Informality as Experimentation: Water Utilities’ Strategies for Cost Recovery and their Consequences for Universal Access
研究了四个撒哈拉以南非洲城市水务公司如何借鉴非正规供应商的做法向低收入住区供水，发现成本回收优先导致水价高企，阻碍了低收入家庭获得足够水量，削弱了实现可持续发展目标6的普遍接入承诺。
This paper considers the modalities by which utilities in four sub-Saharan African cities have extended water services into low-income settlements and examines their consequences for household access to water. We argue that water utilities and other public agencies supplying water are experimenting, drawing on the approaches of informal suppliers, to find ways to extend their coverage into low-income and/or informal neighbourhoods despite their legal status. While this experimentation appears to be extending access, prices prevent low-income households from being able to purchase sufficient quantities of water from public suppliers. Prices remain high in a context in which cost-recovery is a priority for utilities. Using a critical political economy approach, we argue that water pricing strategies applied in informal settlements present a form of accumulation enacted through the ‘market integration’ of low-income, primarily informal households that appears to undermine attempts to build the universal access to water services promised by Sustainable Development Goal 6.