ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the underlying pressures to decentralize and privatize state water services, rooted in capital’s drive to commodify. The 1990s and early 2000s witnessed the formal establishment of “water as an economic good” in multilateral programs and multinational corporate expansion of service provision. But, in addition to various forms of economic logic that have driven water commodification, countervailing pressure emerged, both implicitly in the form of poverty, and more explicitly from trade unions, community and consumer groups, environmentalists and other citizens’ movements. The case of South African water during the first decade of post-apartheid democracy is illustrative, not only for the way decentralization of financing initially limited access, but also for the revealing ways resistance shifted state policy to a “free basic water” tariff in 2001, which still left consumers disempowered because it retained crucial micro-neoliberal pricing principles.
