Water, food and climate commoning in South African cities

Abstract

Social change has occurred unevenly in South Africa, with adverse implications for the strategy of ‘commoning.’ The framing of a commons is not as popular in this extremely unequal society as are various versions of ‘Right to the City’ narratives, or simply the informal and mainly illegal appropriation of state-supplied services, especially water and electricity, sometimes in the wake of the thousands of ‘service delivery protests’ that occur each year. The narrow, constitutionalist framings of rights are most often articulated by lawyers supporting low-income people in these struggles, while other organizers (e.g. Ngwane, 2009) have taken up a more expansive argument consistent with arguments made by Henri Lefebvre (1996) or David Harvey (2012). The direction the latter may go, if the ‘popcorn protests’ can be linked up more effectively, could be towards a new version of mutual-aid philosophy often considered within the ‘eco-socialist,’ feminist and decolonizing traditions of radical South African politics. To understand the concrete form these are taking, it is useful first to frame these as contestations of the commons. Progressive movements have regularly expressed a desire to expand various kinds of commons, especially those that are connected with nature (water, air, land, sub-soil resources), ideas (humanity’s intellectual and cultural traditions), society (the mixing of peoples through regional migrations) and state services (water/sanitation, electricity, social services, healthcare, education, etc.). The most crucial South African example is represented by the successful commoning of intellectual property over Anti-Retroviral Medicines (ARVs), which led to free provision of AIDS medicines through the public service since 2004. Earlier, ARVs were too costly for anyone aside from a few thousand individual healthcare customers (nearly all white) in the private sector. By 2018, with four million receiving the ARVs for free, life expectancy soared from 52 (in 2004) to 64 (Bond, 2014). There have also been illustrative commons struggles for water decommodification, free tertiary education financing, access to land and nature and resistance against society’s xenophobic tendencies. The neoliberal era’s enclosing movements often were accompanied by countermovements (as predicted by Polanyi, 1957). In South Africa, they could claim partially successful efforts to decommodify, defend or expand stateor mutually-owned or managed goods and services, including free basic water and electricity. 15 WATER, FOOD AND CLIMATE COMMONING IN SOUTH AFRICAN CITIES