Water Privatization and Social Citizenship: The Case of Urban Water Sector in Ghana

Abstract

The impact of globalization on citizenship has recently gathered considerable academic attention. In the literature it is assumed that globalization will alter citizenship, either by constraining or enabling it. The article explores this question through the relationship between water privatization and social citizenship. It asks to what extent privatization, as an aspect of globalization, alters people's social right to water. Drawing from interviews and documents collected in 2008 and 2009, and a review of secondary literature, the article argues that in Ghana's capital Accra, water privatization left people's social citizenship relatively unchanged. The study shows how social citizenship is rooted in its historical context of unequal access to water in a post-colonial society, and how the privatization policy was mediated by this context, bringing relatively little change. Instead, many flexible, self-enforced social citizenships are in place which challenge the universal notions of Western political theory and which continued to operate under the privatization arrangement. The article concludes that in some cases, globalization influences citizenship less than previous literature argues, and suggests that for making balanced arguments, debates about water privatization need to take the contextual dynamics of specific settings more carefully into account.