De-scaling without Democratic Substance

Abstract

The case of water provisioning in Tudun Murtala, a peripheral low income area in Kano, Nigeria, is used to highlight an expanding form of decentralisation in infrastructure provision in African cities and the democratic problems associated with it. I look at the decentralisation ‘by default’ that is connected with the type of liberalisation that takes the form of informalisation of supplies. The concurrent separation of supply from state regulation means that the regulation of relations between suppliers and users escapes from public control at the municipal and local government level into traditional hands at the community level. For users, this entails a revived dependence on neo-traditional politics, rather than the development of the parliamentary system, as a mode of influencing the conditions of access to water provisioning.