Contract as frontier device, or, the political publics of water infrastructures

ABSTRACT This article explores the contract as a mediating device at the financial frontier. Focusing on contracts signed and breached in two instances across 150 years in Berlin, Germany, I argue that contracts are frontier devices that are both durable and volatile in that they seek to bind together two unlike – even incommensurable – contracting parties into formally equal partnerships. Contracts thus seek to enforce certainty and predictability into potentially risky environments and relations and attempt to fix futures in specific ways. I show that the recurrent strategy of extracting value from water infrastructures through contractually regulated private debt financing must be accompanied by an analysis of the intense politics of public secrecy and disclosure that erupt around the contract as labile frontier device, over and over again.