capitalist exploitation, any financial alternative must not be lightly discarded. Public banks are potentially significant sources of progressive social developmental power. Moreover, should these banks be sold off to private corporate entities then these public bases of material capacity would shift to the private sector, which extends and deepens class-based competitive profit imperatives in society. It is thus vital that existing public banks be defended from their most immediate threat, that is, corporate privatization. In today’s context, public banking capacity may well be a necessary, if not sufficient, condition of any initial break with neoliberal social rule. Their potential, progressive ‘publicness’ may yet need to be reclaimed, however. Drawing on the case of Turkey, we can highlight some additional strategic lessons for public banking and alternative finance (see Marois and Güngen 2013, 19–20). First, any collective defence of public banks must not rely solely on legal or constitutional challenges, but must rather seek to build new social bases of support. Collective organization within the public banks is one example of how to reshape and reclaim the institutionalized social content of the banks, especially if done in solidarity with other private banking sector workers. Furthermore, because any challenge to the hegemony of private, profit-oriented finance will face a well-coordinated and malicious response on behalf of capital, political support must be fostered across society. One potent means of garnering public backing would be to demonstrate the actually existing functions and practices of public banks that support the public good, from preferential lending terms to funding public services and infrastructure. To this end more research and popular outreach is required.

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Perhaps most importantly, the struggle to defend public banks must ultimately be a struggle to democratize their social content and institutionalized functions. There is no popular benefit in having strong public banks that are susceptible to political and personal abuse or that function to reproduce capitalist social relations. The struggle for public banks may have to evolve into a struggle to supersede public ownership with new forms of collective and cooperative bank ownership and control. Here again radical scholarship can play an important role in understanding such potential alternatives. Existing and potentially progressive public (and cooperative) banking functions need excavating, while conventional academic discourses that constrain progressive possibilities need demystifying, and practical alternatives to the hegemony of private finance and profit-maximization need elaborating. Any alternative to neoliberal finance capitalism is, of course, a complex and multifarious endeavour. Strategizing around the (re)making of public banks and their social content is a crucial element. Note 1 For details on bank privatizations, see the Turkish Privatization

Administration website: http://www.oib. gov.tr/.

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Treasury, Directorate General of State Owned Enterprises. PER. 2012. Public enterprises report 2012. Ankara, Turkey: Undersecretariat of Treasury, Directorate General of State Owned Enterprises. Rappaport, G. D. 1996. Stability and change in revolutionary Pennsylvania: Banking, politics, and social structure. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Roberts, A. 2013. Financing social reproduction: The gendered relations of debt and mortgage finance in twenty-first-century America. New Political Economy 18(1): 21–42. Selwyn, B. 2015. The political economy of development: Statism or Marxism? In L. Pradella and T. Marois (eds.), Polarizing development: Alternatives to neoliberalism and the crisis, 39–50. London: Pluto Press. Shleifer, A. 1998. State versus private ownership. Journal of Economic Perspectives 12(4): 133–150. Solomon, M. S. 2010. Critical ideas in times of crisis: Reconsidering Smith, Marx, Keynes, and Hayek. Globalizations 7(1–2): 127–35. Spratt, S. 2009. Development finance: Debates, dogmas, and new directions. London: Routledge. Spufford, P. 2014. Provision of stable moneys by Florence and Venice, and North Italian financial innovations in the Renaissance period. Explaining Monetary and Financial Innovation Financial and Monetary Policy Studies 39: 227–251. VakıfBank. 2010. 2009 Annual Report. Ankara: VakıfBank. Vanberg, V. J. 2005. Market and state: The perspective of constitutional political economy. Journal of Institutional Economics 1(1): 23–49. von Mettenheim, K. 2012. Public banks: Competitive advantages and policy

maroi s and güngen | 217 alternatives. Public Banking Institute Journal 1(1): 2–34. World Bank. 2000. Turkey country economic memorandum, structural reforms for sustainable growth. Report No. 20657-TU. Washington, DC: World Bank. World Bank. 2001. Finance for growth: Policy choices in a volatile world. Washington, DC: World Bank.

World Bank. 2012. Global financial development report 2013: Rethinking the role of state in finance. Washington, DC: World Bank. Yalman, G. 2009. Transition to neoliberalism: The case of Turkey in the 1980s. Istanbul: Bilgi University Press. Ziraat. 2010. 2009 annual report. Ankara: Ziraat Bank.

1 3 | P RAGM A T I C P UB L I CS I N T H E HEARTLAN D O F CA P I T A L I S M : L OC A L SE RVI C E S I N T H E UN I T E D S T A T E S

Mildred E. Warner

While privatization has been a longstanding policy prescription by the European Union and the Washington Consensus, application in the United States and Europe has generally not been as aggressive as in many countries of the South. In the US, when local governments are given a choice, they often choose to keep services in public hands. Direct public provision accounts for almost half of all local government service delivery on average in the US (Homsy and Warner 2014). When cities do contract out, they typically mix public and private delivery over time through insourcing services from internal local government agencies and outsourcing from external private ones (Warner and Hefetz 2012), or through hybrid public–private delivery systems (Hefetz, Warner and Vigoda-Gadot 2014). These dynamic forms of market management reinsert some level of public management control into the privatization process. While insourcing (known as ‘reverse privatization’) has been measured in the US since 1992 (Hefetz and Warner 2004, 2007; Warner and Hefetz 2012), it has only recently been studied by European scholars, who term this process ‘remunicipalization’ (Chong, Saussier and Silverman 2012; Hall, Lobina and Terhorst 2013; Kishimoto, Lobina and Petitjean 2014). Remunicipalization is also found in cities in the South, including some high-profile cases of privatization reversals (Pigeon et al. 2012). Case study research points to concerns with service quality, price and access as key reasons driving the decision to remunicipalize. But our ability to say anything more general is limited by the lack of large-scale trends research. This chapter helps to fill that gap. In the US, reversing privatization, as a process of ‘making public’ among local governments, is primarily a pragmatic practice of experimentation – exploring what works in local service delivery reform

warner | 219 – as opposed to any particular ideological commitment to publicness per se. Indeed, it often takes place even when ‘small government’ sentiment is strong. The US is the heartland of capitalism after all. Local government managers believe in markets and understand how they work and how to use them. There is no strong political opposition to privatization at the local government level in the US. We find privatization reversals simply reflect a pragmatic desire to employ reforms that work. Because reverse privatization is so common in the US, despite relatively robust markets for public services, local governments in contexts that have weaker markets and greater concerns with citizen access to public services may find this trend even more important. In this chapter I present national survey data on US local government service delivery to show how these dynamics of mixing public and private delivery of services over time – while lacking a political agenda – nevertheless create avenues for a reinsertion of public control. Empirical results suggest an important role for city managers and for public workers in assessing private delivery and improving public service delivery. Insourcing requires that cities maintain their production capacities, so that, in case the market fails to perform as expected, the city can step back in, without a disruptive effect on the service itself. Insourcing, even in the private sector, is understood as a critical market management tool in the risky contracting business (Deloitte Consulting 2005). Understanding these practices, and the motivations behind them, can help with the development of more strategic paths for a public-centric focus in the future. In addition, I explore the nature of contracting partnerships and point to the importance of public partners (other municipalities), as compared to private partners (for-profit firms). What we see is that contracting is more likely with public partners – where public ethos, accountability and openness are present. We also find such contracts are more stable than contracts with private partners. These intermunicipal contracts are a local form of the public–public partnerships being explored between municipalities in countries in the North and the South (Hall et al. 2009). When contracting with private partners, contracts are more likely to be mixed to ensure continued public involvement alongside private contracts. The private partners get a portion of the service, or a sector of the city, while the city retains service delivery elsewhere. This ensures the city maintains capacity to reverse the contract if necessary, and it

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provides ongoing information for benchmarking costs and quality, and ensures continued avenues for direct citizen involvement through the governance process (Hefetz, Warner and Vigoda-Gadot 2014). Because the debate on privatization is less politicized in the US, and because nationwide longitudinal surveys enable more robust empirical analysis, we can derive some understanding of the possibilities and challenges these dynamics present for a way forward as local governments seek to ensure the continued publicness of public service delivery. I begin with the theoretical challenges to ‘making public’ in the context of government contracting. I then present the most recent data on US local government contracting practice and conclude with recommendations for policy. Theories of contracting

Ensuring public value While public services involve a direct relationship between government and citizens through the delivery process, contracting inserts a third-party provider and fundamentally shifts this relationship (Blanchard, Hinnant and Wong 1998). It creates a consumer connection, potentially undermining access and reducing forms of citizen engagement to a market relationship based solely on price. The relationship between government and service provider shifts from bureaucratic control to market control via a contract. Some scholars argue this has the potential to instil public values in the contractor because insertion of public funding into private organizations increases their publicness (Bozeman 2007). Others note that insertion of private finance in public services actually pulls the public sector more toward private objectives (Dahl and Soss 2014). Sclar (2015) has outlined the public planning elements that are lost when primary consideration is given to the needs of private finance. Core public values in the US context, such as open government, ‘sunshine laws’ designed to enhance decision-making transparency, and due process, do not necessarily follow when governments choose to contract out service delivery (Dannin 2010; Rosenbloom and Piotrowski 2005). It all depends on how the contract is written. Thus when government managers seek to ‘make public’ as they experiment with private contracting, they need to be attuned to potential erosion of core public values in the contracting process.

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Managing markets Theoretically, one of the keys to cost savings from privatization is competition. But competitive markets in most public services do not exist. This is especially true for natural monopolies such as water. Bel, Fageda and Warner (2010) conducted a statistical metaregression on all empirical economic studies on privatization in water and solid waste services (the two services with the greatest experience in privatization worldwide) and found no statistical support for cost savings under privatization. Nationwide surveys of local government in the US find that, on average, there is only one alternative provider for most services in a majority of local government markets (Hefetz and Warner 2012; Warner and Hefetz 2010). So privatization often merely substitutes a public monopoly for a private one. Lack of competition brings several problems. Absent the discipline of a competitive market, more responsibility rests on public regulation to ensure service quality. In economics, property rights theory argues that private providers will reduce service quality to enhance profits – especially if competition is not present (Hart, Shleifer and Vishny 1997). Contracting out to low competition markets requires that local governments spend so much time trying to simulate market dynamics that it cuts into their ability to monitor contractors (Girth, Hefetz, Johnston and Warner 2012). When the competitive requirements for market delivery are not met, it creates more problems than just lack of cost savings; it creates service quality problems and regulatory problems. This has led local governments to explore ways to reinsert public control. Local governments have a broader set of concerns than just cost savings. Essential public services such as water, electricity and healthcare must be failsafe – delivered no matter what. Thus some level of redundancy is needed in the system to ensure guaranteed provision. Public systems, when embedded in a multipurpose local government, can have cross-departmental back up. But corporatization and privatization make cross-departmental collaboration more difficult, if not impossible (McDonald 2014). This undermines system resilience. What we see in both the private and public sectors is increased attention to mixed delivery systems that incorporate both internal and external production to ensure internal control but also take advantage of potential market complementarities (Hefetz, Warner and Vigoda-Gadot 2014; Gradus, Dijkgraaf and Wassenaar 2014; Parmigiani 2007). In the public sector this assurance can take the form of mixed market delivery (public and private delivery of the same service over

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space) (Albalate, Bel and Calzada 2012; Warner and Hefetz 2008), or of mixed public–private firms (Cruz et al. 2014). Mixed firms are more common in Europe than the US (Warner and Bel 2008). Such mixed firms operate under commercial law and have greater flexibility regarding labour deployment, which can be used to facilitate labour shedding, as was the case in the partial privatization of Berlin public transit (Swarts and Warner 2014). While mixed firms increase public sector control, they still raise important questions regarding accountability (Peters, Pierre and Røiseland 2014). Mixed market delivery is more common in the US and it involves contracting and direct public provision in the same service area. This mixed delivery is more than competitive bidding as it enables an ongoing public presence in the service delivery process. For example, a city may be divided into districts with some served by private contract providers and others served by public crews. This enables benchmarking of processes and costs across the public and private partners in a process that stimulates innovation and retains avenues for citizen engagement (Warner and Hefetz 2008). It also ensures that the city retains capacity for re-internalizing service delivery should the contract fail. In the US, such mixed delivery is more common when contracting with private partners and accounts for almost one fifth of all service delivery (Hefetz, Warner and Vigoda-Gadot 2014). Insourcing or reverse privatization is another mechanism used to manage markets in the US. Local governments use a dynamic process of contracting out and then contracting back in over time to create competition, benchmark costs and processes, and provide an alternative to monitoring. Primary drivers of such reverse privatization are lack of cost savings, problems with monitoring, and service quality (Hefetz and Warner 2004). Subsequent work on reverse privatization in the US has found evidence of a social choice framework where managers use reversals to ensure public voice and public values in the service delivery process (Hefetz and Warner 2007; Warner and Hefetz 2012). The US literature on contracting gives significant attention to transaction costs. These are the costs of contract design, finding a qualified contractor, and monitoring after the contract is set. These costs are significant under contracting and have been found to divert public managers’ attention away from monitoring and ensuring broader public values (Girth et al. 2012).

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Cooperative public markets Local officials in the US are moving away from private contracting markets based on competition, to public markets based on cooperation with neighbouring governments. Intermunicipal contracting is now larger than for-profit contracting among US local governments (Homsy and Warner 2014) and is a longstanding practice (Hefetz, Warner and Vigoda-Gadot 2012). It is built on the positive benefits of cooperation among neighbouring municipalities to achieve economies of scale, to promote service coordination across the region, and to promote service quality through enhanced access to technical expertise (Bel and Warner 2014; Warner 2011). Cooperation is a reform strategy that stands in contrast to the competition basis of for-profit contracting. Cooperation among neighbouring municipalities has been shown to minimize contracting risks and ensure attention to public values (Hefetz, Warner and VigodaGadot 2014). This inter-municipal cooperation is a localized form of the public–public partnerships being pushed globally to improve services (Hall et al. 2009). But in contrast to North–South PUPs, inter-municipal cooperation in the US and Europe is most common among adjacent municipalities. European studies of inter-municipal cooperation find strong evidence of cost savings (Bel and Warner 2014), but US studies find inter-municipal contracting is focused less on cost and more on other objectives such as service quality, coordination and equity in service levels across the urban region and ensuring continued avenues for citizen voice (Warner and Hefetz 2002). Empirical evidence This chapter draws on a national survey of US local governments conducted by the International City/County Management Association (ICMA) in 2007 and 2012. The ICMA surveys cover 67 public services and ask how the service is delivered: by government directly, or through contracts to for-profits, other governments or non-profits. The surveys also ask managers specifically why they brought previously contracted work back in-house. The survey has responses from about 1,500 local governments and is representative of the full range of local governments in the US, making it an invaluable resource for understanding trends.

Why contract back in? The 2012 survey asked if the local government brought back in-house services that were contracted out in the previous five years. About 20 per cent of responding municipalities said they

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did. Building from a series of case studies conducted by Ballard and Warner (2000), the following reasons for insourcing previously outsourced services were included in the survey questionnaire. Table 13.1 shows that city managers’ top two reasons for reversing contracts were problems with service quality and lack of cost savings. These are the theoretically expected elements of contract failure. The third-most-common reason for reversals was improvement in local government efficiency. Successful proposal by in-house staff ranks fourth. These last two reasons for reversing privatization demonstrate the importance of maintaining public sector capacity to re-engage in service delivery through a direct competitive proposal from in-house crews or indirectly by improving internal process efficiency. They also highlight the innovation impact of contracting – producing competition and market complementarities that promote public sector innovation. TABLE

13.1 Reasons for contracting back in (2012 survey)

Reasons given

%

Service quality was not satisfactory

51.4

The cost savings were insufficient

52.5

Local government efficiency improved

30.4

Successful proposal by in-house staff

23.4

There was strong political support to bring back the service delivery

15.0

There were problems monitoring the contract

12.9

There were problems with the contract specifications

10.0

Lack of competitive private bidders Other

7.1 12.1

Source: Author analysis, ICMA Alternative Service Delivery Survey, 2012, Washington, DC.

Problems with contract management, monitoring and political support to bring services back in house were listed less often by managers. Privatization is relatively uncontroversial in the US, so decisions about

warner | 225 outsourcing and insourcing are generally managerial and technical in nature. Lack of competitive private bidders was reported by 7 per cent of respondents. What Table 13.1 clearly shows is that theoretical predictions regarding contract failure (lack of cost savings, problems with service quality, competition, contract specification and monitoring problems) are borne out by local government experience. Note that politics are not the primary driver of reversals – cost, service quality and internal efficiency are.

Comparing insourcing and outsourcing No national survey directly measures reversals in privatization. However, the consistency of the ICMA survey design allows pairing surveys over time to see if the form of service delivery has changed. About a quarter to a third of respondents are the same in any two, paired surveys. To track changes over time, we paired the 2007 and 2012 surveys and found 523 local governments that responded to both. We used the matrix method first employed by Hefetz and Warner in 2004. The light shaded areas of Table 13.2 capture new outsourcing and new insourcing. These provide very conservative measures of reversals as they only count services that come all the way back to fully public delivery. New outsourcing includes anything that is not completely public. Stable contracting is very broadly defined to include both mixed and complete contracts. For the period 2007 to 2012, new outsourcing accounted for 11.1 per cent of all services and new insourcing accounted for 10.4 per cent of all services in the paired sample. This experimentation at the margin is almost even between new contracting and reversals. Stable contracting was 29.7 per cent and stable public delivery was 48.9 per cent. Public delivery remains the most common form of service delivery across local governments in the US. Public or private partner? Contracting in the US involves both public and private partners, but contracting to for-profit providers has dropped across the country. In the 2007 national survey, public–public, intermunicipal contracting equalled for-profit contracting (Hefetz, Warner and Vigoda-Gadot 2012). By 2012, inter-municipal contracting surpassed for-profit contracting in popularity (Homsy and Warner 2014). We disaggregate new outsourcing and new insourcing to see what portion benefits for-profit partners and what proportion is awarded to

Mix → mix Stable contracting Contract → mix

Mix → public

New insourcing

Contract → public

← Towards public delivery

Stable contracting

Public → mix

Public → public

New insourcing

New outsourcing

Stable public

Contract → contract

Stable contracting

Mix → contract

Stable contracting

Public → contract

New outsourcing

Complete contracting out

Source: Adapted from Hefetz and Warner 2004 with data from ICMA surveys from 2007 and 2012.

Complete contracting out

Mixed public/ private delivery

Direct public delivery

2012 ICMA survey Mixed public/private delivery

Towards contracting out →

Direct public delivery

13.2 Matrix of service delivery dynamics

2007 ICMA survey

TABLE

warner | 227 other governments. We find new outsourcing is almost evenly divided between other governments (355 cases) and for-profit partners (395 cases) (see Table 13.3). Thus, as municipalities explore contracting they are equally bound to explore it with public or private partners. The difference shows up in the reversals. Insourcing is much more common with for-profit contracts (394) than as part of inter-municipal contracts (251), with a ratio of 1.6:1. In other words, contracts to for-profit partners are 60 per cent more likely to be reversed than contracts to other governments. Cooperative agreements may also fail, but failure rates are much lower and this helps explain the growth in intermunicipal cooperative agreements in the US. TABLE 13.3 Composition of US government contracting by type and contract partner

Contracting partner Overall delivery Experimentation at the margin

%

Other municipality

For-profit contractor

Number of cases

Number of cases

New contracting out

11.1

355

395

Contracting back in

10.4

251

394

Mixed public and private delivery

11.9

171

495

Complete contracting out

17.8

964

751

Stable public delivery

48.9

Stable contracts

Source: Author analysis based on 2007 and 2012 ICMA Alternative Service Delivery surveys of US municipalities, paired sample of common municipal respondents over two time periods, N=523 municipalities, 11,425 cases.

If we look inside the stable contracts we find similar results. Mixed contracts are much more likely to be found with for-profit partners (495 cases) than with other municipalities (171 cases) – a ratio of 2.9:1. City managers recognize that if they want to contract with private providers they can enhance their ability to manage the service by retaining a mixed market position. By contrast, complete contracts are only 78 per cent as likely to be found among for-profit partners (751) as among other

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municipalities (964). When you fully contract out services you are less likely to be able to reverse, so contracting with other municipalities is preferred to contracting with private partners. Policy recommendations This analysis has taken a look inside the dynamics of local government service delivery and shown that insourcing and outsourcing are now equally common among US local governments. These are tools used at the margin to experiment with new forms of service delivery. Together, new insourcing and new outsourcing only account for 21.5 per cent of all service delivery, while stable contracting accounts for 29.7 per cent of service delivery. But even in this stable contracting we find important differences by contract partner. More than half of these stable contracts are with public partners – other governments – not for-profit providers. What implications do these trends suggest for policy regarding making public service delivery reform among local governments? First, they make clear that privatization should never be a one-way street. Local governments have the obligation to provide failsafe services in an efficient manner to their citizens. While outsourcing may perturb the system and promote efficiencies in the short term, research shows cost savings are ephemeral and competition is limited. Second, these trends show that to ensure continued cost savings and maintain service quality, local governments must retain some level of public control. In the US this is typically done through market management – using mixed public and private delivery in the same service at the same time, or through outsourcing and then insourcing again over time. Third, this market management approach is costly, risky and unstable. Competitive markets are hard to maintain. Research shows efforts to maintain such competition distract public managers from other important tasks such as monitoring to ensure service quality. Fourth, it is important to maintain internal capacity. Insourcing can be made more difficult if a local government loses capacity – such as equipment or technical know-how when the service is first contracted out. This is why mixed delivery is often preferred as a means to maintain government control and presence in the market. Fifth, public values require attention to broader concerns than just efficiency. Citizen access, public engagement in the service delivery, and

warner | 229 sustainability are features that must be written into the contract or else they risk being lost. Governments seeking to ‘make public’ in the process of service delivery reform must address these aspects in contract design. Looking to the future One of the challenges to insourcing is higher-level government directives to contract out or subject services to competition. But we know that such competition, especially in network infrastructure services, is fleeting (Florio 2013; Hefetz and Warner 2012). Contracting out to a private monopoly can undermine government capacity in the future. Some have argued this is a form of straitjacketing the state as international agreements force states to acquiesce to market interests (Clifton 2014). This is most often imposed on cities by nation states or international organizations through trade agreements (e.g. the EU, WTO, GATS, TISA), which attempt to subject public services to competition (Gerbasi and Warner 2007; Sinclair and MertinsKirkwood 2014). While local governments can do little to alter the structural rules under which they are forced to operate, we are finding evidence of ‘riding the wave’ where local governments attempt to manage market forms of service delivery to ensure public values are met (Warner and Clifton 2014). Insourcing and mixed market delivery are part of this local government strategy. Local governments are often pragmatic actors. They are in a position to see how service reforms play out on the ground, and thus should be given more space to experiment and to make their own choices regarding service delivery. Policy prescriptions from above requiring privatization deny these local realities. In the US, local governments are free to experiment without state directives to privatize, as has occurred in the UK, Australia, New Zealand and now across the EU (Clifton 2014; Warner 2008). This freedom has allowed US local governments to carefully assess when privatization works and when it does not. We find both lower rates of privatization and higher rates of reversals among local governments in the US as compared to Europe (Warner and Bel 2008). Local governments’ job is to ensure failsafe service delivery to residents. Having the ability to test market delivery and reverse those choices is critical. Some scholars argue that local government has become an ‘austerity machine’, privatizing and cutting services in a time of fiscal stress (Peck 2012). Donald, Glasmeier, Gray and Lobao (2014, 6) point to

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‘multiscalar coalitions forming around austerity which affect the level of public infrastructure and service provision, or collective consumption, as well as the role of the municipal government as employer’. Our research on US local governments shows local governments are ‘riding the wave’ of these neoliberal reforms but also pushing back where they can (Warner and Clifton 2014). But this push back is not progressive so much as pragmatic as professional local government managers try to maintain service levels and find efficiencies without sacrificing quality and service to their citizens. For example, privatization rates fell from 2007 to 2012 and inter-municipal cooperation, which seeks efficiency but keeps the service public, has become the new popular reform (Kim and Warner 2014). Thus we argue that US local government managers practise a pragmatic form of municipalism (Kim and Warner 2014), concerned with service quality, efficiency and public values. Peck (2014: 28) notes that ‘[w]hat remains of the Keynesian commitment to public services in the United States … is basically delivered at the state and local level’. That is true and local government managers understand the importance of Keynesian investments in services and infrastructure. But to maintain services they must constantly seek efficiencies and innovation. Privatization (and its reversal) is just one policy tool in that process, and it is used with caution. Acknowledgements Research for this chapter was supported in part by funding from the US Department of Agriculture,

National Institute for Food and Agriculture Grant No. 2011-6800630793.

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Bel, G. and Warner, M. E. 2014. Intermunicipal cooperation and costs: Expectations and Evidence. Public Administration, 93(1): 52–67. Bel, G., Fageda, X. and Warner, M. E. 2010. Is private production of public services cheaper than public production? A meta-regression analysis of solid waste and water services. Journal of Policy Analysis and Management 29(3): 553–577. Blanchard, L. A., Hinnant, C. C. and Wong, W. 1998. Market-based reforms

warner | 231 in government: Toward a social subcontract? Administration and Society 30(5): 483–512. Bozeman, B. 2007. Public values and public interest: Counterbalancing economic individualism. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Chong, E., Saussier, S. and Silverman, B. S. 2012. Water under the bridge: City size, bargaining power, prices and franchise renewals in the provision of water. Paper presented in honour of Oliver Williamson, November, Berkeley, CA. Clifton, J. 2014. Beyond hollowing out: ‘Straightjacketing’ the state. Political Quarterly 85(4): 437–444. Cruz, N. F., Marques, R. C., Marra, A. and Pozzi, C. 2014. Local mixed companies: The theory and practice in an international perspective. Annals of Public and Cooperative Economics 85(1): 1–10. Dahl, A. and Soss, J. 2014. Neoliberalism for the common good? Public value governance and the downsizing of democracy. Public Administration Review 74(4): 496–504. Dannin, E. 2010. Crumbling infrastructure – crumbling democracy: Infrastructure privatization contracts and their effects on state and local governance. Northeastern University Journal of Social Policy 5(2): 47–105. Deloitte Consulting. 2005. Calling a change in the outsourcing market. New York: Deloitte Consulting. www. deloitte.com/dtt/cda/doc/content/ us_outsourcing_callingachange.pdf (accessed 10 October 2010). Donald, B., Glasmeier, A., Gray, M. and Lobao, L. 2014. Austerity in the city: Economic crisis and urban service decline? Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society 7(1): 3–15. Florio, M. 2013. Networked industries and social welfare: The experiment that

reshuffled European utilities. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gerbasi, J. and Warner, M. E. 2007. Privatization, public goods and the ironic challenge of free trade agreements. Administration and Society 39(2): 127–149. Girth, A., Hefetz, A. Johnston, J. and Warner, M. E. 2012. Outsourcing public service delivery: Management responses in noncompetitive markets. Public Administration Review 72(6): 887–900. Gradus, R., Dijkgraaf, E. and Wassenaar, M. 2014. Understanding mixed forms of refuse collection, privatization and its reverse in the Netherlands. International Public Management Journal 17(3): 328–343. Hall, D., Lobina, E. and Terhorst, P. 2013. Re-municipalisation in the early twenty-first century: Water in France and energy in Germany. International Review of Applied Economics 27(2): 193–214. Hall, D., Lobina, E., Corral, V., Hoedeman, O., Terhorst, P., Pigeon, M. and Kishimoto, S. 2009. Public–public partnerships in water. Amsterdam and London: Transnational Institute and PSIRU. www.tni.org/sites/www.tni. org/files/download/pupinwater.pdf (accessed 2 December 2014). Hart, O. D., Shleifer, A. and Vishny, R. W. 1997. The proper scope of government: Theory and an application to prisons. Quarterly Journal of Economics 112: 1127–1161. Hefetz, A. and Warner, M. E. 2004. Privatization and its reverse: Explaining the dynamics of the government contracting process. Journal of Public Administration, Research and Theory 14(2): 171–190. Hefetz, A. and Warner, M. E. 2007. Beyond the market vs. planning dichotomy: Understanding privatisation and its reverse in US

232 | t h wielv rt een e cities. Local Government Studies 33(4): 555–572. Hefetz, A. and Warner, M. E. 2012. Contracting or public delivery? The importance of service, market and management characteristics. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory 22(2): 289–317. Hefetz, A., Warner, M. E. and VigodaGadot, E. 2012. Privatization and inter-municipal contracting: US local government experience 1992–2007. Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy 30(4): 675–692. Hefetz, A., Warner, M. E. and VigodaGadot, E. 2014. Concurrent sourcing in the public sector: A strategy to manage contracting risk. International Public Management Journal 17(3): 365–386. Homsy, G. C. and Warner, M. E. 2014. Intermunicipal cooperation: The growing reform. In The Municipal Yearbook 2014. Washington, DC: International City County Management Association. Kim, Y. and Warner, M. E. 2014. Pragmatic municipalism: Local government service delivery in the Great Recession. Paper presented at Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning, October, Philadelphia, PA. Kishimoto, S., Lobina, E. and Petitjean, O. 2014. Here to stay: Water remunicipalisation as a global trend. London, Amsterdam and Paris: PSIRU, TNI and Multinational Observatory. McDonald, D. A. 2014. Public ambiguity and multiple meanings of corporatization. In D. A. McDonald (ed.), Rethinking corporatization and public services in the global South, 1–30. London: Zed Books. Parmigiani, A. 2007. Why do firms both make and buy? An investigation of concurrent sourcing. Strategic Management Journal 28(3): 285–311.

Peck, J. 2012. Austerity urbanism: American cities under extreme economy. City 16(6): 626–655. Peck, J. 2014. Pushing austerity: State failure, municipal bankruptcy and the crises of fiscal federalism in the USA. Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, 7: 17–44. Peters, B. G., Pierre, J. and Røiseland, A. 2014. Financial gains and value loss? The impacts of local mixed companies. Annals of Public and Cooperative Economics 85(1): 87–102. Pigeon, M., McDonald, D. A., Hoedeman, O. and Kishimoto, S. (eds.). 2012. Remunicipalization: Putting water back into public hands. Amsterdam: Transnational Institute. Rosenbloom, D. H. and Piotrowski, S. J. 2005. Outsourcing the constitution and administrative law norms. American Review of Public Administration 35(2): 103–121. Sclar, E. 2015. The political-economics of investment utopia: Public–private partnerships for urban infrastructure finance. Journal of Economic Policy Reform 18(1): 1–15. Sinclair, S. and Mertins-Kirkwood, H. 2014. TISA versus public services. Geneva: Public Services International. www.world-psi.org/sites/default/ files/documents/research/en_ tisaresearchpaper_final_web.pdf (accessed 22 June 2015). Swarts, D. and Warner, M. E. 2014. Hybrid firms and transit delivery: The case of Berlin. Annals of Public and Cooperative Economics 85(1): 127–146. Warner, M. E. 2011. Competition or cooperation in urban service delivery? Annals of Public and Cooperative Economics 82(4): 421–435. Warner, M. E. 2008. Reversing privatization, rebalancing government reform: markets, deliberation and planning. Policy and Society 27(2): 163–174.

warner | 233 Warner, M. E. and Bel, G. 2008. Competition or monopoly? Comparing privatization of local public services in the US and Spain. Public Administration 86(3): 723–735. Warner, M. E. and Clifton, J. 2014. Marketization, public services and the city: The potential for polanyian counter movements. Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society 7(1): 45–61. Warner, M. E. and Hefetz, A. 2002. Applying market solutions to public services: An assessment of efficiency, equity and voice. Urban Affairs Review 38(1): 70–89.

Warner, M. E. and Hefetz, A. 2008. Managing markets for public service: The role of mixed public–private delivery of city services. Public Administration Review 68(1): 150–161. Warner, M. E. and Hefetz, A. 2010. Service characteristics and contracting: The importance of citizen interest and competition. In The Municipal Year Book 2010, 19–27. Washington, DC: International City County Management Association. Warner, M. E. and Hefetz, A. 2012. In-sourcing and outsourcing: The dynamics of privatization among US municipalities 2002–2007. Journal of the American Planning Association 78(3): 313–327.

1 4 | P OS T-N EO L I B E R A L I S M I N B OLIV IA ? WA TE R S E C TO R R E F O R M S UN D E R EVO M ORALES

Susan Spronk

This marks the end of neoliberalism. We don’t want vengeance against those who have subjugated us, what we want is unity and equality … We the poor have the right to govern ourselves … It is the hour to create a new foundation for the Republic. Evo Morales Ayma, President of Bolivia, inauguration speech, 22 January 2006

In December 2005, Evo Morales and his party, the Movement toward Socialism (Movimiento al Socialismo, MAS), were elected on promises to end two decades of neoliberalism. Given the organizational strength of the indigenous, peasant and labour movements, the potential for the elaboration and implementation of ‘post-neoliberal’ alternatives was more ripe in Bolivia than anywhere else in Latin America amid the resurgence of the political left on the continent – the so-called ‘pink tide’ (Cameron and Hershberg 2010). And in no policy area has the pressure from below for alternative policy been felt more strongly than in the water and sanitation sector in the Andean nation. The Cochabamba Water War of 2000 is credited for opening a ‘revolutionary moment’ in Bolivia’s history (Hylton and Thomson 2007; see also Webber 2011), a five-year cycle of social movement uprisings during which a nationwide, left–indigenous coalition emerged to defend natural resources, articulating their claims forcefully against neoliberalism. For these reasons, the water and sanitation sector in Bolivia serves as a paradigmatic case for exploring what the postneoliberal turn has meant for public policy and practice in Bolivia in general, with potential lessons for Latin America more broadly. This chapter argues that there have been significant changes in the mode of governance of water and sanitation under Morales that point toward a significant reorientation from private to public forms of

spronk | 235 provision. The Morales government has signalled its commitment to the human right to water, which is now enshrined in the Constitution (despite some potential contradictions: see Crespo Flores 2010), and has established new institutions to bolster the role of the state in water management. Most important, annual investment in the sector tripled from 2005 to 2012; yet it remains heavily dependent on loans and donations from international agencies. Despite the increased role of the state in the economy, public monies earmarked for expanding household water and sanitation services represent a fraction compared to those for developing the extractive sector, particularly for the exploitation of non-renewable hydrocarbon and mineral resources, which has far-reaching implications for the country’s dwindling freshwater supplies in the context of climate change and groundwater contamination. Water reforms under Morales Soon after it took office in January 2006, the Morales government took some important steps to transform the institutional framework governing water and sanitation with respect to privatization, regulation and the role of third-party providers. The following sections look at policies of remunicipalization and the reassertion of the role of the state via the creation of new institutions, highlighting both their progressive and regressive outcomes.

Remunicipalization: a return to public ownership and control One of the most important post-neoliberal reforms to water and sanitation governance – the reversal of privatization – was in fact implemented before the Morales administration assumed office. Facing pressure from international financial institutions in the late-1990s, the Bolivian government initially auctioned off management contracts for two of the largest state-owned and state-operated water utilities in the country to consortia controlled by multinational corporations: La Paz-El Alto in 1997 and Cochabamba in 1999 (Castro 2007; Sjölander Holland 2005). Following the protests known as the ‘Water Wars’, both contracts were reversed: the Aguas del Tunari contract in Cochabamba controlled by US multinational Bechtel (Olivera and Lewis 2005) was cancelled in 2000 and the Aguas del Illimani contract controlled by French multinational Suez in the neighbouring cities of La Paz and El Alto was cancelled in January 2005 (Spronk 2007). Since then, the

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water utilities in Cochabamba (SEMAPA) and La Paz-El Alto (EPSAS, formerly SAMAPA) have been returned to municipal control, as part of what is now a global trend of remunicipalization (Pigeon et al. 2012). In addition to cancelling these contracts, the Morales administration has made the human right to water a cornerstone of its domestic and foreign policy. In April 2008, Morales addressed the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues declaring that water is a human right and a right for all living things on the planet, and that basic services cannot be privatized and must remain public. Bolivia also introduced the resolution at the UN General Assembly to expand the UN Declaration of Human Rights to recognize the right to water, which was passed by majority vote in July 2010. More recently, the human right to water has been framed in government policy as part of the Andean principles of ‘buen vivir’ (good living) (PSDSB 2010, iii). Guaranteeing the right to water does not preclude, however, the involvement of private, profit-seeking companies in the provision of water and sanitation. Within a liberal framework of human rights law, profit-seeking transnational corporations can play a key role in the provision of services, and international law is ambiguous in this respect: the UN’s Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, for example, recognized the ambivalent status which a human right conveys upon a resource when it defined water as a social, economic and cultural good as well as a commodity (Bakker 2007, 439). Such contradictory notions of what the human right to water means in practice – that is, whether selling water for a profit contradicts or promotes this right – are also expressed in the 2009 Bolivian Constitution. On the one hand, Article 20 states that the right to water is ‘the responsibility of the State, at all levels of government’. Yet the same article makes reference to public, mixed, cooperatives and communitarian providers. In the Bolivian context, ‘mixed’ refers to public–private partnerships under which the state owns part of the shares along with private companies, such as the ‘capitalized’ companies that were privatized in the 1990s by the previous neoliberal administrations. The potential role of the private sector is reinforced again in Article 309, which also makes reference to ‘mixed companies’ when referring to the different forms that state provision can take. One possible explanation for this seeming contradiction comes from Crespo Flores (2010), who argues that the draft Constitution that was approved by the Constituent Assembly made no reference to ‘mixed

spronk | 237 companies’. He speculates that the Executive inserted the wording into the final draft just before the January 2009 referendum vote on the Constitution in order to avoid close public scrutiny, likely due to pressure from the foreign donors that continue to play an important role in financing water and sanitation infrastructure. The government used the same tactic to formulate and then approve other pieces of controversial legislation that involved consultations with stakeholders, such as the 2011 Law of Productive, Communal and Agricultural Revolution when references to genetically modified organisms were inserted into the text without the knowledge or support of indigenous peasant groups immediately before it was voted on by Congress (see Chávez 2011). With respect to privatization of water and sanitation services, while it is clear from Morales’s many public statements that his government is committed to banning private, profit-seeking providers from the sector, in practice the Constitution represents a similar political compromise, which leaves the door to privatization slightly ajar.

Re-regulation: the state as planner and provider The regulatory agencies established in the mid-1990s to oversee the privatization process were heavily criticized by social movement organizations at the time, such as the Coordinadora de Defensa del Agua y de la Vida, which orchestrated the protests in Cochabamba in 2000, and the Federación de Juntas Vecinales (FEJUVE), the neighbourhoods’ organization that led the protests in El Alto and La Paz in 2005. Known as Superintendencias, these public regulatory authorities were established at arm’s length from government as part of former President Sánchez de Lozada’s Plan de Todos, an ambitious privatization scheme that auctioned off state-owned enterprises such as electricity, airlines, railroads and telecommunications at what many saw as steep discounts (Kohl 2002). Their primary goal as regulators was to encourage competition. In sectors considered to have ‘natural monopoly’ characteristics such as water and sanitation, this meant opening up to private sector participation through the granting of concession contracts and performance benchmarking to hold all water and sanitation utilities to the same standard (Spronk 2010a; Swyngedouw 2006: 58–9). The regulatory system was widely perceived as anti-democratic ‘superpowers’ remote from the public (Crespo Flores 2000), and Morales promised to revamp it upon assuming the presidency. In

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May 2006 the government announced the existing water regulatory agency was the first agency to be dissolved, justifying the decision on the basis that it had failed to properly regulate tariffs and lacked accountability. With the passing of the new Constitution in 2009, other existing regulatory agencies were also put under tighter control by the respective ministries except in key ‘strategic’ areas such as banking and hydrocarbons. The new regulatory agency for the water sector, the Bolivian Water and Sanitation Authority (Autoridad de Fiscalización y Control Social de Agua Potable y Saneamiento Básico, AAPS) came into being in April 2009. A decentralized agency that is responsible to the Ministry of the Environment and Water (created a few years earlier as explained below), AAPS’s mandate is to monitor, control, supervise and regulate laws and activities in the water sector. The Vice-President of Bolivia argued that the creation of this new regulatory framework would produce cost savings by reducing administrative duplication (La Jornada 2009). While the creation of an arm’s-length regulatory entity that is directly accountable to the Ministry means that the state is now regulating itself, it is common institutional practice in countries with well-performing public water companies such as Uruguay. But the flagship institutional change during the first mandate of Morales (2006–2010) was the creation of a Water Ministry (subsequently renamed the Ministry of the Environment and Water). Inaugurated in January 2006, it has been much lauded as Latin America’s only dedicated water ministry (Assies 2010). Created with the expressed mission of ending privatization and establishing a public water company to replace the temporary administration of the water and sanitation provider in La Paz-El Alto, it was meant to be one of the clearest signals of the government’s commitment to the public character of water and sanitation. As President Morales emphasized at the inauguration ceremony celebrating the creation of the new ministry: ‘Water cannot be privatized or converted into a commodity because to do so violates human rights. Water must be a public service’ (Bolpress 2006). The first cabinet appointed Abel Mamani, a leader from FEJUVE in El Alto, as the first Water Minister. Mamani is a well-known public figure thanks to his role in organizing the protests against Aguas del Illimani from 2004 to 2005. As minister, Mamani oversaw the settling of the terms to cancel the Aguas del Illimani contract and established a

spronk | 239 commission charged with creating a new public water company for the cities of La Paz and El Alto. He was forced to resign within the year, however, after becoming embroiled in a scandal, foreshadowing several years of instability that hampered the institution’s performance. While the state regained control over water governance with these reforms, the ministry’s performance has left much to be desired. From 2006 to 2012, the minister changed every year, leading to many delays in project execution. Institutional reorganization has led to the duplication of tasks that it sought to remedy. For example, the development of irrigation infrastructure falls under the mandate of the Ministry of the Environment and Water as well as the Ministry of Rural Development, while water and sanitation services also fall under the Ministry of Public Works, Services and Housing. Indeed, according to one senior policy official interviewed for this study in 2010, the Ministry of the Environment and Water acts more like a loose federation of three distinct ministries than a coherent organization. There are also considerable overlaps in responsibility with municipal and departmental governments. Nor has the ministry managed to replace the water utility established in La Paz-El Alto following the exit of Suez in 2005. Under Mamani, an inter-institutional commission consisting of representatives from the Ministry of Water, the municipal governments of La Paz and El Alto, and the neighbourhood committees from both cities was formed, but more than eight years later the commission had produced no tangible results (Pérez 2013). The appointment of José Antonio Zamora Gutiérrez as Minister of the Environment and Water in August 2012, however, brought muchneeded expertise to the ministry. Zamora remained in his post until the appointment of a new cabinet in January 2015. Zamora was considered to be a technical rather than a political appointment (author interview with Patricia Mecerreyes, representative of the water and sanitation programme of the Spanish government, September 2014). Hailing from El Alto’s sister city, La Paz, unlike many of his predecessors Zamora had post-secondary degrees in engineering and public finance. Under his administration, the ministry greatly improved project execution, which, as Ben Kohl (2010) argues, has been one of the foremost challenges facing the Morales government.1 Although there have been some important institutional changes, the formal regulatory apparatus in Bolivia has not actually changed dramatically. According to Adhemar Romero, technical consultant

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for AAPS (author interview, September 2014), the same performance indicators employed during the neoliberal era are still being used to judge the efficacy of post-neoliberal water utilities. This continuity with the former regulatory apparatus suggests that the administration has not yet figured out how it might evaluate performance on the basis of ‘social efficiency’ rather than the more narrow financial indicators established during the neoliberal era (Spronk 2010b). In addition, the General Water Law still dates back to 1906. While water resources are mentioned in new laws such as the Law of Productive, Communal and Agricultural Revolution (2011) and the new Mining Law (2014) the country lacks an integral regulatory framework to set priorities in cases of multiple uses of water, such as domestic use, agriculture and industry. At the local level, traditional regulatory practices prevail for water access and management based on customs and usage, which coexist with formal rights.

Recognizing small, independent service providers The devolution of service delivery to third-party providers – that is, community groups such as NGOs, locally based committees or cooperatives – is one of the country’s most ambiguous post-neoliberal water policies. For observers on the political left (including those who identify with communitariananarchist traditions, some of whom are associated with the Red VIDA, Latin America’s largest anti-privatization network [Spronk, Crespo and Olivera 2012]), public participation and decentralization are viewed as processes that can lead to popular empowerment and the democratization of bureaucratic, corrupt, centralized states, fostering the capacity for self-governance in the preparation for a possible socialist future (McMillan, Spronk and Caswell 2014). For those on the right, public participation, particularly when coupled with forprofit service providers, is seen as a way to introduce ‘efficiencies’ in service delivery by reducing costs and making room for local entrepreneurial initiatives. The devolution knife can therefore cut both ways, and in Bolivia, the role of small, independent water operators has been a highly contentious political issue. For social movement activists, the state’s recognition of these providers was considered one of the main victories of the Cochabamba Water War, especially in a city where about half the urban residents obtain their household water from informal, non-state, small providers such as community cooperatives (Spronk

spronk | 241 2007). These community organizations were also at the front lines of the barricades to protect their water supplies from private, monopoly providers. They objected to the terms of the private contract and the controversial water privatization Law 2029, which did not include any provisions for recognizing the right to water of small providers; instead, it enforced the monopoly rights of concessionaires over the water supply, thus rendering artisanal wells and water catchment systems illegal if they happened to fall within the boundaries determined by the concession. Law 2066, which was passed in the heat of the 2000 Water War, created a system of registries and licences that guaranteed the property rights of small, independent providers over their water supplies for up to 5 or 10 years, entrenching the rights of ‘uses and customs’ (Perreault 2008). The Morales government has taken further steps to integrate these small, independent water providers within the regulatory framework and has ramped up programmes to provide them with financial and technical assistance. The government now views these providers as partners rather than entities that will disappear with the ‘modernization’ of water and sanitation systems. Today, the state estimates that there are more than 28,000 water and sanitation providers (called Entidades Prestadora de Servicio de Agua Potable y Alcantarillado Sanitario, EPSAS) (Rojas 2011, 17), most of which deliver water to between 50 and 100 families. When the Morales government came to office in 2006, there were only 26 such providers registered with the regulatory agency. By 2014, there were over 1,300. The state nevertheless faces dilemmas regarding how best to support and regulate these small, independent providers. These dilemmas go to the heart of many ambiguities surrounding the notion of ‘public’, particularly in deciding where the boundary lies between public and private. As West (2014) observes in the case of Cochabamba, many community water associations are being held captive by the private water vendors that exploit the city’s unequal distribution of water resources for profit. The primary problem that these small associations face is access to sufficient volumes of water to feed their self-built water systems, and they depend on small private companies (aguateros), to fill their holding tanks. The state is reluctant to regulate these private companies’ water extraction activities or to tax them for the use of the resource since the cost will be transferred to the communities in the form of higher prices.

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These small providers face considerable challenges in delivering quality services due to severe operational deficiencies: defects in the construction of systems, rapid deterioration of existing infrastructure, deficiencies in operation and maintenance, and poor water quality. It has been estimated that in communities located at high elevation, or far from improved water sources, households connected to these small providers only receive water for 2 to 4 hours a day, or even once or twice a week (Rojas 2011, 17). As Bakker (2013) notes, similar to the privatization of healthcare, the entrenching of such community providers can create a two-tiered system. These small providers, she notes, may represent a ‘refinement, rather than a retrenchment, of the neoliberal project’ since they ‘run the risk of entrenching dual or multiple water supply delivery standards [of lower quality] in poorer communities, while wealthier communities continue to receive higher quality services’ (Bakker 2013, 257). In an effort to raise the capacity of these small providers, the government established the National Service for the Sustainability of Sanitation Services (Servicio Nacional para la Sostenabilidad de Servicios en Saneamiento Básico, SENASBA) in March 2009, which replaced an institutional precedent (FUNDASAB). The government has placed priority on investment in physical infrastructure rather than the social infrastructure that is necessary to operate water and sanitation systems over the long run. Morales also introduced two flagship programmes to expand water and sanitation infrastructure in rural and peri-urban areas where small-scale providers predominate: ‘Evo Keeps His Promises’ (Evo Cumple), which was initiated in 2006 and financed mostly by the Venezuelan government, and later replaced by ‘My Water’ (Mi Agua) when external funding was withdrawn in 2011. These programmes are designed to fund relatively small projects, valued at no more than US$300,000 each. Municipal governments are expected to provide 15 per cent toward each project. These projects are intended to have a rapid impact, raising criticism that the programme is aimed at boosting the government’s popularity at the ballot box rather than creating sustainable infrastructure. According to the terms of reference for the programme, moneys are to be dispensed within four months of a project’s approval or the money must be returned. While the programme’s method of dispensing money has ensured a quick turnover time between approval and execution, it has also

spronk | 243 led to shoddy construction, abandoned contracts and allegations of corruption due to poor oversight. Although this method of expanding infrastructure has been effective in raising the number of citizens with ‘improved’ access to water and sanitation, these statistics about access hide potential problems with the quality of water and continuity of service. As of yet, no comprehensive study of the Mi Agua programme has been conducted. According to Lorena Ferreyra Villalpando, Chief of Investigation and Technological Development of SENASBA (author interview, September 2014), the ministry acknowledged in an internal audit that more attention must be paid to the feasibility of projects and greater investment in providing communities the support they need to run their water and sanitation systems. Although SENASBA has expanded its activities, with 58 projects in 2012, the rapid expansion of physical infrastructure has quickly outstripped the ability to provide the training and support to communities that help make these projects more sustainable in the long run. The government’s priority for investment over technical training is also clearly expressed in the resources it dedicates to each mandate: SENASBA has a total of 48 full-time, permanent staff while the Executing Agency for the Environment and Water (Entidad Ejecutora de Medio Ambiente y Agua, EMAGUA), which is responsible for managing the money, has three times the staff (EMAGUA 2014, 80). Financing water and sanitation: ‘productive’ versus ‘social’ investment There is little doubt that public spending has increased substantially under Morales, including spending on water and sanitation. Thanks to an export bonanza sustained by unusually high commodity prices in international markets, GDP per capita has more than doubled since Morales assumed office in 2006 and public investment has more than tripled (see Table 14.1). In order to achieve its development goals, the government has dedicated far more resources to investments in what it calls the ‘productive’ and ‘infrastructure’ sectors than in the ‘social’ sector, which includes water and sanitation. While spending more in these sectors is justifiable in an underdeveloped country such as Bolivia, there is a wide gap between the rhetoric of ‘buen vivir’ and reality on the ground, given the emphasis on the extractive sector. Although the government spouts a fiery rhetoric about anticapitalism, climate change and the importance of ‘protecting Mother

3

5

Industry and tourism

66

51

51

37

500

Education and culture

Basic sanitation

Urbanism and housing

Multi-sector

TOTAL

602

29

54

54

54

45

221

14

0

18

264

297

49

4

1

0

55

2004

629

38

60

51

42

40

194

17

0

20

289

326

57

7

3

0

72

2005

Source: Instituto Nacional de Estadísticas 2012, 671.

37

Health

11

187

Hydro resources

Social

0

Communications

13

203

Transportation

Energy

228

Infrastructure

41

0

Mining

Agriculture

49

Hydrocarbons

2003

879

37

70

56

75

61

263

27

1

44

409

481

76

11

3

4

98

2006

1,005

48

83

61

78

63

284

30

1

70

450

551

83

20

11

7

122

2007

1,351

127

173

50

124

80

427

33

47

80

490

650

82

18

34

8

147

2008

14.1 Public investment (executed) by economic sector (millions of US$)

Productive

TABLE

1,439

85

153

79

151

91

475

38

37

83

537

694

90

15

48

13

184

2009

1,521

93

144

79

177

72

472

44

9

71

600

725

84

12

28

109

232

2010

2,182

105

196

120

170

80

566

45

85

107

722

960

135

19

89

308

551

2011

2,897

187

260

157

232

93

743

56

82

123

897

1,158

180

70

71

488

810

2012

spronk | 245 Earth’, the Morales government has prioritized investments that aim to inspire ‘industrial take-off’, particularly in the hydrocarbons and transportation sectors. This orientation is clearly expressed in its plan for basic sanitation, which announces that the government aims to foster a new productive matrix based upon ‘the industrialization of hydrocarbons, minerals, food, medicine production, textiles and, in general, any [economic] activity that produces value added’ (PSDSB 2010, 73–74). The government hopes to achieve this goal by involving ‘strategic partners [meaning multinational corporations], but under the principle of state control’ (PSDSB 2010, 74) in order to generate the economic wealth needed to ‘meet the demands of the disadvantaged’ (PSDSB 2010, 74). This prioritization of industrialization threatens Bolivia’s clean water supplies. While operators that extract water for human use require a permit, the 2014 Mining Law requires nothing of mining operators for water extraction, despite the vast resources needed for mineral processing (Campanini 2014). In the context of weak environmental regulation, mining activities have contaminated groundwater resources as some mines dump untreated water and waste directly into the waterways (Perreault 2013, 1056). Climate change is the second major threat. Already prone to drought, the Andean region is considered to be particularly vulnerable. The water systems of major urban areas such as La Paz, El Alto and Cochabamba are fed by melting glaciers, which are receding at an alarming rate (Rosenthal 2009). Morales’s government faces a dilemma in the context of high rates of poverty and underdevelopment, justifying its spending priorities on the basis that the extractive sector yields generous resource rents, which in turn have funded investments in health, education, housing and basic sanitation. But there are legitimate questions to be asked about the allocation of resources given the vast amounts at the government’s disposal. The government has been earning far more than it has been spending. From 2005 to 2012, international reserves have increased 7.5 times and by 2013, the government was boasting the highest international reserves in Latin America, totaling US$14.5 billion, or nearly half of the country’s GDP (La Razón 2013). These vast international reserves provide a necessary buffer in the event of a downturn in international commodity prices, but it does beg the question as to whether the state could be spending more to help fill the large deficit in social

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infrastructure after two decades of neoliberalism. As progressive economists from the Centre for Policy Research argue (Weisbrot, Ray and Johnston 2009, 21): ‘[t]he accumulation of excess foreign reserves represents part of Bolivia’s development challenge, which is to convert recently acquired trade surpluses … to investment that can increase the economy’s long run productivity as well as levels of employment’. In short, the Morales government could afford to do more on ‘social’ investments, such as water and sanitation using money from the national treasury, likely with large paybacks in terms of health and welfare. Evidence of this need comes from gaps in the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Although the government claims to have met the MDGs for access to safe drinking water three years ahead of schedule, with 88 per cent overall coverage achieved in 2012 (El Deber 2014), potable water access rates in Bolivia’s rural and periurban zones lag far behind those for urban areas (72 vs 96 per cent), and are among the lowest in Latin America. And only 46 per cent of Bolivians have access to improved sanitation facilities (see Table 14.2), the second-worst record in the region, after Haiti. TABLE

14.2 Access to water and sanitation in Bolivia Drinking water (% improved)

Sanitation (% improved)

Urban

Rural

Urban

Rural

1990

90.6

41.0

68.6

41.3

12.0

28.3

2000

93.2

55.7

78.9

49.0

17.6

37.0

2012

96.0

71.9

88.1

57.5

23.7

46.4

National

National

Source: Joint Monitoring Programme of the WHO and UNICEF, available at: http://www.wssinfo.org/data-estimates/tables/.

In fact there has been little ‘public’ investment in water and sanitation in Bolivia that has not come from international financial institutions and donor governments. Between 1992 and 2000, 58 per cent of investments in the sector were externally financed (mainly from the Inter-American Development Bank, the World Bank, Japanese and German aid agencies and development banks), 17 per cent by municipal governments, 8 per cent by the private sector, and 17 per cent by departmental governments (PSDSB 2010, 24–25). EMAGUA (2014,

spronk | 247 32) reports that over the period 2009–2013 it has signed agreements worth approximately US$260 million for investment in water, sanitation and irrigation: 63 per cent comes from loans (principally the Latin American development bank CAF and the Inter-American Development Bank), 24 per cent from foreign donations (principally the German and Spanish aid agencies as well as development banks), and 8 per cent from departmental and municipal governments. Less than 1 per cent of funds came from the National Treasury. The Ministry of Environment and Water is aware of the problems that dependence on external donors and lending agencies can create, noting that it needs to depend on international cooperation given the large amounts of financing needed. But this dependence means that Bolivia’s rate of water and sanitation infrastructure expansion is also dependent to some extent on external priorities, introducing a level of risk and unpredictability that could be problematic in the context of changing donor fashions and volatility in the world economy. According to Ramiro Rios, head of the Basic Services Unit of the Department of Cochabamba (author interview, September 2014), the ministry is taking steps to better involve municipal and department-level governments in the financing and execution of water and sanitation infrastructure. While this is a move in the right direction, it should not be forgotten that the national government has vast resources at its disposal that could also be mobilized for investment. Conclusion This brief survey of changes in the water and sanitation sector in Bolivia suggests that the Morales administration has expanded the role of the state in the water and sanitation sector and reasserted the ‘public’ character of basic services. The government has signalled its commitment to realizing the human right to water by creating new public agencies and seeking new loans and donations to increase investment in the sector. Rhetorically, the government has aimed to construct a more social vision for water resource management, pioneering the multilateral effort to have the human right to water recognized by the United Nations. Legal guarantees to the right to water, however, have not closed the door on privatization. While institutional reforms – the establishment of a new ministry and a new regulatory apparatus – have bolstered the role of the state as both provider and regulator of public services, the

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financing of public water and sanitation infrastructure is still largely dependent on international donors. In January 2013, Bolivia announced an ambitious plan to achieve 100 per cent coverage in access to water and sanitation by 2025 as part of its 13-point ‘Patriotic Agenda’. If the Morales government hopes to achieve its ambitious goal and fulfill the ‘buen vivir’ promises, it will need to put its money where its mouth is and dedicate more resources from the national treasury to guarantee high-quality, public services to all. Note 1 According to the National Institute of Statistics, the budget for basic sanitation for 2008 was US$80 million

(with only US$50 million spent), while in 2012 it nearly tripled to US$172 million (with US$157 million spent).

References Assies, W. 2010. The limits of state reform and multiculturalism in Latin America: Contemporary illustrations. In R. Boelens, D. H. Getches and J. A. G. Gil (eds.), Out of the mainstream: Water rights, politics and identity, 57–73. London and Washington, DC: Earthscan. Bakker, K. 2007. The ‘commons’ versus the ‘commodity’: Alter-globalization, anti-privatization, and the human right to water in the global South. Antipode 39(3): 430–455. Bakker, K. 2013. Neoliberal versus postneoliberal water: Geographies of privatization and resistance. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 103(2): 253–260. Bolpress. 2006. Evo crea el ministerio del Agua, vuelven los ministerios de Justicia y Planeamiento. 19 January. www.bolpress.com/art. php?Cod=2006011919 (accessed 22 June 2015). Cameron, M. A. and Hershberg, E. 2010. Latin America’s left turns: Politics, policies, and trajectories of change. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner.

Campanini, O. 2014. Impactos de la política minera sobre los recursos hídricos y el medio ambiente. Petropress 33: 35–47. Castro, J. E. 2007. Poverty and citizenship: Sociological perspectives on water services and public–private participation. Geoforum 38(5): 756–771. Chávez, F. 2011. Bolivia: New food policy to boost small-scale farms. IPS News Service, 19 July. www.ipsnews. net/2011/07/bolivia-new-food-policyto-boost-small-scale-farms/ (accessed 22 June 2015). Crespo Flores, C. 2000. Superintendencias: nuevos superpoderes (democracia y regulación en Bolivia). Cochabamba, Bolivia, Centro de Estudios Superiores Universitarios, UMSS. Crespo Flores, C. 2010. El DDHH al agua en la práctica: La política de agua y RRNN del gobierno de Evo Morales. Congreso Nacional de Sociología, Cochabamba, Bolivia. El Deber. 2014. Bolivia supera meta del milenio sobre cobertura de agua potable. 8 August.

spronk | 249 EMAGUA. 2014. Memoria Institucional 2013. La Paz, Bolivia: EMAGUA. Hylton, F. and Thomson, S. 2007. Revolutionary horizons: Past and present in Bolivian politics. London and New York: Verso. La Jornada. 2009. Superintendencias pasan a Ministerios, menos Hidrocarburos y Bancos. 9 February. La Razón. 2013. Reservas internacionales: El Banco Central ha demostrado una gestión coherente en el manejo de las RIN. 28 September, available at: www.la-razon.com/index. php?_url=/opinion/editorial/Reservasinternacionales_0_1915008487.html (accessed 22 June 2015). McMillan, R., Spronk, S. and Caswell, C. 2014. Popular participation, equity and co-production of water and sanitation services in Caracas, Venezuela. Water International 39(2): 201–215. Kohl, B. 2002. Stabilizing neoliberalism in Bolivia: Popular participation and privatization in Bolivia. Political Geography 21(4): 449–72. Kohl, B. 2010. Bolivia under Morales: A work in progress. Latin American Perspectives 37(3): 107–122. Olivera, O. and Lewis, T. 2005. ¡Cochabamba!: Water War in Bolivia. Cambridge, MA: South End Press. Pérez, J. 2013. A seis años de la salida de Aguas del Illimani. Bolpress, 26 January. Perreault, T. 2008. Custom and contradiction: Rural water governance and the politics of usos y costumbres in Bolivia’s irrigators’ movement. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 98(4): 834–854. Perreault, T. 2013. Dispossession by accumulation? Mining, water and the nature of enclosure in the Bolivian altiplano. Antipode 45(5): 1050–69. Pigeon, M., McDonald, D. A., Hoedeman, O. and Kishimoto, S. (eds). 2012.

Remunicipalisation: Putting water back into public hands. Amsterdam: Transnational Institute. PSDSB (Plan Sectorial de Desarrollo de Saneamiento Básico). 2010. Plan Sectorial de Desarrollo de Saneamiento Básico, 2011–2015. La Paz, Bolivia: Ministerio de Medio Ambiente y Agua. Rojas, F. 2011. Hacía la equidad: Agua y desarrollo de capacidades. Bolivia Agua: 16–19. Rosenthal, E. 2009. In Bolivia, water and ice tell of climate change. New York Times, 13 December. Sjölander Holland, A-C. 2005. The water business: Corporations versus people. London: Zed Books. Spronk, S., Crespo, C. and Olivera, M. 2012. Struggles for water justice in Latin America: Public and ‘socialpublic’ alternatives. In D. A. McDonald and G. Ruiters (eds.), Alternatives to privatization: Public options for essential services in the global South, 421–452. New York: Routledge. Spronk, S. 2007. Roots of resistance to urban water privatization in Bolivia: Public services, the ‘new working class’ and the crisis of neoliberalism. International Labor and Working Class History 71: 8–28. Spronk, S. 2010a. De lo público a lo privado y … ¿de vuelta? El desarrollo histórico del ‘problema del agua’ del tercer mundo. In F. Jacobsen, J.-A. McNeish and C. González (eds.), Conocimiento local y políticas de agua en Los Andes, 83–110. La Paz, Bolivia, Instituto Francés de Estudios Andinos (IFEA). Spronk, S. 2010b. Water and sanitation utilities in the global South: Recentering the debate on ‘efficiency’. Review of Radical Political Economics 42(2): 156–174. Swyngedouw, E. 2006. Power, money and water: Exploring the nexus. Geneva: United Nations Development Programme.

250 | fourteen Webber, J. R. 2011. From rebellion to reform in Bolivia: Class struggle, indigenous liberation, and the politics of Evo Morales. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books. Weisbrot, M., Ray, R. and Johnston, J. 2009. Bolivia: The economy during the Morales administration. Washington, DC: Centre for Policy Research.

www.cepr.net/documents/ publications/bolivia-2009-12.pdf (accessed 22 June 2015). West, M. 2014. Community water and sanitation alternatives in peri-urban Cochabamba: Progressive politics or neoliberal utopia? MA thesis, School of International Development and Global Studies. Ottawa: University of Ottawa.

1 5 | C ON C LU S I O N : B UI L D I N G A GLOBA L PRO-P U B LI C M O V E M E N T

David A. McDonald

The anti-privatization movement has been remarkably successful in exposing the negative impacts of private sector involvement in the delivery of essential services over the past 30 years. This rigorous and dogged research and activism has contributed to slowing down – and in some cases reversing – privatization and commercialization, and has revealed the false claims of progress made by corporate lobbies across multiple sectors in virtually every region of the world (Dower and Markevich 2014; Kingstone, Young and Aubrey 2013; Robinson 2013; Sarker 2014). This has been a proverbial David and Goliath battle, with poorly funded NGOs, overstretched unions, embattled community organizations and an otherwise dissimilar assortment of campaigners and academics up against large, deep-pocketed multinational corporations, mainstream media, international financial institutions and well-heeled consumer associations in favour of service marketization. The vitality and significance of this anti-privatization resistance has attracted support from progressive donors, inspired television documentaries and filled academic journals, contributing to a culture of success and the belief that the giant of privatization can be slain (Graham, Desai and McFarlane 2013; Kale-Sukra 2012; Kingsnorth 2012; Loomis 2013). Much less conspicuous has been the emergence of a pro-public movement – people and organizations seeking alternatives to privatization in the form of non-profit and non-commodified provision of essential services such as water, healthcare and electricity. Although sharing much in common with anti-privatization organizations, this pro-public movement can nevertheless be distinguished by its emphasis on trying to answer the question of what we want instead of commercialization, seeking concrete ways to (re)make public services that are universalistic, sustainable and accountable to end users.

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The case studies in this book are representative of this growing attentiveness to change, offering insights into ‘actually existing’ public service alternatives. But they also make clear how far we are from a bona fide pro-public ‘movement’ in organizational and ideological terms, with little conceptual or administrative glue to hold it together. Nor is there much in the way of resources available to develop a more systematic approach to alternative public service frameworks. There are pockets of strength regionally and sectorally (discussed below) but these are much smaller and more fractured than the relatively united and coherent anti-privatization movement. It’s not easy making public This brief concluding chapter asks why a more robust global propublic movement has been so slow in developing, and makes some modest recommendations for how it might be accelerated. I point to three key areas of concern: the inherent (and probably intractable) complexities of what constitutes a ‘public’ service; a reluctance on the part of some anti-privatization actors to be overly critical of existing public services; and the lack of an established academic framework for research. These observations are based in part on my own experiences with trying to move from an anti-privatization focus to one engaging primarily with alternative, pro-public options, as well as my reading of the theoretical and practical gulfs that separate erstwhile allies on the anti-privatization front. These observations are written out of deep respect for the creativity and courage of people that continue to fight privatization, but in a spirit of critical self-reflection.

Inherent complexity Although complex in practice, the basic principles of privatization – and the public–private partnerships that fall within its broad orbit (Bakker 2013; Grant 2013) – are relatively easy to define: the transfer of ownership and/or management of all or some of the functions of a service from a state-controlled body to a private, forprofit company. This transfer can range from the outright divestiture of state assets, to long-term management contracts with multinationals, to temporary agreements with local entrepreneurs to accomplish a discrete set of activities such as meter reading (ITPI 2011; World Bank 2014). The problems of privatization are also relatively easy to identify and describe. Rising prices, cut-offs to the poor, unfulfilled infrastructure

mcdonal d | 253 promises, corruption, violations of environmental regulations and redlining of low-income communities are but a few of the concerns that have been broadly documented around the world (Auriol and Blanc 2009; Boubakri et al. 2013; Friedman and Parenti 2003; Hahn et al. 2012; Narsiah and Ahmed 2012). Hundreds of millions of people have felt these effects directly and many more have been alerted to them through the media. No such easy narratives apply to the push for remaking public services. Even those in favour of change are often unaware of the extent of public service successes, and unsure what an alternative service delivery model should look like. As a result, people are frequently at odds with each other about what they want to pursue and why, serving to splinter organizations otherwise united in their opposition to privatization. Nor are these differences trivial, often falling along highly divisive and well-established ideological lines such as ‘big state’ versus ‘community autonomy’, making it difficult to develop and communicate a unified position that can easily attract new supporters. This absence of a clear and consistent counter-narrative to privatization also frustrates fundraising efforts in a donor market already stretched thin and where mainstream donor agencies often support public–private solutions (Hilary 2005; Ravitch 2013; Wilkins 2014). The media struggles to follow the story as well. Print and digital outlets have produced compelling and dramatic coverage of anti-privatization efforts over the years, but largely disregard the more mundane and inconsistent storylines related to the restructuring of public services. The uprisings against water privatization in Cochabamba, Bolivia, in 2000 are a case in point. Having attracted widespread international media attention at the time, there has been virtual silence since, with the hard slog of remaking public water barely registering on the global news radar screen. This is understandable given the complex, divisive and often bureaucratic post-privatization negotiations that generally make up these processes, but it speaks volumes about the challenges that a pro-public movement faces in generating mass interest. One notable exception in this regard is the growing media interest in the remunicipalization of water and electricity (Milne 2014; Provost and Kennard 2014).

A reluctance to be (overly) critical Differing pro-public viewpoints also shape the extent to which people and organizations are willing to be

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critical of past public service models. For some, defending ‘old’ forms of public services (e.g. the welfare state) is a default position. This is understandable, especially in countries in the North where state services have been relatively effective and equitable, and where there are very real losses that come with privatization. As a result, some of the stiffest resistance to ‘new’ forms of public services come from organizations protecting older service delivery models. In countries in the South, by contrast, there is generally more willingness to be critical of state-led service models because welfare systems either do not exist or were so heavily biased toward elite and corporate interests as to deny them widespread popular support. This state of mind may also help to explain the bigger appetite for new types of public service configuration in these regions. Indeed, countries in the South are the focus of this book because necessity and marginalization have catalysed a broader range of experimentation with service options there – although this is certainly no guarantee of success given the odds stacked against public sector transformation in regions with limited resources, massive infrastructure gaps and ongoing neoliberal forms of structural adjustment. Nevertheless, the reluctance to ‘bad-mouth’ existing public services is understandable. It can feed into the privatization agenda and undermine struggles to retain what is left of the public services that took decades to build. It is therefore critically important to be strategic about how one frames critiques of existing public service models. But defending or celebrating poorly run or inequitable public services simply because they are owned by the state (or are community-run) does little to advance the cause of improving their outcomes and effectiveness. Improvement can only come with critical engagement, and if transparency is a feature we value in publicness in general then it is essential that we carry this commitment over to the debates about how to improve pro-public services. There is also a concern that shifting attention to pro-public organizing runs the risk of weakening the capacity and progress of the antiprivatization movement – even sending out a signal that privatization is no longer a threat. These concerns are also valid. Privatization has not gone away. Multinationals and neoliberal states continue to develop cunning ways to advance the commercialization of essential services and we must keep a close eye on these trends to understand what is happening and publicize it widely. But if we do not also tell people

mcdonal d | 255 what we are ‘for’ we risk stagnating into rearguard opposition, lending credence to Starr’s (1988, 40) still-relevant observation that ‘[t]he privatization debate puts the advocates of more generous public programmes entirely on the defensive’. Public sector unions are emblematic of all these tensions. Even those unions that are relatively well resourced struggle to keep up with the neoliberal restructuring that affects their members. Much of the (excellent) anti-privatization work they do is necessarily responding to crisis situations in an effort to protect what they have, both for their members and the people they serve. Thinking about alternative public service futures is a luxury that many unions simply cannot afford. Community organizations and NGOs may have less of a vested interest in the status quo, and perhaps more to gain from remaking public services into something altogether new, but they tend to have even fewer resources than public sector unions and lack the capacity to coordinate a push for alternative models. And, as we saw in the chapters on South Africa and Colombia in this volume, creating labour–community alliances to push for revised public services has been difficult to accomplish, and even harder to scale up. In short, the fact that the pro-public movement is largely an outgrowth of the anti-privatization movement is both a blessing and a curse. It helps to build on an existing network of people and organizations that have achieved remarkable success in challenging the privatization agenda, but also acts as a check on moving forward, with widely differing positions, vulnerabilities and capacities affecting what people and organizations can and cannot say about public services from the past, and shaping their demands and appetites for change in the future.

The academy And what of academia? Scholars have been active in the anti-privatization debate for decades but have been relatively quiet in comparison when it comes to a critical engagement with postprivatization public services. There is often a token attempt at the end of an anti-privatization article or conference paper about the need to move beyond critique (something I have been guilty of myself), but little in the way of focused, sustained engagement with the conceptual frameworks and concrete details of what alternatives might look like. There are, for example, no dedicated journals on the topic and it rarely features as a theme in academic meetings.

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What does exist in academia tends to be scattered in its origins and places of publication, as well as in its methodologies and conceptual frameworks. Much of the research is also conducted by NGOs, and that research does not often find its way into academic venues. As a result, focused study on the topic is difficult to find and even harder to compare and evaluate, especially across sectors. In fact, it may be the sectoral divide that most starkly separates the literature (and the pro-public movement in general), with research on water largely restricted to water journals, health research in medical journals, and so on, with remarkably little cross-sectoral referencing. A pro-public water scholar (or activist) in Mumbai is much more likely to know about similar work on water in Mexico or France than they are about public service reform in health, electricity or waste management in their own city. Even this book is representative of these fractured and dispersed nodes of research, despite being the product of the first international conference (to our knowledge) dedicated to exploring the theory and practice of ‘what it means to put public in public services’, with clear terms of reference. The chapters are successful, in the end, in helping to move the debate forward, but are nowhere near as conceptually coherent as a volume focused on ‘problems with privatization’ could be. This is not to sound pessimistic. This variety of opinion and method, combined with the reality of failed privatizations and growing calls for a rethink of public services, can only prove to be fertile ground for future debate and publications. But uncertainty can beget uncertainty. Most scholarship is grounded in familiar, established theoretical and methodological frameworks that allow for incremental inputs. It will take time to build these foundations and to overcome the obstacles of ambiguity in an increasingly competitive and peer reviewobsessed academic market. Finding one’s footing in such an uncertain intellectual terrain can be an unsettling, and risky, career move. And finally, there is the unease that many academics feel – again, myself included – in imposing ideas on other people’s service delivery systems, even when developed in consultation with local stakeholders. Telling people what is wrong with privatization is one thing. Suggesting what they might want to put in its place is quite another, assuming a much higher order of moral authority.

mcdonal d | 257 Moving forward How do we find traction on this loose and potholed road? The answers are to be found in large part in the challenges outlined above. First, we need to focus more energy on the study of actually existing examples of remade public services and how they might be transferred (in whole or in part) elsewhere. Like it or not, privatizations are failing, states are reclaiming service ownership in some countries, and non-state actors are filling the vacuum left by both in others. It is intellectually and politically imperative that we develop a better network for understanding these developments as part of a broader commitment to challenging and reversing service commercialization. Second, we need to acknowledge and respect the diverse and even contradictory ways in which public services are being (re)built in different places and sectors, and learn how to work within this terrain of difference. Factionalism has long been the scourge of the left. We should not allow those in favour of privatization to use these tensions to divide and conquer a pro-public movement, even if it is a highly differentiated one. And finally, more academics (and funders) should push themselves to go beyond a critique of privatization to ask ‘What do we want?’ while at the same time remaining alert to the ever-shifting question of ‘What is wrong with privatization?’

Building on what we have Perhaps the most successful pro-public movement to date has been in the water sector, which has a robust (if poorly funded) network of NGOs and social movements active throughout the world, with one of the most important examples being Red VIDA (or Vigilancia Interamericana para la Defensa y el Derecho al Agua, with 54 organizations from 16 countries operating throughout the Americas). There is also an Africa Water Network, but it is largely concentrated in anglophone Africa and is not secure in its funding and organization. Asian water networks, for their part, tend to be more country-based or sub-regional, but they are well connected to the broader international pro-public water movement via organizations such as WaterJustice.org, which has been particularly effective in the research and promotion of revitalized public water developments, notably remunicipalization (Kishimoto, Lobina and Petitjean 2015; Pigeon et al. 2012). The fact that water has received more attention than other sectors is likely due to its highly publicized struggles against privatization and its

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entirely non-substitutable characteristics (as opposed to healthcare or education which can be offered in many different ways). Water systems are also relatively easy to scale up and down, and can be operated using alternative technologies and governance models. Healthcare has also seen rapid growth in pro-public organizing (e.g. People’s Health Movement [PHM], Asociación Latinoamericana de Medicina Social [Alames] and the Regional Network on Equity in Health in Southern Africa [Equinet]), but the multi-faceted and multi-scalar nature of healthcare has made it much more difficult here to generate a popular narrative of reform. Tertiary hospitals are very different from rural primary health clinics, and parallel systems of ‘modern’ and ‘traditional’ medicine exist in many countries, making it even more challenging to integrate public initiatives within the sector. Electricity, waste management and banking are by far the least organized of the sectors explored in this book in terms of the development and conceptualization of public service alternatives. This is a result, once again, of their relative substitutability, as well as the fact that they can be (though need not be) highly technical and capitalintensive in structure. Rethinking publicness in the electricity sector has also been complicated by the ‘unbundling’ trend over the past 30 years, which has diffused public ownership and control (Pollitt 2008). As a result, few regional – and no global – fora exist that are working explicitly on the development of creative public alternatives to privatization (although there is a global network of waste pickers pushing to be integrated into municipal waste collection systems around the world, under the auspices of Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing [WIEGO]). It should also be noted that there has been relatively little work done on public sanitation – the ‘ugly cousin’ of potable water – though this is addressed somewhat in this volume with the critical discussion of ‘community-led total sanitation’. Regionally, the largest number of interesting rethinks on public service alternatives are to be found in Latin America. This should come as no surprise given the region’s larger set of experiments with alternatives to neoliberalism, and its long history of anti-corporate struggle, although criticisms are emerging around the lack of real change in some of the most high-profile cases, such as water reforms in Bolivia (this volume). Asia has strong pockets of pro-public movements, while Africa, by contrast, is the weakest of the three regions in terms

mcdonal d | 259 of ‘actually existing’ public alternatives. This is especially true of subSaharan Africa, still strongly influenced by international financial institutions such as the World Bank (Ferguson 2006). Combined with the relatively conservative/neoliberal regimes in power, and limited state capacities, the outlook for progressive public sector reform in Africa is not particularly encouraging, which may nonetheless underscore the need for focusing attention on it. There is certainly resistance to privatization on the continent – and some promising propublic developments in North Africa (Bennasr and Verdeil 2014; Hall et al. 2009) – but these have yet to morph into effective continental voices on public alternatives. And finally, there is scope for sharper focus on key thematic areas, especially with regard to a better understanding of the gendered aspects of public services. While there is a considerable body of work on the impacts of privatization on women and gender relations (Eichler 2013; Laurie 2011), and a substantial literature on the gendered dimensions of the public sphere in general (Fraser 1995; Göle 1997), relatively little has been written about how gender shapes the ways that public services are conceived of and operationalized and how they might best address the realities of gender relations in different sectors. The chapters by Baruah and by Sultana, Mohanty and Miraglia (this volume) go some way toward addressing this concern, although the research gap is still a yawning one. Conclusion Making Public in a Privatized World is a study of alternative forms of service praxis: an amalgam of people, institutions, actions, ideas and expectations. This book has attempted to contribute to a better awareness of these possibilities by advancing our understanding of publicness via an exploration of ‘actually existing’ efforts to make public services in the face of privatization. The stories are about real people working within real political, ideological, economic, technical and cultural constraints to provide water, electricity, healthcare, waste management and banking services. They are a mere snapshot of the millions of different struggles for better public amenities taking place around the world every day, but they help shed light on the multiple ways in which alternatives to privatization are being realized and point to the possibilities (and limitations) of different forms of public services in the future.

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The book also reveals deep conceptual and practical tensions in efforts to build a global pro-public movement. And because so much public-making is about the mechanical aspects of administrative systems, organizational capacity and other technical matters, much of what is taking place on the ground may not seem all that exciting. This kind of commonplace activity may be disappointing to some after the high-flying rhetoric and energy of many anti-privatization struggles, but it is important to tackle these daily realities head on. Water must be tested for bacteria. Electricity lines need repairs. Healthcare providers must be trained. In this respect, struggles for a pro-public future will require a combination of debate, cooperation and the daily grind of making change in the face of stiff resistance. There may be no ideal model for what we want, but we can develop better landscapes of possibility. References Auriol, E. and Blanc, A. 2009. Capture and corruption in public utilities: The cases of water and electricity in SubSaharan Africa. Utilities Policy 17(2): 203–216. Bakker, K. 2013. Neoliberal versus postneoliberal water: Geographies of privatization and resistance. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 103(2): 253–260. Bennasr, A. and Verdeil, E. 2014. An ‘Arab Spring’ for corporatization? Tunisia’s national electricity company (STEG). In D. A. McDonald (ed.), Rethinking corporatization: Public utilities in the global South, 88–106. London: Zed Books. Boubakri, N., Cosset, J. C., Debab, N. and Valéry, P. 2013. Privatization and globalization: An empirical analysis. Journal of Banking and Finance 37(6): 1898–1914. Dower, P. C. and Markevich, A. 2014. A history of resistance to privatization in Russia. Journal of Comparative Economics 42(4): 855–873. Eichler, M. 2013. Gender and the privatization of security: Neoliberal

transformation of the militarized gender order. Critical Studies on Security 1(3): 311–325. Ferguson, J. 2006. Global shadows: Africa in the neoliberal world order. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Fraser, N. 1995. Politics, culture, and the public sphere: Toward a postmodern conception. In L. Nicholson and S. Seidman (eds.), Social postmodernism: Beyond identity politics, 287–312. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Friedman, A. and Parenti, C. (eds). 2003. Capitalist punishment: Prison privatization and human rights. London: Zed Books. Göle, N. 1997. The gendered nature of the public sphere. Public Culture 10(1): 61–81. Graham, S., Desai, R. and McFarlane, C. 2013. Water wars in Mumbai. Public Culture 25(169): 115–141. Grant, M. 2013. Water privatization overview: A public interest perspective on for-profit, private sector provision of water and sewer services in the United

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Laurie, N. 2011. Gender water networks: Femininity and masculinity in water politics in Bolivia. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 35(1): 172–188. Loomis, E. 2013. The global water crisis privatization and neocolonialism in film. Radical History Review 116: 189–195. Milne, S. 2014. The tide is turning against the scam that is privatisation. The Guardian, July 9. www.theguardian. com/commentisfree/2014/jul/09/ tide-turning-against-privatisation (accessed October 30, 2014). Narsiah, S. and Ahmed, W. 2012. The neoliberalization of the water and energy sectors in South Africa and India. Journal of Asian and African Studies 47(6): 679–694. Pigeon. M., McDonald, D. A., Hoedeman, O. and Kishimoto, S. (eds). 2012. Remunicipalisation: Putting water back into public hands. Amsterdam: Transnational Institute. Pollitt, M. 2008. The arguments for and against ownership unbundling of energy transmission networks. Energy Policy 36(2): 704–713. Provost, C., and Kennard, K. 2014. Hamburg at forefront of global drive to reverse privatisation of city services. The Guardian, November 12. www.theguardian.com/cities/2014/ nov/12/hamburg-global-reverseprivatisation-city-services (accessed January 10, 2015). Ravitch, D. 2013. Reign of error: The hoax of the privatization movement and the danger to America’s public schools. New York: Vintage. Robinson, J. L. 2013. Contested water: the struggle against water privatization in the United States and Canada. Boston, MA: MIT Press. Sarker, K. 2014. Neoliberal state, austerity, and workers’ resistance in

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development: A critical feminist analysis of Oprah, Madonna, and Angelina. Communication, Culture and Critique 8(2): 163–181. World Bank. 2014. Public–private partnerships reference guide: Version 2.0. Washington, DC: World Bank.

A B OU T TH E CO N T R I B UT O R S

Bipasha Baruah is an associate professor in the Department of Women’s Studies and Feminist Research at the University of Western Ontario, and holds the Canada research chair in global women’s issues. Her most recent book is Women and Property in Urban India. Madeleine Bélanger Dumontier is project manager for the Municipal Services Project, coordinating communications, research within the network, and events. From 2009 to 2011 she was director of communications for the Canadian Foundation for the Americas (FOCAL). Yoswa M. Dambisya is director general of the East, Central and Southern African Health Community and coordinates the Human Resources for Health programme of work in EQUINET, the Regional Network on Equity in Health in Southern Africa. He was previously part of the Health Systems Research Group, Department of Pharmacy, University of Limpopo, South Africa.

Walter Flores is the director of the Center for the Study of Equity and Governance in Health Systems, a steering committee member of the Community of Practitioners on Accountability and Social Action in Health (COPASAH), and a member of the People’s Health Movement. Mary Galvin is an associate professor in development studies at the University of Johannesburg. She has worked as a researcher, development practitioner and social justice activist in South Africa since 1992. She established and directed two South African non-profit organizations, the Regional Consultative Forum on Rural Development and Umphilo waManzi (‘Water is Life’), and also coordinated a national multi-stakeholder initiative, The Water Dialogues. Ali Rıza Güngen teaches at the Department of Political Science, Ondokuz Mayıs University, Samsun, Turkey. He received the Young

264 | co fourteen n t r i b u tors

Social Scientist Award from the Turkish Social Sciences Association in 2013. He is co-author of Financialization, Debt Crisis and Collapse.

Allie B. Kibwika-Muyinda is assistant commissioner, human resource development in the Ministry of Health, Uganda. He has previously held various positions including that of director of operations and institutional development at the East, Central and Southern African Health Community.

Marcela López completed her PhD in the Department of Geography at the Freie Universität Berlin, where she conducted research on conflicts over access to water in Medellín. She has also worked for several years in the NGO sector in Colombia. Mulalo Manenzhe is a research pharmacist who previously worked for the University of Limpopo, Turfloop Campus, and is now with the Witwatersrand Research Consortium working on HIV prevention.

Thomas Marois is a senior lecturer on development studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, UK. He has recently authored the book States, Banks and Crisis: Emerging Finance Capitalism in Mexico and Turkey. Dale T. McKinley is an independent writer, researcher and lecturer based in Johannesburg, South Africa. He is a long-time political activist and has been involved in social movement, community and political struggles for over three decades. He is presently the Gauteng coordinator for the Right2Know campaign and a member of its National Working Group.

Sarah Miraglia is a doctoral candidate in sociology at Syracuse University, US. Her doctoral research examines an International Labour Organization programme aimed at improving labour practices in Cambodian garment factories. Adrian Murray is a doctoral candidate in the School of International Development and Global Studies at the University of Ottawa, Canada. His research explores the experiences of organized labour and social movements in opposition to the neoliberal restructuring of public services, particularly in Southern Africa. Melanie Samson is the Africa waste sector specialist for Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO)

cont ributors spronk | 265 and a senior lecturer in the School of Geography, Archaeology and Environmental Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand. She was a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council postdoctoral fellow at the Public Affairs Research Institute at the time of writing this chapter.

Susan Spronk is an associate professor in the School of International Development and Global Studies at the University of Ottawa, Canada. Her research interests include social movements and class formation in Latin America, critical perspectives on capitalism and development, and water governance.

Farhana Sultana is associate professor of geography at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, and faculty associate of the Women’s and Gender Studies Department, Syracuse University, US. Her most recent book is The Right to Water: Politics, Governance and Social Struggles.

Chandra Talpade Mohanty is professor of women’s and gender studies and dean’s professor of the humanities at Syracuse University, US. She is the author of many books and articles, including Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity.

Sandra van Niekerk is based in South Africa where she works for the Public Services International Research Unit (PSIRU) as a researcher supporting affiliates in the Africa region. She has extensive experience working in, and with, trade unions as an organizer, researcher and educator. For many years she was the national education officer for the South African Municipal Workers’ Union. Mildred E. Warner is a professor in the Department of City and Regional Planning at Cornell University, US. Her work focuses primarily on local government service delivery, economic development and planning across generations. Prior to her professorship at Cornell, she served as a program officer with the Ford Foundation and as associate director of Cornell’s Community and Rural Development Institute.

IN D E X

access to electricity 100, 102, 112, 179 to finance 17, 207–8 to healthcare 85, 87–8, 90, 141 to water 16, 105, 151–3, 158, 161, 165–6, 168–72, 175–6, 243, 246 accountability 8, 10, 17, 46, 50, 68, 75, 85–6, 88–9, 93, 114, 126, 128, 150–1, 188 Acuavalle 25, 27, 30, 32 advocacy 26, 84, 86, 88, 90 AEC (Ahmedabad Electricity Company) 104–10, 113 affordability 6, 11, 16, 136, 149–50, 156 Africa 3, 12, 16, 128, 135, 140, 179–82, 187–8, 190, 257–9 Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation 103–4, 109 alternatives to privatization 2, 12, 26, 34–6, 149, 166, 175, 251, 258–9 ANC (African National Congress) 59, 61–3, 66–7, 74–5 ANC-Alliance 64, 66, 70–1, 74 anti-privatization movement 2, 251, 254–5 apartheid 60, 62 ARB (Asociación de Recicladores de Bogotá) 47–8, 51–4 autonomy 16, 29, 33, 149, 189 Bangladesh 15, 103, 120, 149–62 banks public 17, 197–200, 202, 204–14 state-owned 17 barrio 166, 171–4, 176 Belo Horizonte 13, 41, 43–5, 49–51, 54 benchmarking 11, 122, 220, 222, 237 Bogotá 13, 41, 43, 47, 50–2, 54 Bolivia 17–18, 25, 84, 234–48, 253, 258 Brazil 13, 41, 44, 52, 54, 61, 103 Cali 12, 24, 29 capacity-building 4, 14, 33, 81, 86

capital 62–3, 189, 202, 204, 210–11, 213 capitalism 17, 197, 199–200, 202–4, 210, 212, 218 capitalist development 197, 202 CBOs (community-based organizations) 27, 62–3, 65, 68–72, 74–5, 81–2, 86–90, 93, 99, 104, 109–12, 159, 175, 241 cities 13–14, 16–17, 28–9, 41–5, 47–8, 51, 53–5, 102–3, 108, 150–2, 168–71, 173–4, 218–19, 239–41 citizenship 16, 85, 149–50, 152, 157–60, 166, 168, 173, 175 civil society organizations 14, 36, 51, 61, 81, 92, 103, 113 class 150, 155, 161 climate change 7, 180 CLTS (Community-Led Total Sanitation) 15, 117–24, 126–31, 258 co-production 45, 125–6, 128 Cochabamba 234–7, 240–1, 253 Colombia 12–13, 16, 23, 25–8, 34, 36, 47, 75, 165, 169 commercialization 5, 7, 62, 105, 143, 149, 165–6, 251, 254 commodification 5, 157, 175 common good 4 commons 5, 35 community aqueducts 23–4, 26–9, 35–7 community leaders 24, 31, 81, 87, 91–2, 124, 126, 171–2, 174 community water 12, 29, 241 management 28, 31 competition 101, 141, 213, 221–3, 225, 228–9, 237 COMUDE (Council for Development) 88–9 connection fees 106–7, 113 constitution 18, 52, 235, 237 consumers 101, 108–9, 150, 157–8, 168–9

index | 267 contracting 13, 17, 46, 48, 91–2, 158, 187, 218–29, 235–6 cooperatives 44–5, 48–9, 188, 200, 205, 208, 212, 236, 240 COPASAH (Community of Practitioners on Accountability and Social Action in Health) 93 corporatization 3, 101, 156, 167, 221 COSATU (Congress of South African Trade Unions) 61–2, 64, 66–8, 71–2 cost recovery 3, 10, 28 cut-offs 11, 65, 252 defecation, open 15, 117–21, 126 democracy 59–60 development banks 204, 246–7 developmental state 3–4, 67 Dhaka 15, 149–52, 157, 159 disconnection 6, 70, 168–9, 175 DSK (Dushtha Shasthya Kendra) 153, 159 Durban 69, 188 DWASA (Dhaka Water Supply and Sewerage Authority) 151, 156–7, 160–2 ecosystems 26, 30, 32 efficiency 10–11, 32, 137, 140, 149, 151, 156, 167–8, 172, 176, 187, 228 social 18, 240 electricity 1, 11–12, 25, 70, 100–2, 104, 107, 112, 132, 179, 181–2, 184–9, 258–60 reform 113–14 supply 101–3, 106, 111–12, 170, 181–2, 186–7 electrification 99–100, 108–9, 113 energy 1, 62, 102, 168, 180, 182, 186–7, 190–3, 244, 257 environment 7, 9, 12, 24, 27, 30, 32, 34–5, 65, 238–9, 243, 247, 253 EPM (Empresas Públicas de Medellín) 16, 165–78 equity 9–10, 14–15, 18, 73, 83, 89, 93, 136, 149–51, 156 Eskom 19, 187–8 FBOs (faith-based organizations) 132–3, 135–8, 140–5

fees 105, 138, 140–1, 154 financial sustainability 28, 140 financing 4, 7, 17–18, 29, 205, 247–8 public services 16, 195 Gambia 182, 184–5 gender 9, 149–50, 153, 155, 160–3 grid, national 181, 184–6, 188 Guatemala 2, 13, 81–3, 85–6, 167 Gujarat 103–5, 107, 109 Halkbank 205, 207–10 health services 15, 85, 87, 89, 91, 132–3, 135–6, 141 health systems 91, 133, 137 health workers 137–8, 141, 143 healthcare 1, 3, 12, 25, 86–7, 89–90, 134, 141–2, 221, 242, 251, 258–9 hospitals 87, 135–6, 139–41 private 133–4 illegal connections 105–6, 170, 172–3 İller Bank 207–9 IMF (International Monetary Fund) 210 India 2, 13–14, 41, 45, 53–5, 99, 101, 103, 105, 107–9, 111–15 indigenous 2, 13–14, 28, 81–5, 91–3, 150, 234, 236–7 inequities 83, 85, 161 informal settlements 14, 99, 101–3, 109, 159, 169 infrastructure 29–30, 71, 103, 159, 170–1, 175, 179, 213, 244, 246 insourcing 12, 17, 218–19, 222, 224–5, 227–9 IPPs (Independent Power Producers) 182, 187 Johannesburg 61, 71 Kalkınma Bank 207–9 Kenya 103, 182, 185–6, 189 KKPKP (Kagad Kach Patra Kashtakari Panchayat) 45–6, 49–51, 54–6 Korail 150, 152–6, 159–60 La Paz 235, 239, 245 La Sirena 12, 24, 27–37

268 | i n d ex labour–community alliances 12–13, 24, 30–1, 33–5, 37, 59, 64, 68, 71–3, 75, 255 labour movement 25, 60, 63, 65, 67, 69–70, 234 land tenure 14, 16, 100, 108, 111–12, 165–6, 168–9, 173 Latin America 12, 16, 23, 26, 36, 234, 238, 240, 245–6, 258 loans 17, 106, 108, 199–200, 208–9, 235, 247 local governments 17, 47, 63, 123, 133, 183, 186–7, 218–25, 228–30 MDGs (Millennium Development Goals) 117, 173, 246 Medellín 16, 47, 165–70, 174–5 meters 99, 101, 110, 158–60, 166, 252 methodology 5, 11–12, 14, 30, 45, 53, 85, 120, 150, 184, 201, 204, 256 mini-grids 182, 184, 186, 189–90 monitoring 8, 85–90, 92, 121–3, 128, 190, 222, 224–5, 228 citizen 14, 81 community 81, 82, 89 Morales, Evo 17–18, 234–5, 239, 241, 245–6 municipal government 90–1, 239, 242, 246–7 municipalities 13–14, 17, 27, 42, 44–52, 54–5, 88, 99–100, 104–5, 112, 167–70, 187–8, 219, 223–4, 227–8 neoliberalism 43, 52, 166, 201, 204–6, 209, 234, 246 NGOs (non-governmental organizations) 14, 34, 51–3, 99–100, 103–4, 107, 109–10, 112–17, 122, 156, 182, 185, 240, 255–7 non-payment 14, 100, 102, 112, 168–9, 175, 200 norms, universal 11 NUMSA (National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa) 60, 74–5

participation 8, 11, 14, 86, 92, 111, 121, 124, 128, 151, 153, 166 partnership 4, 14–15, 24, 27, 29, 31, 33–4, 99, 103–4, 128, 167 community–community 4, 14 public–community 4, 37 planning 121, 124, 151–2 power relations 82–3, 85, 161, 203 private banks 17, 200, 202, 204, 206, 208–11 privatization, reverse 17, 218–19, 222 privatization reversals 218–19, 222, 224–5, 227, 229–30, 235 pro-public 2, 5, 11, 18, 64, 73, 103–4, 251–60 movement 251, 255–8 services 73, 254 protests 69, 235, 237–8 PSI (Public Services International) 31, 36 public company 165, 167, 169 public control 48, 199, 219, 221, 228 public ethos 7, 10, 17, 29, 136–7, 142, 219 public good 16, 26, 165–6, 171, 213 public health services 2, 14, 81–2 public sector 13, 25, 41, 49–51, 54, 64, 125, 133, 138, 190, 220–1 unions 25, 36, 255 workers 17, 24–5, 64, 68, 72, 190 public service delivery 7, 17, 50, 59, 62, 67, 71, 101, 118–19, 219–20, 225–6, 254 public service reform 2, 256 public sphere 13, 41, 49–50, 54, 259–60 public systems 15, 156–7, 221 public values 220, 222–3, 228–31 public water 15, 23–5, 27, 36, 149–51, 157, 161–2, 174, 238, 253 defence of 26, 34 publicness 5–6, 12, 14, 17–19, 24–5, 123–4, 132, 143, 176, 213, 220, 254, 259 Pune 13, 41, 43, 45–6, 49, 51, 53–4 quality 6, 7, 14, 17, 49, 73, 85, 100–1, 138, 143, 151, 155, 167 quasi-public 2, 14, 132

outsourcing 17, 218, 225, 228 PAR (participatory action-research) 14, 84–5, 92

reclaimers 13, 41–55 recyclables 44, 46, 48–9, 51 recycling 13, 42, 44, 47, 49, 51

index | 269 Red VIDA 24, 36–7, 240, 257 religion 15, 83, 132–3, 143 remunicipalization 47, 218, 235–6, 253, 257 renewable energy 16, 179–82, 184, 186–8, 190 resistance 60, 62, 108, 110, 159, 259–61 rural areas 15, 23, 26, 28, 81, 100–1, 114, 119, 139–41, 156, 170, 174, 179, 182–4, 186 Saath 14, 99, 103–4, 106–7, 109, 111 SACP (South African Communist Party) 59, 61–2 SAMWU (South African Municipal Workers’ Union) 62, 69, 71 sanitation sector 15, 23, 29, 105, 118, 151, 234–5, 237, 239, 242, 247 service quality 9, 99, 133, 136–7, 167, 218, 221–5, 228 SEWA (Self-Employed Women’s Association) 14, 99, 103, 107 Sintracuavalle 24–5, 27, 31, 34–5 Sintrambiente 24, 26–7, 30–1, 34–5 slum electrification 14, 100, 107–8, 112–13 slum electrification programme 104, 108, 112, 114 Slum Networking Project 104–5, 109, 111 slum residents 100–1, 103–6, 109, 112, 154, 156, 158–61 slums 101–4, 106–7, 109–11, 114–15, 152–3, 155–62 SNDT Women’s University 45–7, 49–50 social movement unionism 61 social movements 45, 51–3, 65, 67, 70, 74–5, 257, 262 solidarity 10, 15, 33–6, 52, 68, 72, 84, 132–3, 136, 139–40, 176, 213 South Africa 12–13, 43, 59–60, 64, 73–5, 114, 122, 179–80, 182, 187–8, 255 state-owned enterprises 204–5, 237 state-owned utilities 179, 187 sub-Saharan Africa 16, 179, 181, 259–60 subsidies 49, 106–7, 122, 184, 189–90 sustainability 7, 60, 91–3, 121, 128, 138, 141, 143, 149, 160, 169

SWaCH (Solid Waste Collection and Handling) 46–7, 49, 54 tariffs 33, 99, 106–7, 184–5, 189, 238 toilets 119, 122–3, 127 trade unions 4, 23–7, 30–9, 45–6, 52, 60–6, 68–76, 84, 255 Turkey 197–8, 204–17 UDF (United Democratic Front) 61, 63, 74 Uganda 1, 15, 132–3, 135–7, 142, 182 UHC (Universal Health Coverage) 141 United States 12, 17, 48, 106–8, 110, 139, 153, 218–25, 227–33, 244–5, 247–8 USAID 104, 107 user fees 15, 24, 132, 134, 138–41 utilities 14, 27, 99–100, 107, 112–13, 182, 186 VakifBank 207, 209–10 waste 42, 46–7, 175, 245 waste management 1, 12–13, 41–5, 47–9, 51, 256, 258–9 waste pickers 46, 54–7 water 18–20, 23–7, 29–30, 37–9, 149–76, 221, 234–43, 246–9, 256–7, 259–61 gendered 150 illegal 158, 176 municipal 16, 151, 154, 156–8, 160 potable 26, 151, 170, 172–3, 258 privatizing 25–6, 75, 253 spatial characteristics of 166, 175 water activists 27–8, 36 water company 166–7, 171, 176 water conservation 32–3 water governance 18, 28, 32, 149, 151, 235, 239, 258 water justice 150, 157–8, 160–2 water quality 28, 172–3, 242–3 water sector reforms 234 water services 23, 25, 27–8, 99, 149, 168–9, 174–5 water systems, community-owned 12, 35 water utilities 26, 236, 239 water vendors 154, 158, 241 Water War 235, 241

270 | i n d ex welfare state 254 WIEGO (Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing) 54, 258 wind 16, 127, 179, 181, 186–7 women 11, 14, 16, 91, 99, 103, 108, 110, 112, 124, 149–51, 153–7, 160–2 poor 15, 104, 108, 150, 155–6, 160–1 workers 9, 12, 23–5, 27, 30–1, 33–5, 41,

44–5, 49–50, 60–1, 63–5, 70–3, 138 informal 13, 41, 46, 49, 60, 64 public service 27 working class 60, 63–6, 73–4 World Bank 10, 18, 28, 104, 117, 121, 182, 201, 246, 259 Ziraat 207–10