City, Metro Manila, in the Philippines, he describes collective action by the Taguig urban ... outlines how Taguig's experience informs the wider debate on water.
Development, 2008, 51, (42–48) r 2008 Society for International Development 1011-6370/08 www.sidint.org/development
Thematic Section
Privatization and Citizenship: Local politics of water in the Philippines
NAI RUI CHNG
ABSTRACT Nai Rui Chng explores the different ways in which water privatization has impacted on the constitution of political community in the context of local politics. Based on recent fieldwork on small-scale water providers in an urban poor community in Taguig City, Metro Manila, in the Philippines, he describes collective action by the Taguig urban poor in response to water privatization. He outlines how Taguig’s experience informs the wider debate on water privatization and citizenship. KEYWORDS water privatization; local politics; collective action
Introduction The gap between the universal recognition of water as essential for human life and the specific institutional arrangements necessary for its distribution is large. The worldwide campaigns to both privatize urban water services and the resistance by citizen mobilization represent competing notions of citizenship. For some anti-privatization advocates, the privatization of water is seen as undermining citizenship through the erosion of democratic structures and processes, leading ultimately to poor service performance.
Water privatization and citizenship The seemingly intuitive claim,‘water is a human right’ is not just the battle-cry of antiwater privatization activists all over the world but also points to a central tension in competing notions of citizenship in today’s world. Modern citizenship is premised upon complex issues of rights, participation, duty and identity (Delanty, 2000). On the one hand, there is the dominant state citizenship model that is institutionalized by water privatization. In ‘global water welfarism’an emerging global structure of corporate welfarism is constituted by elites to help those who cannot access or pay for water (Morgan, 2006). While welfarism is rendered ‘neutral’ in Morgan’s outline, the leading actors of global water welfarism like the World Bank and the United Nations are institutions that support, rather than challenge the territorial premise of state citizenship. On the other hand, there exists a desire by anti-water privatization advocates to realize an immanent transnational community of cosmopolitan citizenship (Morgan, 2005b). Unlike state citizenship, anti-water privatization activists aspire to a citizenship Development (2008) 51, 42–48. doi:10.1057/palgrave.development.1100444
Chng: Local Politics of Water in the Philippines that is not based on territoriality (Stewart, 1995, 2001). For advocates challenging water privatization, contestation is about private/public interests that pit the profit maximizing corporation against the social, economic, political and environmental interests of the public (Hall and Lobina, 2004; Balanya et al., 2005). The privatization of water is said to be incompatible with public interest, hence undermining citizenship through depriving citizens of a basic right to water by subjecting water management to the logic of market forces of demand and supply. Without accountability to citizens through democratic structures and processes, corporations that are only answerable to their shareholders are likely to compromise sustainability in their bid maximize shareholder value, leading ultimately to poor service performance. This kind of episodic resistance against water privatization, bounded by the affirmation of a common need is exactly the kind of outbreaks of democracy Blaug (2000) sees as evidence of institutionalized democratic citizenship. Bakker (2007: 440), however, pointed out how this exaggerated public/private divide in theory resuscitates two unsatisfactory options ^ state or market control ^ that in reality excludes local communities anti-privatization advocates. As Morgan’s (2005a) studies reveal, any activism is crucially dependent on local politics. The following urban poor mobilization in Taguig reveals that the attempt to institutionalize competing notions of citizenship remains bound up in local politics.
State-society formation and water privatization in the Philippines The privatization of the water sector in Metro Manila occurs in Philippine state^society relations where the state has been called ‘weak’due to its capture by ‘local strongmen’ (Migdal, 1988) and an unevenly developed civil society (Franco, 2004). Filipino politics is characterized by the prevalence of local power brokers who achieved sustained monopolistic control over both coercive and economic resources within given territorial jurisdictions or bailiwicks. The Philippine ‘state’ is thus a complex set of predatory mechanisms for the private exploitation and accumulation of re-
sources (Sidel, 1999). Civil society is a correspondingly large and complex sphere of public action filled with variety of associations and movements that are distributed unevenly across archipelago, reflecting the contours of a post-Marcos state where rule of law is unevenly institutionalized (Franco, 2004). The implications of a vibrant civil society and a ‘weak’ state means that the transition from what Fox (1994) described elsewhere as ‘clientelistic subordination to citizenship rights of access to the state’ is ongoing in the Philippines. In 1997, there was no surprise when contracts from the bidding of the Manila Metropolitan Waterworks and Sewerage System (MWSS) were awarded to Manila Water (MWCI) and Maynilad (MWSI), owned by economically and politically powerful families of the Ayalas and Lopezes, respectively.1 Prior to privatization, up to 3.6 million residents in the Metro Manila had no access to water in 1995. MWSS was as inefficient as it was unpopular. Ten years into being, persistent divergent opinions on the experience of water utility reform in Metro Manila suggest that water privatization remains contested. Much of this challenge has come from mobilized citizens in civil society engaging water privatization on grounds of legitimacy, governance and performance.
Water politics in Taguig It was nearly midnight when the motley group of engineers from MWCI and residents from the local community gathered in a narrow and dank alleyway near the entrance to Sitio Imelda, an urban poor community in the city of Taguig in Metro Manila. Toiling under torchlight and enforced silence, they attached the mother metre to the newly installed secondary pipes as Ruth,2 her neighbours and family members encircled the working engineers, held their hands together and said a prayer: Guide us oh Lord, for the installation of the bulkmetre. Protect us from danger, especially from the municipality. We hope that this water will serve the community and prove to the people that our desire for clean and cheap water can be fulfilled. This is the end of our long wait for nawasa.3
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Development 51(1): Thematic Section
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The next morning on 2 January 2004, water from Angat dam, treated and distributed by MWCI began running freely in the community-installed pipes of Sitio Imelda for the first time in the neighbourhood’s history.4 Formed in late 2003, Ruth’s Waterlink was the first of several water Peoples’ Organizations (POs) to be formed in the community of Sitio Imelda in barangay Upper Bicutan, Taguig.5 Comprising around 110 member households as of 2007, Waterlink served between 1,200 to 1,500 residents in Sitio Imelda under a community-managed supply system where POs enter into a bulk-water contract with MWCI, and are billed according to the reading on the mother metre.6 POs also pay for the installation of the mother metres, usually located at the community’s entrance, and all pipe extensions from the company’s main line to individual households. Crucially, it is the PO, and not MWCI, that collects payment from member households. Apart from expenses related to the operation and maintenance of the water system, POs also utilize earnings for community projects such as street lighting, paving of foot paths and undertaking the legal requirements needed to secure formal ownership of the land on which the community is located, where land tenure was a problem. In Sitio Imelda,Waterlink has also made donations to the church, as well as disburse ‘grocery allowances’ (Php300) during the Christmas festive period to all members. Initial investors from the community are also given refunds of their capital expenditures and are also entitled to dividends (Ferrer, 2006). Billing within the community is based on sub-metres, which is often shared by several households or tenants under a single connection account. Collection is done twice a month and POs’ flexibility in payment has helped revenue collections. Since the runners who collect payment also live in the same community as their ‘customers’, they are able to collect more frequently, as well as schedule their visits to ensure that costumers have money on hand for payment. Relationships between POs and their customers are thus not simply business alone. Waterlink has exercised much latitude in allowing members a range of payment means that sustains the
connection without automatic resort to cut-offs. Additionally, payment balances are treated as interest-free loans so social pressure helps prevent defaults to a certain extent. This community-managed approach in service delivery has also helped address the problem of non-revenue water.7 Waterlink officers regularly monitor pipes or hoses located aboveground and are able to immediately respond to problems of water wastage caused by damaged pipes. Speedy response time has also motivated community residents to voluntarily alert the officers whenever they see instances of water wastage. They also closely monitor household water consumption to spot irregular usage (a possible sign of water pilferage). By 2007, there were just under 90 POs providing communitymanaged water systems in Taguig under bulk-contract with MWCI. What appears to be a tremendously successful example of communitymanagement water system is, however, coming under threat, paradoxically from MWCI itself, as well as the local government of Taguig city, led by incumbent Mayor Freddie Tinga. Taguig has been lauded as one of the most successful examples of MWCI’s engagement with organized urban poor communities for water service provision.8 However, many POs including Waterlink did not receive help from the local government in the development of community-managed water systems. Interviews with officers and members of various water POs in Taguig have suggested that local civil society has been subjected to a considerable degree of intimidation from local politicians and members of their political machinery.9 Most of the POs for example failed to obtain excavation permits from the local government needed for excavation work when laying pipes, resulting in haphazard reticulation. This has been used by the incumbent mayor of Taguig Freddie Tinga to attack the POs. He has further accused ‘oppressive syndicates’ of overcharging their customers (Tinga, 2006). A resolution was also passed by the Taguig city council supporting ‘direct individual water connections’ with the support of MWCI. MWCI meanwhile has sought to extend direct connections to households who already receive water from the POs, thus undermining their own contract with the POs. At a recent
Chng: Local Politics of Water in the Philippines arbitration by the regulator, MWCI was chided for infringing the service areas of the POs. According to Villanueva, leader of a large group of water POs in Taguig concentrated in an adjacent barangay in Signal village, this change in attitude by local politicians and MWCI is in fact ‘political’. Villanueva has found it difficult to understand why MWCI continues to pursue bulkwater selling to the POs in Taguig and other parts of Metro Manila, while undermining its own bulk-water schemes in Taguig ‘deceptively’ by providing direct connections to customers who also purchase bulk-water from POs.10 This has led to an increase in payment delinquency, resulting in many POs failing to pay MWCI. Recently, 13 POs including Waterlink have brought their case to the regulator for arbitration. Villanueva has claimed that they are also prepared to resort to the courts to seek redress regarding allegations that MWCI is undermining their business, something that MWCI denied during the arbitration.11 MWCI’s official stance is that POs are over-charging their customers while MWCI remains obligated to the concession agreement to provide direct connections. The political and economic relationships linking Villanueva and the POs,Tinga and MWCI is thus highly textured and complex. From the perspective of MWCI, the POs presented a welcome opportunity to expand water service delivery (without needing to bear too much risks and incur transaction costs) in poorly connected areas at a financially difficult time for MWCI.12 To this end, it has skilfully managed its relations with the local community and politicians as evidenced by its official stance of claiming sole credit for community-managed water systems in Taguig while laying blame on the very same POs for over-charging and poor service performance. For Villanueva, the comparative advantages of POs over big water utilities in servicing the urban poor are very clear. Being residents of the area, POs are familiar with the social and physical landscape of the community in ways that MWCI, with its handful of local administrative and technical staff, can never be. Organized urban poor groups tap into local civil society and are able to ensure prompt and sustained payment of bills given their
knowledge of how much and how often, individual households receive their wages from employment, if any. POs can also provide better customer service as they have sufficient manpower in the local community to attend to problems experienced by customers such as leaks. According to interviews with water POs in another barangay in Taguig, Upper Bicutan, PO officers’ response to reports of leaks or pilferage ^ usually by residents in the community ^ is instantaneous, compared with the days and even weeks a report to MWCI may take before it is acted upon. It is in their incentive to respond quickly to infrastructural problems since their own revenue and income is directly affected by NRW. In addition to service delivery, there is also a political dimension to the significance of the POs. Their success may also have contributed to the erosion of power relations local politicians like Tinga have had over their constituents. In the past, local communities with water problems need only lobby their local politicians, who respond out of their allocated congressional development funds in local water infrastructure projects like deep-well construction. This sustained the traditional patron-client political system dominated by local ‘strongmen’and their political machines alluded to earlier.13 Now, not only can local civil society mobilize independently, POs like Waterlink can also tap into broad-based antiwater privatization networks like Bantay Tubig who are aware of the value of utilizing congressional support from minority politicians for advocacy. The demonstration effect of Villanueva’s associations and other POs like Waterlink has threatened the political machinery of local politicians so much so that water was a key issue in Taguig in recent legislative and local elections in May 2007 when Villanueva withdrew his support from Freddie Tinga’s re-election campaign. This is despite their long-running close association in previous elections when Villanueva would mobilize support for Tinga. A shrewd political operator balancing the needs of his own community with his own agenda, and his assessment of local and national political dynamics, Villanueva’s personal leftist political leanings has not prevented him in engaging with the conservative
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Development 51(1): Thematic Section political machines of local politicians, local church groups and seeking out broader-based, sectoral NGOs like Bantay Tubig.14 For more politically modest leaders like Ruth, there is less space for manoeuvring that explains Waterlink’s dependence on Villanueva in seeking various avenues of redress.
Lessons learnt
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The experience of Taguig has shown that water service provision is bound up in local political contexts. While the study does not penetrate into the ‘gray zone of power’ so thoroughly illuminated by Auyero’s (2007) study of local politics in Argentina, the above case study has provided an indicative hint at the politics of water service provision at the local level, and how it relates to the wider debate on citizenship. Given that the local government was either unwilling or unable to address the issue, MWCI delegated water service provision to the POs outright rather than undermining or marginalizing the local community. The status of the urban poor with regards to their right to clean and affordable water has always been compromised by the MWSS. The privatization of the water sector had therefore provided a mobilized urban poor with not only water service, but also an economic livelihood and political empowerment in the face of encroaching clientelism. It was probably one of the first times a privatized water utility and an urban poor community association had worked together. It is also one of several different forms of political relationship between (mobilized) citizens and essential service providers in a post-privatization environment that suggest both advocates and dissenters of water privatization engage the issue in a variety of ways. In the Taguig case, the POs were re-empowered citizens, new customers and service providers all at once. This goes beyond any existing formulation of citizenship models from either global water welfarism or radical cosmopolitanism. Privatization alters the political opportunity structures that allow collective action from citizens, contentious or otherwise. Villanueva considered himself ‘lucky’ to have come across
MWCI for his engagement with the private utility has paid off economically and politically. Despite the apparent ideological contradiction in their association ^ Villanueva remains a member of a leftist faction in a country with the world’s longest-running Marxist insurgency ^ He is also in no hurry to disassociate himself from MWCI despite pressure from the utility and the local government. He has plans to take theTaguig water PO model to other parts of Metro Manila like Antipolo. That the limited emancipation of the urban poor in Taguig has come about as a consequence of the universal but thin identity-conferring property of water is beyond a doubt, given the initial success of the nearly 90 POs providing water services in Taguig. The sustainability of this model, however, may be compromised not by ‘local politics’ but by the initiation and regulation of a culture in the community by POs, whereby the idea and practice of paying for water is produced and re-produced. Not only is the outlet for more militant collective action stymied as witnessed elsewhere in Metro Manila (e.g., Caloocan), the commodification of water and its decoupling from state provision prepared local communities for the smooth expansion of MWCI in expansion areas like Taguig. Hence, when the time came for the expansion of direct connection by MWCI (i.e., conversion), POs were no opposed to this. What they had problems with was the political context out of which conversion was taking place. The peoples’ response to water privatization has not simply been a singular movement of resistance. As Bakker explained, ‘alter-globalization’ activists have realized the futility of ‘rights talk’ and are focusing instead on alternative concepts and institutions. Taguig has brought attention to the monumental challenges to the institutionalization of alternative models of urban water services, and by implication, a democratic cosmopolitan citizenship.
Conclusion For community leaders like Villanueva, mobilizing communities for water may not be very different from mobilizing communities to demonstrate
Chng: Local Politics of Water in the Philippines in the streets, or to vote for particular political candidates in local elections. It was due to the desire to support and fund the struggle for legal tenancy in Taguig that led Villanueva to first enquire about MWCI’s bulk-selling programme as a business opportunity.15 This was yet another dimension of the ‘entrepreneurship’ displayed by community organizers such as Villanueva documented elsewhere (Karaos, 2006: 364). For Ruth’s Waterlink however, it was simply an opportunity to provide a service for themselves and to the community. As inferred by Esguerra (2005: 41), essential services like water may form only part of the agenda of a local civil society embedded in local politics. In this context, citizenship is not simply rights, duties, identities and responsibilities.
Citizenship ^ the debates and institutions as expressed in the local community ^ is the space, which the urban poor and marginalized exploit for their own purposes. It is in this space that the universal but thinly-identifed conferring property of water as a mobilizing source may be augmented, albeit temporarily. There is a greater recognition by the community that there are competing demands on them for their allegiance, custom and patronage. Rather than being passive ‘takers’, their active involvement places them at the forefront of citizenship debates in relation to water privatization. The ultimate fate of the water POs and similar initiatives in Metro Manila and elsewhere will determine how far alternative models of urban water service delivery, and democratic citizenship, may be instituted.
Notes 1 The city was carved into two zones. The east zone was awarded to MWCI and its foreign partner, Bechtel while the west zone was awarded to Maynilad and Suez/Ondeo. 2 Not her real name. Her identity is being protected as the future of POs is subject to ongoing negotiations in the community. 3 Interview with Ruth, 11 April 2007. ‘Nawasa’ is the local community’s name for piped water from MWSS (previously the National Waterworks and Sewerage Authority). 4 Ninety-eight percent of the water supply of Metro Manila comes from the Angat Dam. 5 The Barangay is the smallest local government unit in the Philippines. 6 Bulk-water is the scheme by which MWCI charges a bulk rate of PhP19/m3 to community PO sub-contractors in Taguig who in turn, directly distribute water via individual connections to household under their own tariff calculation. Rates once again vary from PhP25/m3 to PhP35/m3.Waterlink charges its customers PhP25/m3. US$1 is equivalent to Philippine Pesos 44 (27 October 2007, Universal Currency Converter, http://www.xe.com). 7 Non-revenue water is water that is ‘lost’ before it reaches the customer. Losses can be real losses (e.g., leaks) or apparent losses (e.g., pilferage or metering errors). 8 MWCI’s water programme for poor communities, the‘Tubig Para Sa Barangay’programme (TPSB ^ ‘Water for the Community’) was developed in 1998. TPSB is primarily a bulk-water scheme. 9 While difficult to verify, it’s worth noting that many in the local community believe that the water POs were a threat to the existing deep-well operators in the area who had close links with politicians. 10 Interview with Noli Villanueva, 21 March 2007. Noli Villanueva has a long history in Taguig as a community leader and activist on land tenure issues. A resident in Barangay Signal Village, he has been deeply involved in local politics where his perceived leadership of the community has made him the enemy, and ally, of local politicians. He claims to have set up the first bulk-water PO in Taguig in partnership with MWCI. Water POs under him have been so economically successful thatVillanueva has attempted to form similarWater POs in other cities in Metro Manila. 11 Interview with Noli Villanueva, 21 March 2007. 12 In the first few years of the concession, both MWCI and MWSI were unable to aggressively extend water services beyond the ‘core’areas due to financial difficulties caused by the 1997 Asian financial crisis. 13 Interview with Ben Moncerate, former staff to a congressman in the Philippine House of Representatives, 25 January 2007. 14 Bantay Tubig (Philippine Water Vigilance Network) is a ‘citizens’coalition for adequate, accessible and affordable water in the Philippines’’, http://ipd.ph/Bantay%20Tubig/web-content/b2big_main.html. 15 Interview with Noli Villanueva, 25 January 2007.
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