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.