The limits of water commodification in Africa

The application of explicitly neoliberal philosophy to African state policies began in the 1980s with macroeconomics, but by the 1990s had worked its way through to microeconomic and developmental fields. In the case of water and sanitation services provision, the World Bank played an instrumental role in transmitting market-based strategies to national, municipal-scale and local-level projects. In settings as diverse as Johannesburg commercial outsourcing and African rural village water projects, we consider the core dynamics and the most important internal contradictions, as well as political resistance associated with the contradictory application of neoliberalism to water services.