The Age of Commodity: Water Privatization in Southern Africa

Extract

The Age of Commodity: Water Privatization in Southern Africa, David A. McDonald and Greg Ruiters, eds., London and Sterling, VA: Earthscan Press, 2005, pp. xv, 303.

This collection of essays is a cutting-edge study of neoliberal public service reform in Southern Africa. While most studies of water privatization, such as Karen Bakker's An Uncooperative Commodity: Privatizing Water in England and Wales (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) and Vandana Shiva's Water Wars (Cambridge: South End Press, 2002), have concentrated on the transfer of ownership and control from the state to private corporations, privatization is more broadly defined to include the transfer of ownership and/or decision-making responsibility to NGOs and community organizations. The editors rightly emphasize, moreover, that privatization is not the only disturbing trend in public service reform. Corporatization—the creation of publicly owned and operated companies that run like private businesses—threatens to entrench the discriminatory aspects of infrastructure distribution that characterized colonialism and apartheid in the region in the previous era.