The paradox of ‘Free Basic Water’ and cost recovery in Grabouw: Increasing household debt and municipal financial loss

Day Zero and The Infrastructures of Climate Change: Water Governance, Inequality, and Infrastructural Politics in Cape Town's Water Crisis

“…The need to manage municipal services at the local level in the context of a dysfunctional national entity and fiscal austerity has meant that infrastructural provisioning and inequality play out in complex, multiscalar ways. This argument builds on a longstanding tradition of critical scholarship examining post‐apartheid water governance in South Africa (Hemson, 2000; McDonald and Pape, 2002; Smith, 2004; Loftus, 2005; McDonald and Ruiters, 2005; McKinley, 2005; Peters and Oldfield, 2005; Ruiters, 2007; Jaglin, 2008; Dugard, 2010; Narsiah and Ahmed, 2012; Yates and Harris, 2018; Angel and Loftus, 2019). We draw, in particular, from Yates and Harris (2018), who chart the co‐evolutionary relation between neoliberal and human‐rights‐to‐water‐oriented transformations in Accra and Cape Town.…”

“…Since 2007, around 250,000 of these devices have been rolled out, largely in homes deemed indigent (Galvin, 2018). As prepaid devices had largely been installed in indebted homes over the past decade, the installation of WMDs affected poor households disproportionately and have been widely contested in the post-apartheid period (Peters and Oldfield, 2005;Loftus, 2005;von Schnitzler, 2008;Yates and Harris, 2018;Angel and Loftus, 2019). The devices were declared legal following the Mazibuko ruling, 9 with the regular dynamics of device breakdown becoming a longstanding complaint of activists and residents.…”

Upsetting the apple cart? Export fruit production, water pollution and social unrest in the Elgin Valley, South Africa

“…These figures, however, are subject to the in-migration of labourers and the seasonality of the employment in the valley. In the off-season, unemployment Source: own elaboration rates are much higher, and households in the informal areas have hardly enough food or money to live on (Haysom, 2007;Peters & Oldfield, 2005). There is a high dependence on the labour opportunities directly or indirectly linked to the fruit sector.…”

Pro-poor water service strategies in developing countries: promoting justice in Uganda's urban project

“…The community"s frustrations with these problems resulted in more generalized opposition to the use of pre-paid meters. Peters and Oldfield (2005) have established that free basic water policy has failed to reduce inequalities in access to water when implemented within a framework of cost recovery. Likewise, the policy fails to strengthen the capacity of municipalities to operate in a financially sustainable manner.…”