Water service providers and debt emitters: Kenya's transformation of public water and sanitation utilities' financing

Infrastructure backlogs and basic services provision gaps in rapidly urbanising contexts precipitated a reappraisal of commercial debt for development purposes. Donors and international organisations have started to support the mobilisation of private finance, which has promised to create a sustainable means of financing the extension and improvement of publicly operated basic services and 'fill the gap'. This research sought to explain how this has changed basic services provision in significant ways despite limited mobilisation of commercial resources. Grounded in an understanding of borrowers as socially positioned entities, the research explored how basic services provision has historically been transformed to enable commercial borrowing by public utilities, who traditionally relied on non-commercial funding sources. Kenya's water and sanitation sector and several of its public services companies were studied in depth through interviewing key sector and utility officials, observing their interactions, and reviewing documents. The analysis foregrounds the initial lack of capacities to borrow commercially, ongoing difficulties to enforce norms about recovering costs from water users and borrowing from commercial lenders, and the nascent external disciplinary effect of commercial financing – even when merely considered – on utilities and water users. The latter explains the continued support given the non-success in actually and substantially mobilising commercial resources. The thesis suggests that commercial financing is a technically and normatively transformative process that independently of actual transactions reorganises public services provision. It furthermore argues that commercial financing is best understood as the purposeful practice of 'debt emission'. Two contributions to social positioning theory and the concept of normative circles are developed: 'Assistive circles' are proposed to explain the practical, next to the normative, influence on occupying and performing the debt emitter position; and 'linked positions' or 'linked positionings' are proposed to explain the debt emitter position and its relation to the service provider position.