The formation of a socio-clientelistic norm in access rights

27In Columbia, the universalisation of access to drinking water was established as a national priority from the 1950s onwards, at the same time as the process of urbanisation began in the country. Previously controlled by local governments, the regulation and financing of this sector were then subject to a process of nationalisation under the auspices of the Minister for Public Works. [26] As part of this new system, massive subsidies were awarded by the state to local public enterprises providing water and sanitation (for their functioning as well as for their investments). These subsidies aimed (among other things) to compensate the operators for the very low rates that were implemented for poor users; rates which otherwise would have hardly encouraged investment in the expansion of access in peripheral areas.

28In addition, from the end of the 1960s, the “stratification” system was progressively established, in which the richer “strata” subsidised the poorer ones. Thus, by financing the extension of services by public spending rather than by the rates charged to poorer users, these developmentalist social policies for water access expressed the intention for all users eventually to be connected to the network, with, moreover, rates adapted to their abilities to pay. At the national level, the proportion of those connected to the drinking water network increased from 29.3% in 1951 to 76.4% in 1993. In Cartagena, even though the financial situation of the municipal public enterprise, EPMC, deteriorated significantly during this period (and with it the quality of the service provided), the priority of expanding the water network connections never faltered. Access to drinking water increased from 40% in 1983, to 72% in 1994, even though the town went from 490,000 inhabitants in 1985 to 750,000 in 1995. [27] From the end of the 1980s, this demographic growth was further fuelled by the populations fleeing the armed conflict unfolding in the surrounding rural areas. In 2000, the town officially housed some 32,000 displaced families.

29In the peripheral areas, however, these national social policies combined with another form of access regulation of a clientelistic nature. In this context, inhabitants of areas not yet connected, or poorly serviced, placed themselves under the protection of a local patron responsible for transmitting their demands to the municipal councillors who essentially controlled the management of the EPMC and its investment strategies. This system was initially used by the 265 neighbourhoods of the town. Each of them had (and still has) management bodies, town action committees (Junta de Acción Comunal, JAC), with a dozen or so members, who are partly appointed and partly elected. These neighbourhoods are then grouped into fifteen “communes”, which each have deliberative bodies, the “local administration committees” (Junta de Administración Local, JAL). The JAL is made up of nine members, the “ediles”, who act as the crucial intermediaries between the local JAC and the municipal councillors. [28]

30From these practical political struggles, at the national as well as the local level, emerged a certain access norm that we might describe as socio-clientelistic. In this context, users from peripheral areas of Cartagena could reasonably hope for full connection to the domestic water system at accessible rates. The interpretation of this norm was fundamentally an object of struggle. But these struggles were closely structured by this norm: they concerned not the principle of fundamental rights to access water, but the modalities of this access (through universal citizenship claims? through allegiance to a local patron?) and the time that its implementation would take. Therefore, whether as a social right or as a right conditional on allegiance, access to the water network was universally considered a right.

31This norm would be threatened by the national project to reform water services that was undertaken in the early 1990s. Indeed the 1994 Columbian law reforming “residential public services” clearly displayed its neoliberal ambitions. In particular it announced a dismantling of state subsidies to local public enterprises, and a compulsory evolution of these businesses towards completely autonomous funding. In claiming to reinforce the legal and financial independence of these suppliers with regards to local governments, the promoters of the law sought to end the clientelistic mechanisms representing the interests of peri-urban users. It wanted to replace this norm with the capitalist rationale according to which each client-user would benefit from the same impersonal treatment on the part of the distribution company. [29] In Cartagena, the introduction of the private operator in 1995, following pressure from the Minister for Economic Development and the World Bank, was clearly a part of this national reform process.

32However, as we will see, in spite of its overt pretensions privatisation did not challenge the essentially socio-clientelistic regulation of access, or the underlying norm.

Renewal of social policies for water in an era of privatisation

33Far from the financial disengagement announced in the 1994 law, the Columbian state and the municipality of Cartagena continued to invest massively in access to drinking water and sanitation in the town. In Cartagena this continuity of the socio-developmentalist state was embodied in the signing of two major programmes for investment, one with the World Bank (117.2 million dollars) and the other with the Inter-American Development Bank (40.5 million dollars). In fact, the final cost of these projects was essentially borne by the municipality and not by the company – via the amount of its “water and sanitation” tax transfers – and to a lesser extent by the state itself. Aguas de Barcelona only financed around 19%. [30]

34The maintenance of massive subsidies and large equalisation payments enabled affordable rates for the poorest residents to be preserved. These rates only increased modestly and gradually. Whilst the 1994 law set a subsidy threshold of 50% for the poorest households, it was only in 2004 that the subsidies paid to the poorest households in the town dropped below this threshold. [31] These increases were not felt too harshly: the results of a study conducted in 2007 on 68 households in the El Pozon [32] neighbourhood showed that 93% of them did not consider their water to be more costly than before. [33]

35The continuity of social policies regarding water access and the financial commitment of the state alongside privatisation constituted a clear sign to inhabitants that they were still – and perhaps even more than before – citizens and not just clients; that they would eventually be connected to the network and this access would be protected even if they had difficulties paying. These policies also had a more indirect effect. As we will see, they secured substantial profits for Aguas de Barcelona, and this protection gave the company the means to deploy strategies for additional social adjustments and clientelistic approaches in the peripheral urban areas.

Socio-commercial innovation by Aguas de Barcelona

36Benefiting from strong public financial support, the managers of Aguas de Barcelona had the strategic intelligence to modernise the socio-clientelistic regulation of water access in peripheral neighbourhoods, rather than attempt to dismantle it. First of all, the Spanish operator implemented a vast range of socially oriented commercial innovations, which actively contributed to its acceptance. It first made an effort to decease the costs of connection to the water network. In 2007, the official cost of standard connection was around 120 dollars, but Agbar proposed a subsidised option with echeloned payments. Users could initially spend under 10 dollars. As one resident of the El Pozon neighbourhood explained “even with the reimbursement of my connection, I pay half as much as before, you can’t complain!” [34]

37Yet payment difficulties still existed. For this reason, ACUACAR created a “community attention” service, made up of a dozen social workers and designed to ensure individualised monitoring of users who were behind in their payments, in order to find solutions with the fewest penalties possible. One of these social workers said, “Generally I meet with two households per hour. We look over the invoices, and the revenues. I would say that I find a solution in about a third of cases, the other two thirds really can’t pay.” [35] For these two thirds ACUACAR established “payment contracts” (convenios de pago), which, for a small penalty fee, transferred the amount unpaid onto the next month and simultaneously committed the provider to not disconnecting the user. [36] These contracts could be set for a period of 12 years maximum. In 2006, nearly 21,000 payment contracts had been established for a total value of nearly 9 million dollars. [37] This flexibility in regards to debtors was a signal to users that, more than a simple commercial strategy corresponding to narrow interests, the company recognised that access to water was indeed, if not an unconditional right, at least an essential service from which exclusion could only be a last resort.

38This continuity, along with improved efficiency, can also be observed in the clientelistic dimension of regulation that ACUACAR partly extended, whilst updating the forms it took.

Maintaining clientelistic strategies

39When it arrived, Aguas de Barcelona was immediately confronted with the expansion of informal neighbourhoods, which could not benefit from individual connections because they lacked formal property titles. This was particularly the case in the Nelson Mandela neighbourhood, which was created during a spontaneous land occupation during the 1990s, and which, at the beginning of the 2000s, was home to more than 50,000 inhabitants. [38] While the property situation of the neighbourhood was being considered, and after much consultation with local leaders, ACUACAR installed standpipes that were connected to the network, equipped with water meters, and which each provided water for between 120 and 1,188 families. The management of these fountains (maintenance and organisation of sale) was entrusted to the different neighbourhood leaders, who consequently became contractual workers for ACUACAR. The management positions thus created ensured the re-inclusion of certain actors previously involved as former service providers (water carriers or burroductos, wholesale owners of water tankers and so forth).

40Moreover, the local populations still had an influence on the investment decisions of the service provider, through certain clearly defined modalities, and notably through the local leaders who retained their role as key intermediaries. One of them explained:

41

“ACUACAR, I saw them every week for more than a year: together we thought about the stages for putting in sewage pipes, I told them that lack of drainage was the biggest problem in the neighbourhood, they should be able to do something. Sometimes it wasn’t easy. For example we won a court case against them in 2007, because they didn’t repair the roads properly after their roadwork.” [39]

42This involvement of local leaders very closely connected to residents maintained a personalised regulation of the service, which as we can see was not entirely free from tensions with ACUACAR. Here, as elsewhere, clientelistic regulation was never free from mobilisations and direct challenges on behalf of the “clients”, which served to establish a kind of responsibility on the part of the “patrons”, who were in turn anxious to show they were responsive to their demands.

43Finally, in the neighbourhoods connected to the network, the company was able to demonstrate their tolerance regarding illegalities such as re-selling neighbourhood water and unauthorised connections. The high levels of water lost on the network (43% in 2009, a much higher figure than the 30% foreseen in the Columbian legislation) is in fact predominantly due to the persistence of illegal connections. This is where the municipality played an essential role within the ACUACAR joint venture, having on several occasions ensured Agbar defer plans for the repression of fraud. [40] The director of a local NGO concluded that:

44

“The mayors don’t want to get on the wrong side of the populations. They like inaugurating new connections with fanfares, rather than making life impossible for people by disconnecting them. So they don’t do everything they could to repress fraud.” [41]

45Ultimately, the social norm governing access to the drinking water network, between a universal right and an individual right, was essentially preserved during privatisation, thanks to the maintenance of strong public investment. The inability of city-centre NGOs to mobilise people from the peripheral neighbourhoods can thus be explained by the fact that the criticisms against privatisation (lack of transparency, excessive profits) seemed secondary in the eyes of the users. They did not represent a fundamental challenge to the social agreement and the norms associated with it (these accusations of corruption were in fact less extensive than those against the previous public enterprise). In fact, water is still managed as a public good in Cartagena, combined with clientelistic strategies in neighbourhoods on the edges of the access network. The essential difference between public and private management lies in the efficiency of this management, which has considerably increased with the private operator whether in terms of access, flow rate, continuity of service, or the turnaround for dealing with complaints. Daily life has been substantially improved for a significant proportion of the population.

The formation of a norm of clientelistic mobilisation

47In El Alto it was historically the neighbourhood assemblies rather than the municipality which articulated the demands of users and received a proportion of the public resources in exchange for residents’ contribution to maintenance work, as part of a “conflictual subcontracting” process. [42] As the sociologist José Blanes notes, negotiations between the assemblies and the municipal services took place within an essentially clientelistic logic, “project by project, assembly by assembly”. [43]

48As in Cartagena, however, relations between public authorities and the juntas cannot be reduced to simple clientelistic subordination. Indeed, from the 1980s onwards, the assemblies tended to formulate their demands in terms of universal and unconditional access. At the same time, the balance of power in their relations with the public authorities gradually shifted, opening the way for a more conflictual and dynamic relationship, accurately described as what Christopher Clapham has termed “clientelistic mobilisation”. [44] The municipalities were effectively weakened by the new political competition between local elites following the introduction of direct election for mayors in 1985, and by several corruption scandals which had led to high levels of politico-administrative instability. [45] Moreover, the so-called “popular participation” law, voted in 1994, had raised the neighbourhood assemblies to the rank of “basic territorial organisations” (OTB) with new formal prerogatives in the areas of control of public spending and infrastructure planning.

49Thus, on the eve of the privatisation, the assemblies and their federation were engaged in broad-ranging negotiations with the public water and sanitation provider, SAMAPA; these negotiations covered the allocation of investments, and the nature of commercial policies (use of water meters, sanctions for unpaid bills), as well as the rates applicable to each category of user (the tariff structure involved more than 150 categories). [46] This clientelistic mobilisation introduced its own norm regarding access, which was entirely related to concrete political struggles and had very little to do with the direct translation of the supposedly secular cultural heritage. It performed and reproduced the principle according to which, by mobilising and calling on the municipal and national authorities, the “peripheral’ users” could hope to accelerate the rhythm of their connection to the water network, in favourable conditions. It was these expectations that would be radically thrown into question with the introduction of the private operator Aguas de Illimani in 1997, after a few years of fragile accommodations.

The first years (1997-2001): the promise of normative accommodation?

50The replacement of the public enterprise SAMAPA by a private consortium, Aguas del Illimani S.A. (AISA), led by the group Lyonnaise des eaux, was a rapid process. [47] It was as opaque as it was discreet, and was directly piloted by the central state rather than by the municipalities. This “express” privatisation was made possible by the weakness of all the counter-powers in Bolivia in the mid-1990s, particularly the unions (profoundly defeated by the neoliberal “shock therapy” in place since 1985), opposition parties, and local governments. However, at least on the surface, it seemed to lead to a contract that was extremely favourable to poor users in peripheral areas.

51Indeed, the AISA consortium committed to connecting no fewer than 71,752 new households to the drinking water network between 1997 and 2002, and to increasing their level of access to the wastewater network from 41% to 90% in 2021. These extensions were to be associated with a programme of land regularisation. The press labelled the programme of access expansion “gigantic”, [48] and the World Bank consultants soon made it a model for “pro-poor” [49] contracts. A fundamental ambiguity nonetheless surrounded these access objectives, which would turn out to have important consequences for what followed. The contract made a distinction between two kinds of area: one “serviced” (area servida), which corresponded to the approximate perimeter of the former public operator and to which the previously mentioned rates applied; the other “non serviced” (area no servida) which corresponded to all the rest of the administrative territory of the La Paz-El Alto urban area. For the latter area, the operator had no legal obligation to provide service (even though it had, in theory, a monopoly on service there, as well as within the serviced area). At the time of signing the contract, this area no servida essentially covered peripheral zones that were far-off and sparsely populated. Unfortunately these zones were also those with the highest rates of demographic growth.

52In this context, the first years were marked by a rapid extension of service access. At the same time the operator attempted to make profitable use of the previous actors and arrangements which had typified “clientelistic mobilisation”, whilst trying to give them a more managerial and less political role. One of the key elements in this attempt at institutional conversion was the proposition made to the juntas to establish low-cost connection offers. This consisted in using pipes that were smaller than traditional pipes, buried less deeply, and connected directly to the houses. Residents were mobilised for the installation (preparing the soil, digging trenches, laying pipes, installing septic tanks etc.) and for the maintenance works on the network, as part of an attempt to re-appropriate traditional sub-contracting. These “connections with neighbourhood cooperation” (obras con participación vecinal – OPV) represented 56% of new connections in 2005. [50]

53At the same time, AISA developed a strategy of consultation and cooperation with the FEJUVE. The consortium set up a representative office in El Alto and held regular meetings; each week, representatives of the assemblies met with the managers of AISA to present the needs of each zone, to examine possible solutions, and to be informed about the progress of investment and works. [51] Over the course of these meetings, for example, the FEJUVE in El Alto were able to ensure the preservation of 60 standpipes on the network in certain non-serviced areas.

54This strategy of accommodation and consideration of pre-existing norms seemed to bear fruit during the first years. We can see this for example in the fact that although “water wars” activists emerged in 2000 in Cochabamba, the third largest city in the country, they failed to export their struggle elsewhere in the agglomeration. [52] But the operator was ultimately disappointed by the low water consumption of households in El Alto (44 litres per day, compared to 140 litres per day in La Paz) and the lower than anticipated income that resulted from it. In 2001, its net profits were expected to be negative.

55Tensions with the Minister and regulators in the sector also emerged in 2001, the year in which the contract was to be renegotiated. AISA moved to negotiate more advantageous conditions. Concerned about the potential impact of an increase in rates, which was one of the causes of the “water wars” in Cochabamba, the regulator chose to opt instead for two measures that seemed less politically risky but which would eventually lead to the social refusal of the privatisation.

From fragile accommodations to a normative shock

56The first disposition enacted during the renegotiation of the contract in 2001 was a substantial increase in fees for connection: from 155 to 196 dollars for drinking water and from 180 to 249 dollars for wastewater evacuation. The total amount, 445 dollars, was equivalent to 9 minimum wages in Bolivia at the time. The second disposition was the drastic reduction in the mandate for the extension of the service into “non serviced” areas. It was initially intended that AISA install some 36,700 new connections for drinking water in this area before 2006. But this objective was lowered to 15,000 in 2001, then to 8,000 in 2003, before finally dropping to 0 in 2005. In other words, as was already the case between 1997 and 2002, AISA was freed from any obligation for service beyond the more solvent area already serviced.

57The effects of these dispositions were added to the disillusionment provoked by the real costs of the so-called “social” connections. The users who opted for these “low-cost” connections did make initial savings, but studies have shown that once all the real costs are taken into account (maintenance costs, materials bought by the users, amount of interest when the connection was funded by credit), these connections were actually more expensive than conventional ones. These higher than expected costs came on top of the technical vulnerability of the system: frequent breakages and clogging etc. Thus, initially seen as signalling that this was a business concerned about poor users, these connections came to be considered as “poor service for the poor”; [53] second rate service, the material expression of the reinforcement of political, social, and urban relegation.

58This sudden tightening of access conditions had implications that went well beyond material impact. Effectively it meant making a starker distinction between citizens who were “connected” or “connectable”, and second-rate citizens for whom connection was debatable, debated, and finally dispensed with. After 2002, nearly 80% of new connections to drinking water were so-called “densification” connections, in neighbourhoods where the main pipelines were already laid. Residents in the more peripheral areas, who represented some 130,000 people, saw their hopes of soon being connected firmly quashed.

59This marginalisation was felt even more keenly because it echoed a more general feeling of marginalisation and the rupture of the social pact that had been in place since the mid-1980s. It was therefore no accident when the offices of AISA in El Alto caught fire for the first time in 2003, in a broader context of protest against tax increases (inpuestazo) decreed by the government of Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada. Overall, 2003 was a year of social turmoil in Bolivia, which culminated in a direct confrontation between activists and the government. This confrontation resulted in 60 deaths and led to the flight of President Sanchez de Lozada to the United States. Although the main struggle was to do with the control of natural gas resources, beyond that it was the neoliberal regime of growth (in place since 1985) that came under fire. In this context, AISA’s manifest refusal to pursue the expansion of access to the water network, when it was technically and economically able to do so, seemed to magnify the elites’ negation of the economic and social “rights” of the majority of the population. After the 2001 census, 15% of households in El Alto had no electricity, and 37% of dwellings were classified unsanitary. According to Julian Perez, then a technical advisor for the FEJUVE:

60

“For us, the water wars were a struggle within a broader struggle: a fight against the oligarchy, their contempt, their racism; against passive obedience and against the neo-colonial state.” [54]

61Following the “gas wars” of October 2003 the FEJUVE elected a new executive committee, made up of combative activists who were focused on rejecting the clientelistic arrangements put in place by the former leaders. [55] But the radicalisation of demonstrators against the privatisation in fact occurred mainly “from the ground up”, driven by the grassroots participants in the neighbourhood assemblies which put pressure on their representatives, who were otherwise initially more inclined to compromise. Several social organisations joined together with the neighbourhood assemblies: the Departmental Federation of Peasant Women, the Rural Workers of La Paz Federated Union, the El Alto Regional Workers’ Central, etc. The mobilisations over the following years were punctuated by negotiations around the compensation payments to be made to AISA and heated disputes over the new management model to be implemented, and particularly the forms of “social control” to be granted to users in the management of the service. [56]

62We can see, therefore, that ultimately different normative adjustments (accommodation versus normative shock) provide a good account of the lacunae left by the alternative hypotheses. They allow us to understand why the “neighbours” in El Alto rose up against privatisation, even though the rates, and the rhythm of the new connections made were in fact better than those observed in Cartagena. They also help us understand why the NGOs in the city centre failed to mobilise the outlying neighbourhoods in Cartagena around the themes of corruption and excess profits of the private operator: because these themes did not challenge the social norms in effect. Finally, they allow us to understand why the users already connected to the network played such a decisive role in the mobilisation in El Alto, whilst the non-connected users were much less hostile to the private operator.