This paper aims to locate developments in water delivery within broader financialization trends by considering three aspects of water management. First, despite clear failings of privatization over the past twenty years, state support for the private sector continues. Second, innovations have emerged so that water consumption generates wealth for private investment finance. Finally, private enterprises have gained increasing influence in sector policy. The paper demonstrates that financialization is incompatible with social objectives in water delivery.

This paper examines the recent resurgence of interest in public-private partnerships (PPPs) to provide infrastructure in developing countries. First, the paper demonstrates that there has been a revival of support for private sector participation in infrastructure. Second, the paper argues that this revival differs from earlier attempts to increase the involvement of the private sector in public service provision in a number of respects. In particular, the current support for PPPs is related to an increased availability of global financial capital. Third, the paper considers the implications of this distinct feature of the revival for development.

Over the past twenty years, the focus of development policy has shifted from the state to the private sector. Privatisation is now central to utility reform in much of SSA. This paper sets out developments in water privatisation and reviews the evidence regarding its impact. Water privatisation has been carried out to some degree in at least fourteen countries in the region, and many other governments are at various stages in the privatisation process. However, in some cases privatisation has been difficult to achieve, and a few countries have successfully provided water under public ownership. Evidence on the impact of privatisation indicates that the performance of privatised utilities has not changed dramatically, but that enterprises have continued to perform well, or not so well, depending both on their state when they were privatised and on the wider economic context. The evidence points to internal improvements in terms of financial management. However, governments face considerable difficulties in attracting investors and regulating private utilities. Furthermore, privatisation fails to address some of the fundamental constraints affecting water utilities in SSA, such as finance, the politicised nature of service delivery, and lack of access for the poor. A preoccupation with ownership may obscure the wider goals of reform.

The ownership structure of the water and sewerage sector has changed substantially in England and Wales since the ten companies were listed on the London Stock Exchange in 1989. The majority of firms are now de-listed and a number of companies are now owned by financial investors via special purpose vehicles. In some cases, revenue streams from customer water bills have become securitised for decades into the future to raise funds for investment but also to finance distributions to shareholders. The high financing costs associated with these highly-leveraged corporate structures are passed on to customers. The regulator, Ofwat, tasked with protecting the interests of consumers, operates largely within a system of price controls intended to mimic a competitive market in the absence of financial speculation. This means that regulation steers away from intervening in the financialised corporate structures that have emerged around some of the water utilities. These manifestations of financialisation are considered to be 'market outcomes'. This paper explores the discourses and narratives that have developed in the provision of water in England and Wales to create a situation where such rentier transfers are normalised. Using the systems of provision approach, the paper shows that the material culture of water finance has been constructed along narrow lines with superficial consumer consultation while extensive financial engineering to increase shareholder returns continues unimpeded.

This article examines the e¡ects on poverty of privatization, an impact to which donors have given little attention in their concern with e⁄ciency and markets. The analysis of the distributional impact of privatization activities draws on empirical cases in the utilities sector in a wide range of developing economies, principally in Africa and Latin America. After a critical consideration of the World Bank position on privatization strategies, and the arguments presented by donors on the pro-poor e¡ects of these economic reforms, the article turns to the negative distributional e¡ects. It is argued that privatization has demonstrably damaged the poor, whether through loss of employment and income, or through exclusion from, or reduced access to, basic services. This is mainly because private ¢rms are principally concerned with pro¢ts, prices and costs, and are highly selective as to sectors and types of consumer. Meanwhile, the weakness of governance and regulatory capacity in many developing countries lead to poor control of market abuses. The article concludes by proposing that donors should take more account of local variations in state^market relations, and be prepared to give consideration to alternative economic strategies where privatization is not working as intended.

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eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Consumer Culture. London: Sage Publications due for publication in 2018: https://uk.sagepub.com/en-gb/eur/the-sage-handbook-ofconsumer-culture/book245907 IntroductionIt is now over twenty years since Fine and Leopold (1993) first detailed the systems of provision (SoP) approach. Developed as a response to traditional 'horizontal' views of consumption, whereby discipline-specific factors were used to explain consumption across a range of goods and contexts, the approach seeks to examine consumption vertically and in its concrete specificity by looking at the full chain of activities underpinning the material production and cultural significance of different goods. As such, the approach avoids overgeneralising the relevance of particular factors, instead recognising that any instance of consumption is shaped by a shifting array of context-specific determinants. This requires a fundamentally interdisciplinary outlook, eclectically but systematically drawing on concepts and theories from different disciplines in an inductive fashion determined by the issue at hand.In addition to seeking a vertical and genuinely interdisciplinary perspective on consumption, the SoP approach was motivated by a perceived need to bridge the material and the cultural, by acknowledging that discursive practices are constitutive of consumption, but that such practices are in turn constrained by material circumstances. This outlook was This is the accepted version of a chapter that will appear in the forthcoming title Kravets, Olga and Maclaran, Pauline and Miles, Steven and Venkatesh, Alladi, (eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Consumer Culture. London: Sage Publications due for publication in 2018: https://uk.sagepub.com/en-gb/eur/the-sage-handbook-ofconsumer-culture/book245907 Accepted version downloaded from SOAS Research Online: http://eprints.soas.ac.uk/24426/ 2 originally driven by dissatisfaction with both neoclassical utility theory and postmodernism, with each being overly subjectivist in its own peculiar ways. However, the approach has since been developed as part of a broader interest in material cultures and the co-constitution of consumption practices and meanings through material and cultural determinants. The SoP approach defines such determinants broadly, encompassing not just the circumstances of material production, but also the social characteristics of different consumers and the broader context within which consumption takes place. The suggestion is that the material culture of consumption needs to be located in terms of the modes of provision as a whole and not simply by virtue of the more immediate relationship between consumer and consumed. Accordingly, what was eventually to become the 10Cs approach to the material culture of consumption was developed. This chapter elaborates on the development of the SoP approach in terms of these specific theoretical stances. But this contribution is also concerned to push the study of consumption further in two otherwise heavily neglected areas. One is to br...

This paper offers a wide-ranging introduction to the symposium on the material culture of financialisation. This collection of papers provides a number of detailed examples of the diverse ways in which finance and financialisation have become absorbed into many aspects of everyday life and the way in which material cultures have adapted so that this has become increasingly normalised. Each of material culture (cultural political economy) and financialisation has now attracted extensive literatures, incorporating equally diverse sets of conceptualisations that have mixed relations to one another and to their objects of enquiry. Our approach sets out its own framings in dealing with financialisation itself and its relationships to economic and social reproduction, including material culture. These framings may appear to be arbitrary but each has its own logic relative to its subject matter and to one another, as well as in traversing the connections between financialisation and material culture. Like others, we seek to escape simple dichotomies in which finance is perceived to be either real or imagined (fictitious) by forging links in the context of finance between material practices and their associated meanings (Haiven 2014). Our approach draws upon the system of provision, SoP, approach (Fine 2002 and 2103). It conceives the economy as dependent upon distinct but overlapping SoPs, most obviously attached but not confined to different sectors of commodity production (for consumption). These SoPs interact with the material cultures that shape norms, values, meanings and practices associated with provisioning. We characterise these material cultures in terms of a number of core features which has been termed the 10Cs-that these cultures are Constructed, Construed, Conforming, Commodified, Contextual, Contradictory, Closed, Contested, Collective and Chaotic. The 10Cs are designed to capture or to bridge both the