Turning Water into a Commodity
Digital Innovation and the Private Sector as Development Agent
By Christiane Tristl
Published
Sep 1, 2025Page count
240 pagesISBN
978-1529245479Dimensions
234 x 156 mmImprint
Bristol University PressPublished
Sep 1, 2025Page count
240 pagesISBN
978-1529245486Dimensions
234 x 156 mmImprint
Bristol University Press
Turning Water into a Commodity
Pay-as-you-go water dispensers are used in many areas in the Global South, particularly those that are ‘off-grid’. This book examines the increasing influence of private sector companies and philanthrocapitalist organisations in development cooperation by focusing on the example of water supply to the inhabitants of rural and peri-urban areas of Kenya.
The book shows how private sector approaches open up remote regions to permanent arrangements of transnational market-based water supply beyond state sovereignty, which define the poor as paying customers and sideline local approaches and actors.
Christiane Tristl is postdoctoral researcher in the Economic Geography Group at the University of Muenster.
Introduction: PAYGo Water Dispensers and the SDGs
1. Digital technologies and private sector market constructions
2. The Private Sector and Market-based Development
3. From Water Privatization to Financialization
4. The Co-emergence of Automatic Water Dispensers and Market-based Water Services
5. Extending Water Supply to Urban “Informal” Areas
6. Disrupting Rural Water Supply
7. Inverted Infrastructures of Market-based Development
8. Ontologies of Water
9. Conclusion: Automatic Water Dispensers?
