Expanding Water Privatization in Mozambique: Producing Success, Reproducing Neoliberal Water

Abstract

This article examines how and why water privatization has been in place for nearly three decades in Mozambique, expanding from cities to towns despite a lack of conclusive evidence of its merits. Drawing on primary data and secondary sources, the article argues that powerful actors driving water privatization in Mozambique ‘produced success’ out of what has been a messy and problematic process of implementing water privatization in cities in the 2000s. This strategy is cultural, in that actors constructed and mobilized a success narrative to legitimize the retention of water privatization in cities and to widen its spatial scope to towns. Yet, because water privatization in cities was not actually successful — quite the contrary — the retention and expansion of water privatization necessarily relied on a political economic process that buttressed this cultural production of success. That is, proponents expended power and resources in critical decision-making moments to ensure water privatization and its underlying neoliberal water imaginary would be sustained, at the expense of alternative (post-neoliberal) modes of water supply. As such, this article concludes that water privatization in Mozambique represents an exemplary case of neoliberal resilience.