Accepted Manuscript

Title: Enclosing the Urban Commons: Crises for the

Commons and Commoners

Author: Franklin Obeng-Odoom

PII: S2210-6707(17)30993-9
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scs.2018.01.001
Reference: SCS 914

To appear in:

Received date: 3-8-2017

Revised date: 2-1-2018
Accepted date: 2-1-2018

Please cite this article as: & Obeng-Odoom, Franklin., Enclosing the Urban
Commons: Crises for the Commons and Commoners.Sustainable Cities and Society
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scs.2018.01.001

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Enclosing the Urban Commons: Crises for the Commons and Commoners

Franklin Obeng-Odoom

University of Technology Sydney, School of Built Environment, Sydney,

NSW, Australia

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Franklin.Obeng-Odoom@uts.edu.au<mailto:Franklin.Obeng-

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Odoom@uts.edu.au>

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Highlights


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For Garett Hardin and new institutional economists inspired by his work or variations
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of it, marketising the commons is the surest way to manage it to prevent
environmental crisis.
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 This ‘governance by the market’, advocates argue, has a popular basis.
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 However, using original field data from Abidjan in Cote d’Ivoire, West Africa, this
paper reaches radically different conclusions from Hardin’s.
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 The neo-colonial marketisation of the water commons has led to a plastic waste
environmental crisis.
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 State-led solutions have turned to disillusions

 The reason for the failures is not just neoliberalism but also neo-colonialism and
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especially neoliberal neo-colonialism.

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 This neoliberal neo-colonialism is best described as the monopolisation of the

common water of the Ivoirian people by their former coloniser

Abstract
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For Garett Hardin and new institutional economists inspired by his work or variations of it,
marketising the commons is the surest way to manage it to prevent environmental crisis. This
‘governance by the market’, advocates argue, has a popular basis. Using original field data
from Abidjan in Cote d’Ivoire, West Africa, this paper reaches radically different conclusions
from Hardin’s. The neo-colonial marketisation of the water commons has led to a plastic
1
waste environmental crisis. An informal economy of labourers has arisen to attempt to clean
up the waste, but they work under difficult conditions. The attempt by the state to address the
crises – of water, waste, and labour - through further marketisation of waste management has
led to the creation of profit making opportunities for corporate waste managers and the
exploitation of labour – without addressing the initial urban challenge. Indeed, the waste
problem is getting worse with marketization and water subsidies for corporate monopolists, a
dynamic which has created an imperative for migrant labour, women and children – in
particular, to become pickers and undervalued pawns in a corporate recycling hierarchy that
exists with the tacit complicity of the state. Analytically, the asocial conceptualisation of
markets is creating anti-social problems against which the exploited labourers have

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recurrently demonstrated much like ‘the Beggars’ Strike’ in Aminata Sow Fall’s novel

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(1986), but such protests are rather sporadic, disparate, and disjointed and hence have not
brought about a new transformation of the commons. Their success is in terms of their

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potential to exert pressure for the possible destruction of corporate water monopoly and state
complicity through water subsidies.

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Key words: Water, Cities, Abidjan, Waste, Recycling, Africa, Care

1. Introduction
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In ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’, Garrett Hardin (1968) argued that common property is
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bound to fail because of its overuse and pollution by selfish commoners. On these bases, he
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put the case for the privatisation of the commons, arguing that individual use of the commons
is more efficient and effective as self-interest drives people to better govern their assets. But,
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Hardin continued, the case for privatisation is not simply because it is more effective or
efficient but also that it has a popular basis. Two interpretations of Hardin are common in the
literature. The first claims that Hardin misused the term 'commons' when, in fact, he was
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referring to 'open access' resources. The second contention is rather different: Hardin did not
argue for privatisation only. Instead, he argued either for private OR for state ownership. The
latter of the two claims is easily dealt with by studying the 1968 article closely. There, Hardin
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recognised that the state can be a manager, but he concludes that it is an incompetent
manager compared to the market. Accordingly, he recommends greater enclosures and
marketisation. The suggestion that Hardin’s claims were merely linguistic or nomenclature
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slippage is similarly problematic. C.S. Orwin’s historical research (Orwin, 1938) shows that
the commons were also called ‘open fields’. And, Orwin’s co-authored book, The Open
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Fields (1938), was reviewed by Joan Thirsk (1964) as a contribution to the commons
literature. The issue with the commons, then, relates more to the political economy of
property.
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Yet, most research in this genre centres on ‘land grabs’. The relatively limited work on the
marketisation of water in cities in Africa (Njeru, 2006; Stoler, 2012; Stoler et al., 2015) is
highly informative, but it is not framed in terms of political economic debates and, even more

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fundamentally, overconcentrates on Anglophone Africa, without considering the experiences
of Francophone cities.

In this sense, Abidjan in Cote d’Ivoire, widely known as the ‘Paris of West Africa’ (Obrist et
al., 2006, p. 321), is an appropriate focus for analysis. Its water commons have been
undergoing directed transformation since the 1960s, so it has far more years of marketisation
experience than other cities in Africa where marketisation of water intensified in the late
1990s. More fundamentally, marketization of nature in Abidjan is also neocolonial; not just
neoliberal and hence is qualitatively different from the dominant global literature summarised
as ‘neoliberalising nature’ (Castree, 2008a; 2008b). Indeed even in Cote d’Ivoire itself, much

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of the work on water and other natural resources in Cote d’Ivoire – typically centred on rural
areas (Komenan, 2010; Dzejou, 2014) - does not make this important distinction. The

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available urban research in the country too has centred on environmental crisis (Brechbühl,
2011), linked mostly to spatial (e.g., Andrianisa et al., 2016); not political-economic and

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socio-ecological, processes. A respectable exception is the highly stimulating study,

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Dynamique socio-écologique et santée en milieu urbain defavorisé: Le cas des quartiers
précaires de la ville d’Abidjan, in which Kassoum Traore (2009) ‘connects the issue of
environment degradation and its impact on the health of populations’ to their wider economic
and social contexts.
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Never the less, by recommending ‘(1) the sensitisation of populations, (ii) the redynamisation
of the sanitary and environmental conscience, (iii) training of the different parties, (iv) the
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promotion of an environmental education, the promotion of a new strategy for managing the
environment’ (all quotations from the ‘abstract’, n.p.) — Traore (2009) also focuses on
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spatial processes as explanation of ecological crisis. There is a gap in knowledge in Cóte

d’Ivoire on how the crisis of the commons is a function of the systemic interconnections
between spatial development and social, economic, and ecological processes in which the
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marketisation of the commons in cities takes place. Bridging that gap is fundamental to
understanding and resolving the crises holistically. By linking ecological questions to labour
and waste and hence to the different types of value in land, labour, capital, and waste, this
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paper contributes to moving forward the analytical literature currently centred on labour,
capital, and waste (for a review, see Herod et al., 2014). The paper also tries to move the
analytical literature beyond the mere ‘neoliberalisation of nature’ where it is current stuck
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(Castree 2008a; 2008b) to probing the relationship between neo-colonial and neoliberal
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nature of marketising the commons.

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Here, I am developing what Stuart Rosewarne (2002) calls ‘ecological political economy’.
But my approach is even more specific: it is both institutional and postcolonial; not just
Marxist and Polanyian, the dominant emphasis in the literature (Castree, 2008a, 2008b). I
seek to (1) describe the marketisation of water (2) analyse the socio-ecological and economic
consequences of water privatisation, and (3) identify resulting counter movements or
processes. The data for the analysis were generated from (a) existing material on Abidjan

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collected for different purposes but germane to the current work and (b) fieldwork in Abidjan
carried out in the month of December, 2015 with the support of a small university grant to
collect data not already available. So, analytically, I try to develop an ‘ecological political
economy’ whose roots lie in pluralist and transdisciplinary economics, including but not
limited to geography, which is Castree’s (2008a, 2008b) primary focus and the central
emphasis in the existing literature. While ecological political economy shares the interest in
Marx with geography, what I try to develop here is, in fact, a postcolonial institutional
ecological political economy.

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I argue that contrary to the new institutional economics view that privatising the commons

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leads to their more efficient use with more auspicious ramifications for environment, society,
and economy, in Abidjan, the neo-colonial marketisation of the water commons has led to a

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plastic waste environmental crisis with dire consequences for society and economy. The
attempt by the state – often directed by neo-colonial forces in France - to address the crisis

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through further marketisation of waste management has only led to the creation of profit
making opportunities for corporate waste managers and the exploitation of labour – without
addressing the initial urban challenge. Indeed, the waste problem is getting worse with

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marketisation, which has created an imperative for migrant labour, women and children – in
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particular, to become pickers and undervalued pawns in a corporate recycling hierarchy that
exists with the tacit complicity of a state that is, in essence, directed by France, the former
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coloniser and current development ‘partner’. In this sense, it is not technological fixes in the
tradition of renaissance science, deep ecology, or romanticism (see, Schimelpfenig, 2017 for
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a discussion, ) that would help address the issues but rather political-economic struggle. The
exploited labourers have recurrently demonstrated against their social conditions much like
‘the Beggars’ Strike’ in Aminata Sow Fall’s novel (1986), but they are rather sporadic,
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disparate, and disjointed and hence have not brought about a new transformation of the
commons. Their success is in terms of their potential to exert pressure for the possible
destruction of corporate water monopoly and state complicity through water subsidies.
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After this introduction (section 1), the rest of the paper is divided into six sections. Section 2
reviews the literature to demonstrate the nature of the research gaps and provide the context
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for subsequent analysis. Section 3 details and defends the research approach. Sections 4
presents, while section 5 discusses the results. Section 6 reflects on the policy implications of
the research, while section 7 concludes the paper.
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 2. Reviewing the State of the Literature

Research and debates on the transformation of nature and the contradictions in the process
have been long-standing and wide-ranging. From the inception of Sustainable Cities and
Society (see Riffat, 2011) to now (see, for example, Nazemi and Madani, 2017; Emenike et
al., 2017), this journal has published and continue to encourage the study of nature and urban
development.

Although Garrett Hardin’s work is usually mentioned as a point of departure in the literature

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on neoliberalism and nature in society, even before the publication of Hardin’s work in 1968,

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there had been prior advocates, including John Locke whose labour theory of property
provided the grounds for those with the means to better utilise land could expropriate others
by taking their land from the commons (Lea, 2008; Cobb, 2016). Richard Schlatter’s classic

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work Private Property: A History of An Idea (1951) contains a more detailed history,

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highlighting the heated debates about the commons in an era that far predate the work of
Hardin. Notably, Schlatter identified the pro-private interests in the debate as constituting the
‘Natural Rights School’ according to which markets in land are natural, emerging as a natural

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process and hence claiming that it is more in the nature of humans to have private property in
land. So, the Natural Rights School was an early exponent of ‘market fundamentalism’.
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The story of market fundamentalism, what it is, and how it has become so entrenched in
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economic analysis is told at length in ‘Contesting Markets’, a special issue of the Journal of
Australian Political Economy (No. 68, Summer, 2012, see especially Cahill and Paton, 2012),
so only a summary is needed here. The idea of ‘market fundamentalism’ is characterised by
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at least five features. First, markets are autonomous, that is, they are free from all other
institutions and the agents acting in markets have no social bonds that shape their behaviour.
Second, markets are universal, that is, they work every where and are applicable to all facets
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of society. Third, such asocial, universal markets are the best means to allocate resources and
govern. Fourth, markets are self-regulating, meaning they only need the interaction of
demand, supply, and price to function best – no other mechanisms are needed of if needed,
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the influence of such mechanisms should be left to the barest minimum. Finally, the rules of
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the market are immutable. Markets have always been around, but market fundamentalism
became the central part of economic analysis since the ‘Marginalist Revolution’ of the 1870s,
a period during which advocates such as William Stanley Jevons and, more recently, Milton
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Friedman, sought to narrow the scope of economic analysis to market fundamentalist

analysis in order to achieve certainty of analysis (using mechanistic methods such as
econometrics) and hence put economic analysis on par with natural science .

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Noel Castree has provided detailed reviews of the literature that relates market
fundamentalism (neoliberalism and neoliberalisation) to nature (see Castree, 2008a, 2008b).
According to Castree, the vast body of research can be grouped into four main themes based
on the kinds of questions they seek to answer which, for Castree, are ‘what are the main
reasons why all manner of qualitatively different nonhuman phenomena in different parts of
the world are being ‘neoliberalised’?; what are the principal ways in which nature is
neoliberalised in practice?; what are the effects of nature’s neoliberalisation?; and how should
these effects be evaluated?” (Castree, 2008a, p. 131). Castree contends that ‘this literature,
authored by critical geographers for the most part, is largely case study based’ (Castree,
2008a, p. 131). His major criticism of this body of work is the second part: the focus on

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different case studies, the indistinction between different forms of nature, and hence the

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difficulty in explaining wider social forces.

Castree’s work is hugely insightful, particularly in terms of drawing out the four common

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questions of investigation and pointing out the various ways of neoliberalising nature be it

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commodity-based valuation, physically enclosing a space, transferring ownership to private
entitites, or governing by the market through both re and de-regulation (Castree, 2008a, pp.
139-143). Yet, Castree’s surveys also have important limitations. It gives no room to any

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social forces before neoliberalism such as slavery, colonialism, imperialism and their
interlinkages with neoliberalism and the neoliberalisation of nature, although much research
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on nature clearly establish these interlinkages (Showers, 2014; Obeng-Odoom, 2016). The
surveys are also heavily centred on the materially rich countries (see table 1 in Castree,
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2008b), heavily focused on scholars from the global north, and narrowly centred on research
cast in the Marxist-Polanyian frameworks. Castree’s reviews admit no research in any other
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field apart from geography and even in geography confuses the institutional tradition for
Marxist analysis. The problem of interpretivism that Castree finds is epistemological; rather
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than methodological (problems with case study research). In other words, it is possible to use
a case study to illustrate - even demonstrate -wider arguments. That is what institutional
economists – especially those in the crtical realist – epistemological tradition try to do (see,
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for example, Marsh and Furlong, 2002). Although Castree (2008a, 2008b) does not
acknowledge this institutional economics tradition, it generates a vibrant field of research on
markets and nature . Adapting the nomenclature proposed by G.D. Libecap (2016), a leading
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new institutional economist, this body of work can be divided into at least four reactions. The
first directly follows Hardin by putting the case for the creation of individual private
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incentives through private property rights as the best way to manage the commons.
Representative work in this genre has been done by Coase (1960), Alchian and Demsetz
(1973), and Anderson and Libecap (2014).
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The second strand seeks to contest Hardin’s claims by showing that individuals can co-
operate under certain rules, rewards, and punishments. This type of work is represented by
Elinor Ostrom (1990) and those committed to her work and politics such as Tarko (2012),
Pennington (2012), and Frischmann (2013). A third body of work offers fundamental
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rejection of the analyses of Hardin, Alchian and Demsetz, and Ostrom. This work contends
that the antimonies about the commons are fundamentally mistaken and the idea of the
commons is simultaneously against the market and big state management. Indeed, this group
of scholars (e.g., Euler, 2016; Cobb, 2016) argues that both politically and philosophically the
commons is opposed to the seemingly apolitical and technical construct that it has become. A
final group of scholarship is not necessarily committed to Ostrom’s politics, but it follows
Ostrom’s IAD either to collect (e.g., Gunn, 2015) or praise the collection of empirical case
studies to contest Hardin’s or the Alchian and Demsetz theses (see, for example, Milonakis
and Meramveliotakis, 2016). But, in fact, by being uncritical of Ostrom’s approach of
creating clearer and more formal rules of engagement, this latter body of literature ends up, in

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essence, providing support for the thesis that private property in land (whether held by a

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small group of private owners or individuals) indirectly endorsing Hardin and Alchian and
Demsetz (Obeng-Odoom, 2015; 2016). The World Bank, for instance in Earth Observation

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for Water Resource Management: Current Use and Future Opportunities for the Water
Sector, cites both Ostrom and Hardin as collectively supporting its approach on the

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management of the commons (World Bank, 2016, p. 27).

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That approach is at the intersection of transaction costs and neoliberal politics. It seeks to
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show how private property serves as a more efficient and hence less costly approach to
managing the commons. Centred on the idea of ‘transaction costs’ (popularised by new
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institutional economists such as Ronald Coase, Douglas North, and Oliver Williamson), this
notion is intended to make academic work more relevant to the real world. So, when the
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International Society for New Institutional Economics was founded, ‘transaction costs’
became one of its central analytical framework (Klaes, 2000; Dagdeviren and Robertson,
2016) . In spite of its many theoretical contradictions, incompleteness, and lack of actual
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validity (Yifeng, 2008; Dagdeviren and Robertson, 2016), the notion of ‘transaction costs’ is
the organising framework for the world’s most powerful development institutions, the World
Bank, whose copious references to the idea in the 2004 World Development Report: Making
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Services Work for the Poor (World Bank, 2003), is testament to the importance of new
institutional economics.
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Indeed, four of its leading thinkers have earned the Nobel Prize in Economic Science. In
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policy circles too, new institutional economics has provided much impetus to neoliberal
states, leaders, think tanks, policy makers, and organisations (Hodgson, 2014). Thus,
organisations such as the World Bank, the German Development Bank, and the IMF seem to
have some scholarly basis to privatise or advocate the privatisation of the commons and
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simultaneously claim that they are not against the existence of the commons.

What is striking across the literatures I have reviewed here, those reviewed in geography
(Castree 2008a, 2008b), surveys carried out in other fields such as planning (see, for example,
Riffat, 2011, Obeng-Odoom, 2016), environmental economics (Rosewarne, 2002) and recent
surveys classified according to environmental value systems (see Gaffney, 2016) is the

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similarity in the range of questions that continues to engage the attention of investigators.
Castree’s summary is a useful starting point: ‘what are the main reasons why all manner of
qualitatively different nonhuman phenomena in different parts of the world are being
‘neoliberalised’?; what are the principal ways in which nature is neoliberalised in practice?;
what are the effects of nature’s neoliberalisation?; and how should these effects be
evaluated?” (Castree, 2008a, p. 131). But these questions have to be refined based on
research approach – that is, how one looks, where one looks, and how one looks where.

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3. Research Approach: Analysing the Commons, their privatisation, and

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consequences for environment and labour

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In this paper, I consider water as a commons. In the mainstream economics and new
institutional economics literature (Ostrom, 1990), water commons as an idea is used narrowly
to refer to rivalrous resources (those for which one person’s consumption reduces the

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consumption of others) that are non-excludable (open to everyone). As detailed extensively in
a special issue of the American Journal of Economics and Sociology on ‘questioning the
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commons’ (2016, vol. 75, no. 2), this approach is highly limiting because it depoliticises what
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is essentially a political-economic concept. In terms of analysis, the mainstream approach to
the commons is mechanistic. It separates environmental crises and the conditions under
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which labour works from the privatisation of the commons. Indeed, it considers these issues
as separate. In turn, this mainstream conceptualisation of the commons impedes our
understanding of the dialectical relationship between the enclosure of the commons and the
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crises of the environment and labour.

I avoid these problems by considering the commons as a social relation. By ‘commons’, I

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mean a system or resources created by nature and hence by no one. And, therefore, they give
equal rights of access to citizens. Water is a common in this sense. And depriving citizens
access to a common resource and its governance can lead to many social problems such as
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pollution and poverty. This dialectical view of the commons (such as land and water) turns
the mainstream view on its head. Although an established tradition in political economy
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(George, 1883, Polanyi, 1944; Backhaus and Krabbe, 1988; Van Griethuysen, 2012, Mason,
2016), it is yet to be applied in the Ivoirian case.
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So, I assembled existing studies and probed their findings on marketisation of the commons
in Abidjan in Cote d’Ivoire (formerly Ivory Coast). The small amount of field interviews took
place in Abidjan in December, 2015. The interviews relied on ‘chain referral sampling’
(Jones et al., 2013, p.3165), that is, on the different networks of the few people I met. Unlike
the traditional snowball approach, this chain referral sampling draws on a multiplicity of
networks. My interviews involved a focus group discussion with the leading 7 researchers

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working broadly on various environmental questions in Abidjan, so these were not random
people. Rather, they were the country’s best scholars on the issue under investigation. I
interviewed them on water and plastic waste. Most of them (6) were based at Centre Ivoirian
de Recherches Economiques et Sociales/ Ivorian Center of Economy and Social Research
(CIRES) in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire. Of those interviewed, 1 did his PhD work on waste
management and has continued to work on the topic; another wrote his PhD on water and has
continued to work on the topic, and a third was writing his PhD on the composition of
municipal waste. The rest of the interviewees write on the environment generally. Five of all
the researchers interviewed self-identified as ‘environmental economist’, although one also
doubly identified as ‘socio-economist’. The only non-economist was a self-identified urban

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planner writing a PhD on environmental planning at Université Félix Houphouet-Boigny in

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Abidjan. As noted by Horowitz and Hughes (2017), this approach of interviewing specialists
as a way to collect data about their area of specialty is reliable, especially when the study

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requires that respondents be familiar with certain theoretical arguments. The inclusion of PhD
scholars in this data collection approach is an advantage because their perspectives can signal

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the direction of future work that cannot usually be found among older academics and, they
can be exposed to recent research that has taken place on the blind side of senior academics.

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In doing the interviews, my interest was in (1) collecting papers, books, theses, reports and
other documented sources produced by local Ivoirian scholars that may not be part of the
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wider body of scholarly literature (2) getting this perspective to enable me critically use the
existing literature on the topic and (3) obtains some feel of the yet to be published ideas of
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research-active scholars in Abidjan. Within this context, I sought guidance on the institutions
of water management in Cote d'Ivoire/Abidjan, the privatisation process and the structure of
the sector, history of packaged water (sachet and bottles), quality, access to, reliability,
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and affordability of packaged water. I also was interested in plastic waste. The interviews,
then, were not intended to tally sizeable evidence or provide scientifically generalizable
categorical claims about social reality. Of course, the experience and backgrounds of the
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interviewees helped to contextualise the documented sources and develop stronger

perspective on them than I would have done otherwise but they served much broader purpose
too. They complemented the study’s methodological pluralism with what Bret Anderson
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(2015, p.891) has recently called ‘the pluralism of narratives’.

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Yet, my approach is neither ‘story telling’ nor ‘narratives’. As noted by Czarniawska (2004)
in her magnum opus Narratives in Social Science Research, rooted in the hermeneutic
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tradition, story telling and narratives are closely linked with discourse analyses and hence
accept that there are many ‘truths’ (see chapter 1). Narratives and story telling tend to be
interpretivist. So, “the focus of attention shifts from ‘what actually happened?’ to ‘how do
people make sense of what happened?’” (Bryman, 2008, pp. 556-557). Narrative research
seeks to describe what they mean by something rather than actually explain human behaviour
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or events (Marsh and Loung, 2002, p. 21). Story telling as one form of narrative can be
biographical, although some narratives are not bio or even autobiographical.

In contrast, my approach is ‘institutionalist’. It follows the approach that Franklin Obeng-

Odoom (2016) successfully used to study the commons elsewhere and for which the
European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy as ‘institutionalist’ rather than
narratives or positivism1. Table 1 shows the essential differences between this institutionalist
approach which I follow and narratives.

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Epistemologically, I do not find the positivist-interpretivist/narrative approach dualism

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useful. How, we come to know what we know must not just be natural ‘scientific’ or simply
‘narrative’ or hermeneutic. Rather, I take a third position of ‘critical realism’ by which I

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mean that I accept some of the ontological claims made in positivism (e.g., that many
observers can see similar phenomena using similar value systems and research techniques

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such that there are not as many truths as there are observers). It is in this sense that actively
seeking diversity of voices and identities in the research process is crucially important.

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So I diversified my sources and places of inspiration. I held informal discussions with others
outside the academy. Ontologically too, my approach is closer to objectivism than raw
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constructivism, which is the position taken in narrative approaches. Yet, my objectivism is

sensitive to context (unlike positivist mainstream or new institutional economics), so my
approach is more critical objectivism in which the social provisioning process does not only
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affect the observed but can also influence the observer. Guidance by theory, for example,
rather than crude testing of theory (conventional economics) or little/no theory (narratives)
helped to order my observations which improved by looking from several vantage points. In
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particular, two waste pickers and their children, 1 development economist at the African
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Development Bank, and held many conversations with mini water sellers in stalls and hotels
as well as taxi and lorry drivers whose opinions as users of packaged water were extremely
valuable. Also, based on the sum total of the accounts and perspectives of my interviewees, I
(a) visited the main dumpsite, Akouédo landfill and the pickers’’ settlement adjoining it
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1
Obeng-Odoom’s study was awarded the Kapp Prize (see
http://eaepe.org/?page=awards&side=eaepekapp_prize&sub=2017) for research that exemplifies the
methodologies of the European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy (see a detailed description here
http://eaepe.org/?page=about&side=theoretical_perspectives.

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(Decharge d’ Akouédo); (b) spent considerable time in the key market of Adjamé observing
the sale of water (c) spent time observing Ebrié Lagoon, ‘one of the biggest lagoon systems
in West Africa and a potential economic powerhouse for Cote d’Ivoire’ (UNEP, 2015, p.
45) and (d) did random walks in the city for field observation. I analysed the data by using
the Attride-Stirling (2001) model: organising the data into themes and thematic networks to
tease out patterns that can be used to address the key research questions. The rest of the paper
draws on the resulting data.

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4. Ecological, Social, and Economic Costs of Selling the Commons

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Once compared to Paris and Geneva (UNEP, 2015, p.6), Abidjan is now a city engulfed in
plastic waste, contributing to what Allun Anderson (2015, p. 139) called ‘one of the world’s

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ugliest problems’ in The Economist. Being an eyesore is obvious enough, but the socio-
economic effects of plastic waste require more careful analysis. Tourism and fishing as

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economic activities risk decline because of the extensive pollution of water bodies with waste
(World Bank, 2015) Plastic waste in the city tends to make its way into inland water sources
– consequently limiting the amount of freshwater available in the city, blocking the flow of

U
drains, making the city vulnerable to flooding, and generating fertile grounds for mosquitoes
to breed. Plastic waste also interferes with water life for example through stifling growth and
N
trapping needed nutrients in the water, which is precisely what is currently taking place in the
A
lagoon. It has been estimated that annually a total of 4.4 million m3 cube of waste pollutes the
Ebrié Lagoon (Komenan, 2010). WHO has clearly stated that the water quality in Ebrié
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Lagoon is so bad that it can be used for practically nothing these days, as live fish in the
lagoon jostle for a place with dead fish (World Bank, 2015, p. 88). Yet, plastic constitutes an
increasing share of waste in Abidjan, rising from 6.99 per cent in the 1990s and early 2000s
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(Ministere de L’Envionnement et Du Cadre de Vie, 2001) to current levels of 11 per cent in

high income private homes, 7 per cent in low-rent settlements, 7 per cent in spontaneous
settlements; and 8 per cent in poorer shared housing (Andrianisa et al., 2016).
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During fieldwork around the Lagoon site, I found plastic water bottles constituted a
disproportionate share of waste in the water. Ebrié Lagoon remains navigable, but at the
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shore, plastic waste had chocked off so much water that water flow was made difficult,
creating the conditions for mosquitoes to breed in the lagoon (World Bank, 2015). Globally,
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this problem is also linked to the ‘micro plastic’ issue (Anderson, 2015) or the environmental
problems occasioned when plastic waste that disintegrates into smaller, invisible particles
poison life in water bodies and destroy terrestrial life as well.
A

Much urban informal labour has developed to clean up the crisis. This group of workers –
often called ‘pickers’ - can usually be seen on dumpsites, around hotels and in other places
where plastic waste can be found. Sometimes pickers buy plastic waste from prior collectors
such as hotel cleaners who collect bottles when cleaning rooms. These pickers, in turn, sell to
(a) market agents in Adjamé (b) directly to traders such as those who sell fruit juice (c) to

11
recycling companies. How much pickers get paid depends on how the waste they have
collected is valued. Generally, pickers are paid either based on the weight or on the quantity
of the plastic waste they collect. In numbers, 3 big waste bottles fetch US$ 0.162, while 4
small bottles of waste fetch US$ 0.16. Plastic waste bags (sachets) are increasingly becoming
valueless, as they are not usually in demand.

As a complement to one’s job, waste picking can be said to be rewarding to the pickers and
their families because it brings them extra income. However, as a main source of livelihoods,
waste picking generates meagre income even by Ivoirian informal economy standards.
Traders, for example, those who sell fruits and fruit juice in the informal markets of Port de

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Fruits in Plateau will make more money as they buy their ‘raw materials’ (plastic bottles)
cheaply from pickers to package their home-made fruit juice to sell.

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Apart from pickers in the city, there are also pickers on the dumpsite on the outskirts of the

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city. In Abidjan, the largest waste dump is Akouédo, a privately managed-for-profit landfill
active since 1965 and operated by the private entrepreneur Pisa Impex with some supervision

SC
from the Mission for the Conduct of Municipal Operations. The dump is scavenged mostly
by women, whose numbers range from anywhere between 200 and 1000 people (United
Nations Environment Programme [UNEP], 2015). For many of these women, the dumpsite

U
doubles as their home. During fieldwork, I observed mothers working on the dumpsite with
N
their babies strapped on their backs.
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The nature of this work requires further description. According to Sandar Brechbühl’s (2011)
most of the pickers here are from the ‘outcast’ groups in Cóte d’Ivoire. Migrants from the
M

North of the country and others from neighbouring countries, notably Mali and Burkina Faso
dominate this class of workers (for similar experiences in other cities in West Africa, see
Obeng-Odoom, 2014).Men on the dumpsite literally dive into approaching dump trucks to
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collect the best/most valuable garbage. Working with no protectives, masks, or boots, the
pickers often get injured by sharp objects such as broken glass and they inhale polluted
fumes. As the private waste companies that deposit waste in the landfill do not sort out the
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waste, women tend to do one to three types of work related to waste deposited in the landfill
(Brechbühl, 2011): collecting (that is gathering from the dump), upgrading (that is sorting
into waste types) and selling (to other pickers or to agents for onward sale to industries or
E

markets for re-use). Slightly better off women do upgrading but, generally, women introduce
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their children to all aspects of the work. While doing so, Sandra Brechbühl (2011) shows that
women tend to either restrict (that is, deprive themselves of the most basic necessities of life
in order to save), support (expend the money they make on vulnerable families), or invest
(mostly in primary education of their children). The work of these pickers is also highly
A

gendered and generational. Brechbühl’s (2011) analysis provide even more graphic details,
although it tends to emphasise exploitation of women.

2
Throughout this paper the West African CFA (FCFA) has been converted to USD for an international
readership. The currency converter used is CoinMill.com ( http://coinmill.com/USD_XOF.html#XOF=100).
100 FCFA = 0.16 USD (as of 26 January, 2016)

12
In the field, however, I observed both some collaboration and work division. Some women
may till the land to supplement their incomes – an exercise in which men are visibly
involved. The tension is that the soils in and around Akouédo are so polluted (UNEP, 2015)
that yield must be low and the produce can only be toxic. In my own field observation, the
food sold on the dumpsite is also prepared in an environment with suffocating stench
emanating from a mixture of many toxic substances and waste, including human excreta.
Explosions and fires are common, but the most well-known is the infamous ‘Trafigura Ltd
case’ in which Trafigura, a transnational corporation, had conspired with a local Ivoirian
company to dump toxic waste into the dumpsite. In what was called a ‘corporate crime’,
Amnesty International found that as a result of this waste, 100, 000 people in and around the

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landfill site sought medical attention, while 15 people lost their lives. The pictorial evidence

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presented by Amnesty International (2015, see front and back cover of the report as well as
pp. 1 and 5) showed that women suffered more from this environmental crisis. Either way,

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waste picking is usually a poorly paid, highly exploitative, and harmful informal activity
which benefits mostly industry, to which most returns go.

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5. Causes of the Waste Crisis U
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So, what are the drivers of plastic pollution in urban centres? Is it lack of access to piped
A
water? Is it poor quality of piped water? Or, it is the result of unaffordability of piped water?
The cause of this waste crisis has been blamed on ignorance and indiscipline of Ivoirian
M

people who do not understand the benefits of sanitation. For the World Bank, it is all the fault
of the state: whose inefficient institutional matrixes, especially its failure to charge citizens
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realistic prices (World Bank, 2015, see especially pp. 60-62) drive and sustain the problem.
That is, inability to recover costs for service delivery is the cause of the problem together
with other state failures (World Bank, 2015, p.66).
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As in much of mainstream environmental economics, new public management, and planning,

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much of the analyses of causes centre on ‘state inefficiencies’ and inappropriate individual or
household behaviour and characteristics – everything (see, for example, Sun et al., 2017 for a
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suggestion on ‘urban industrial symbiosis’ and Dos Santos et al., 2013; Dos Santos, 2011 on
sustainable business practices) apart from the monopolisation of land and water, indeed the
market itself or the marketisation process of land. There are detailed steps taken depending
A

on where the analyst places the most emphasis. When Ivoirians are framed as ignorant and
undisciplined, the army is used to police waste disposal and discipline those who litter the
environment (UNEP, 2015). Generally, then, setting the law in such a way that the cost of
transactions or the cost of polluting the environment would be prohibitive is commonly
emphasised (see, for example, Viscusi et al, 2009, 2012). In turn, the decision rule for what
should be done reduces to cost-benefit analyses, sometimes leading to recommendations that
13
if the cost can be recovered through a surcharge on city residents, then state-based curbside
(with waste sorted) or other forms of state-based recycling (e.g., single stream programs) is
appropriate (see, for example, Aadland and Caplan, 1999, 2006; Viscusi et al., 2013; Zen et
al., 2014; Zen and Siwar, 2015; Bell et al., 2016, 2017). Otherwise, environmental taxes are
highly recommended (see, for example, Convery et al., 2007), especially if ‘sold’ to the
public effectively in messages that emphasise ‘avoiding a fee’ and ‘paying a tax’ (see
Muralidharan and Sheehan, 2016, p. 200). There are also urban public administration texts
that view the problem in terms of how quickly and diversely cities are growing and hence
focus on canonically improving public administration to deal with the problem. That is
evidently the case with Genie Stowers’ latest book, Managing the Sustainable City (Stowers,

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2018).

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Yet, none of these analyses presents a persuasive explanation or solution. Literacy rate
among Ivoirians has been increasing over time and environmental concerns are taken
seriously by Ivoirians, by most Africans (Njoh, 2014). The rapid urbanisation view is even

U
less persuasive. As Cris Beauchemin and Philippe Bocquier (2004) have shown, even if we
accept that the war in the country pulled people into Abidjan for better services, we should
N
also account for the effect of the war in pushing international migrants and other Ivoirians out
A
of Abidjan to seek safer residences in neighbouring countries and overseas.

When more broadly framed, the most important drivers of the crisis of the commons in
M

Abidjan lie in the throes of both neo-colonial and neoliberal marketisation – the very
processes that are prescribed as solution. Being one of the oldest experiments of
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marketisation, the role of the state, if anything, should be seen as consistent with the
marketisation doctrine: providing regulation and security for private enterprise. In this sense,
individual and state activities are not seen as distinct from market forces and the market
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forces are not understood as separate from individual and state activities but as
interdependent and embedded in complex interactions of society, economy, and environment.
These processes of marketisation are evident in the processes of (1) commodifying water and
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(2) marketising waste.

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As with other West African water governance models (Dagdeviren and Robertson, 2013,
2014), the provision of water has taken the form of privatisation of municipal water provision
in Abidjan and urban centres in Cóte d’Ivoire more generally. Widely regarded as the ‘French
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water model’ (Komenan, 2010, p.2) and quite distinct from the Anglophone West African
model (Dagdeviren and Robertson, 2013, 2014) in terms of length and the extent of
monopoly, urban Cóte d’Ivoire has known no other water provider other than the inherited
French private company, Société de Distribution d’Eau de Côte d’Ivoire (SODECI), which
was founded in 1959 – a year before the Ivoirian independence - and has been in charge of
water provision in Abidjan since then, slowly extending its influence to all urban centres
from 1973 to date (Traore, 2000). Through its profit-oriented price setting practices, this
14
monopolistic water provision system has led to recurrent increases in the cost of household
water consumption. In response, residents tend to substitute or complement their water needs
by purchasing plastic packaged water (Johnstone and Wood, 1999; Appessika, 2003; Obrist
et al, 2006), also a feature of marketising the commons.

While Private water supply existed in Abidjan for decades, plastic pollution seem to be a
relatively recent phenomenon. Hence, it can be difficult to see an immediate relationship
between private supply and plastic crisis. Looking at the history and politics of plastic
packaged water market, however, makes the relationships clearer.

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The market for plastic packaging did not spring to being until a relentless campaign of a
public health disaster was waged against traditional practices of sharing water. The solution

IP
to the public health crisis, advocates argued, was for individuals to buy packaged water in
plastic, store, and use it. This was an intriguing case – combining convenience, good health,

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and efficiency – to make plastic water look fundamental for the modern African life. Writing
under the caption ‘the age of plastics’, E.S.Stevens (2002, p.3) forcefully argued that ‘Plastics

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are so clearly useful that it is foolish not to afford them major respect. …Their low cost has
undoubtedly had life-saving consequences, as in drought-prone areas of Africa where
lightweight plastic water pails, at times the most important family possession, have replaced

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clay and stone containers, making it possible to bring in water from even distant wells in
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times of severe water shortage.’
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Both globally (see Obeng-Odoom’s 2016 review) and regionally, forces outside of Cote
M

d’Ivoire were cumulatively supporting the transformation. Whether in the form of the
changes in global governance or the rise of particular ideas such as neoliberalism, the mood
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complemented the transformation. Qualitatively, the mood in the 1960s was quite different
from the mood in the neoliberal era of the 1980s. For Cote d’Ivoire, however, the
marketization of the latter years was patterned after the colonial control of resources by
France. This specific ‘French urbanism’ (Njoh, 2016) itself appears similar to what was
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happening elsewhere. For example, in West Africa, neighbouring countries such as Ghana
were speedily catching the plastic fever, much like elsewhere in Africa such as Kenya (Njeru,
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2006). Yet, because France continue to exert a much stronger influence over Cote d’Ivoire,
the story of ‘free’ markets take a distinctive form in Abidjan.
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In Abidjan, indeed in Cóte d’Ivoire more generally, private entities soon entered the market,
becoming more prominent in the first few years into the millennium, around 2005, according
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to the researcher interviewees for this paper. Since then, medium-sized Lebanese owned but
locally-based companies lead in the production of packaged water be it in sachet or bottled
form. Most of the companies’ workers are Ivoirians who work under difficult conditions.
Bigger plastic water companies are European (French and Belgian, typically) in origin and in
terms of the ownership hierarchy. The ‘traditional’ plastic bag is dominated by households,
but they are less and less in evidence these days, except in poorer areas such as Ajamé and its
market. The corporately produced plastic water includes Awa, Céleste, and Olgane in plastic
15
bottles but also Pureté in sachet form. Supported by aggressive marketing on national
television and radio, plastic water companies and the state starred plastic water as superior in
every sense to sharing water. Across the continent, selling water became widely perceived as
superior to sharing water.

The demand for packaged water was soon to increase in response to this aggressive
advertisement and public health campaigns. As noted by the research experts in Abidjan with
whom the issues were discussed, the reasons why individuals purchase packaged water were
given as the growing high/middle class cohorts in Abidjan, the seeming high quality of
packaged water, convenience, and the possibility of storage. The growing demand for water

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had an important effect: a fall in price and a rise in profit levels, which, in turn, attracted
more entrepreneurs into the market. Under aggressive advertisement some under guises of

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public health campaigns, the ‘culture’ of drinking plastic water gained roots in the psyche of
Ivoirians. Here, the ‘revealed preferences’ of individuals were, in fact, moulded over a long

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period of aggressive and competitive advertisement that extolled the virtues of the market.

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Supported by state laws that have evolved under international supervision, there has been a
boom in the demand for plastic waste – a process that, as this account shows, was
‘embedded’ in a wider social context (Polanyi, 1944/2001). The economy of plastic water,

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then, is as Karl Polanyi (1957) regards markets ‘an instituted process’ rather than individuals
autonomously revealing their preferences by buying plastic packaged water. Similarly, it
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looks like markets are not ‘natural’, as the new institutional economics literature reviewed
suggests.
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Over time, this constructed market for plastic water also became class based. Depending on
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one’s social class, one buys either bottled water or sachet water – the stronger classes going
for bottled; the rest sachet water or as some prefer to call it ‘Adjamé water’ – after the large
informal market of Adjamé where sachet water is more in evidence. These changes reflect
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price differentials. Taking Awa as an example, on average the big size (1.5 litres) goes for
US$ 0.82, the next in size goes for US$ 0.49, while sachets go for US$ 0.08. These markets
were articulated and supported by one logic: selling water as a superior way of managing the
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commons to sharing water. This class dimension to the constructed demand for plastic water
is similar to what pertains in other cities in West Africa (Stoler, 2012; Stoler et al., 2015;
Obeng-Odoom, 2013; 2014). And, much like what pertains in those cities, the effects of the
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boom in plastic packaged water has been a related boom in plastic waste in Abidjan.
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The Ivorian state relies on corporate waste collection companies to try to address this
problem. These companies are changed often and different communes in Abidjan have
different private companies. Some of these companies are Agrouté and Societé Abidjan
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Salibrute (SAS), respectively working in Cocody and Port Bouet. A few of the private
companies are, however, more prominent. As Sandra Brechbühl (2011) notes, the sanitation
situation in Abidjan is decided by four private sanitation companies - LDS, Ciprom,
Cleanbor, and Intercor- even if, in principle, they are all regulated by and answerable to the
national regulator, Agence National de Salubrité Urbain de la Côte d’Ivoire (ANASUR).
Unlike SODECI, their ‘monopoly’ is partial and de facto but much like SODECI, these
private entities have not succeeded in their mandate to date. Indeed, in 2009, they could only
16
manage 46.1 per cent of the 893,330 tons of total solid waste generated in Abidjan
(Brechbühl, 2011), leaving the rest to be scavenged by vultures, to the pleasure of the wind or
running water that carries the garbage into the sea and other water bodies or spread it around
pollute the environment, or wait to be collected by precarious labour exploited by private
industries. Current total waste levels in Abidjan have jumped to 1 million tons per year
without any corresponding increase in the coverage of the private sector (Andrianisa et al.
2016), so the gap has to be filled somehow.

The use of green plastics has been proposed as a solution (see, for example, Stevens, 2002).
These are biodegradable plastics that will not stay in the environment for so long. In 2014,

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the Ivoirian Government introduced a law to this effect. The challenge, however, is how to

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determine which plastics are biodegradable in a society with extensive informal economies.
More fundamentally, there are major plastic-related challenges that will not go away with
even a successful implementation of biodegradables, exploitation and the non-separation of

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waste, for example. So, green plastics cannot provide a lasting solution.

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It is possible to use the market in a different way. Here, vendors of water will get a certain
amount of money back from the private company, if they send back a certain amount of
plastic container. This will give incentive to the vendor to collect the bags, while to the user,
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who keeps enough containers can send the containers back to get some amount of water free
N
of charge. Buses can also do the same: they can collect the bags and send them to a collection
point for some free water or money. In all these cases, the incentives must be sufficiently
A
large to encourage them to collect the waste and no matter how large it is wealthier people
may not have the incentives for this additional burden. The test of the effectiveness of this
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otherwise plausible solution is the now common self-help recycling model in Abidjan which
is not only exploitative but also environmentally destructive. And, much like the situation
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elsewhere in Africa (see Obeng-Odoom, 2013; 2014), there have been three contradictions.
The rate of waste generation has been much faster than the rate of waste collection and hence
the waste problem remains, worsening over the years. Second, there are serious health
dangers for the waste pickers and third it is unclear but potentially risky to depend on the
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waste returned to human society without careful health assessment of how clean are these
‘recycled’ waste.
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The particular case of Abidjan and Cote d’Ivoire can teach us a useful lesson about policy
reform. Often technological fixes in the tradition of renaissance science, deep ecology
(returning to past forms of village life to be closer to nature), or appeals to environmental
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idealism or romanticism are touted as panacea in the literature that supports or contests
neoliberalism (see, Schimelpfenig, 2017 for a discussion). But what if what is happening in
Abidjan is not just the ‘neoliberalisation of nature’ (Castree, 2008a, 2008b)? Clearly, where
the problem has neo-colonial political economic underpinnings, grassroots co-ordinated
struggle for a different future could have much more promise.

17
 6. A Counter Movement: To Sell or Share Water?

Contrary to the claims by Hardin (1968) that privatising the commons is popular supported, a
claim that many new institutional economists today uphold (see, for example, De soto, 2000),
these crises of the commons – of land, the environment, economy, and society — have led to

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four kinds of reactions.

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The pickers of Akouédo have also periodically closed down the gates to the landfill. During
such periods – akin to ‘the Beggars Strike’ in Aminata Sow Fall’s novel (1986)3, except that

R
the pickers’ strike is currently sporadic, disparate, and disjointed – the entire city of Abidjan
is brought to its knees as garbage piles up on the streets and the stench from the city becomes

SC
unbearable (interviews with researchers). When this happens, the state – to use an expression
commonly adopted by the researchers – ‘bribe’ the pickers by giving them money. In
addition, it rehearses promises to overhaul the conditions in the settlement and relocate the

U
site either to Attiékoi and Kossihouen or both, but as noted by UNEP (2015), not much is
heard of these promises after. An ‘agreement’ is reached, the landfill is re-opened, and the
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circle re-commences.
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Third, civil society groups have risen up to demand change. Amnesty International, for
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example, brought considerable pressure through its international campaigns to rework the
landfill model. In particular, its activities relating to how a transnational corporation based in
the UK was complicit in illegally dumping an illegal, harmful substance in Akuodo brought
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much needed attention to the site, forcing both local Ivoirian authorities and international
actors to pay greater attention to the dumpsite (see, for example, Amnesty International,
2015). UNEP has also been working in Abidjan, drawing attention to issues as another actor
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that is neither state nor market but is shaped by both (see, for example, its report, UNEP.
2015).

All these ‘counter movements’ seek to address the water and the related waste crises. Yet,
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there is all too often the danger in confusing effect for cause. Marketisation has been seen as
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the effect – something that arose to solve the problem – rather than the root cause of the
crisis. Similarly, weak city management has been seen as the cause of poor city sanitation
when, in fact, it is the marketisation of city governance that led to the crisis of water and then
A

the crisis of waste. Culture and indiscipline of the Ivoirians are blamed for the environmental
waste but, as the analysis in this paper shows, none of the so-called culture is autonomously
formed. It is the market itself in the bellies of society and the environment that directed this

3
Readers unfamiliar with Sow Fall’s famous novel The Beggars’ Strike can consult an excellent sociological
analysis by Mark Beeman (1992) in Contributions in Black Studies.

18
outlook of depending on the market for plastic. In this sense public education will have to
directly advocate alternative water governance, by the public and the commons. It has been
reported to UNEP (2015) that the plastic industry as a whole supports around 30, 000 jobs
and hence ought to be maintained. Yet, by the industry’s own calculations contained in the
UNEP report, most of these jobs (about 67 per cent) – are informal and precarious rather than
decent and safe work. It is possible to look elsewhere for better prospects for the commons in
Abidjan.

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7. Conclusion

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Privatisation has its place in society, but the new institutional economics argument that the
marketisation of the commons is in the interest of society, economy, and environment is,

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looking at the evidence, far-fetched. The Abidjan experience is particularly significant
because the city has had one of the longest experiences of marketisation in Africa. In the case

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of Abidjan, at least, the failings of the marketisation and monopolisation of water cannot be
attributed to limited experience: Cote d’Ivoire has tried marketisation for nearly six decades
now. The failings cannot also be said to be an exceptional case: there is much evidence at

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least in Anglophone West Africa (Obeng-Odoom, 2013; 2014), showing similarly
disappointing results from marketisation. ‘Selling the environment in order to save it’, as
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leading Australian political economist Frank Stilwell (2008) once described such arguments,
A
is pregnant with contradictions.

Although the public governance of water is dismissively regarded as ‘command and control’
M

by new institutional economists, in the case of Abidjan at least, that argument cannot be
made. The city, indeed Cóte d’Ivoir as a sovereign postcolonial state has never been allowed
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the freedom to manage water resource as a public good. An alternative future for the
commons might entail state management. Whether it will succeed is an unknown question at
this stage because it has never been done. What we know is that it will give the people of
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Abidjan and Ivoirians generally the chance to taste fresh water for everybody not water
commodities distributed according to ability to pay. This model of governance can be
combined with communal water governance. Examples of successful management of water
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commons abound in Africa. In Cameroon, Njoh (2011) has documented examples of

community organised or managed water service, notably in Bonadikombo. In the same
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country another communing water project in Mpundu failed. The key to success, Njoh notes,
is that the idea of a water commons is generated not from above or outside the community
but from below and within the community. When this happens there is a general shared
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interest in protecting the water commons for human need. There is no talk of
commodification, plastic privatisation, or monification of nature. But more importantly, is
consistent with the African philosophy of Ubuntu, which Archbishop Desmond Tutu explains
as follows:

19
 The first law of our being is that we are set in a delicate network of interdependence with
our fellow human beings and with the rest of God’s creation. In Africa recognition of our
interdependence is called Ubuntu (cited in Bassey, 2012, p. 9).

Such a philosophy is not expressed in the simplistic zero-sum game between thesis and anti-
thesis, between common and private. Instead, a synthesis of different and mixed property
rights arise and are enforced that link the household to the communal-level water
management. Such is evidently what happens in local communities in Northern Ghana where
recent anthropological studies confirm the viability and vitality of mixed and local-based
property rights that are not purely communal, certainly not individual, and not purely statist.

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Instead, it is a mixture of household and communal and work from the grounds up in ways

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that are inconsistent with top-down state provided water property rights regulations but have
the support of the state (Eguavoen, 2007). Likewise in Khartoum, Sudan, socially embedded

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markets where donkeys are used to sell water operate alongside common practices of gifting
water to neighbours. This gift economy is widespread and works to distribute water to people

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who otherwise would not have access to water in a sustainable way. The gift economy in
water entails no packaging and mechanisation; only reusable containers to share and hence is
not associated with any plastic waste pandemic (Zug and Graefe, 2014). Waste generated in

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the city can be managed along similar water commoning lines in Sudan by planning to reduce
and to manage waste in the commons by commoners themselves. Although located in a non-
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African context, the successful implementation of the Orangi Pilot Project in Karachi,
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Pakistan by commoners working with local specialists and activists, demonstrates the
principle that commons-based management of waste is plausible (Hassan, 2006).The
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question, then is not whether such alternatives can work: they do. What they require is
nurturing, state and popular support to preserve and to expand them.
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Acknowledgements
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Thanks to the reviewers and the editor-in-chief of SCS for helpful feedback on
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various drafts of the paper. Thanks also to Prof. Dagdeviren for very helpful
comments on earlier drafts of the paper.
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 T
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8. References

R
SC
Aadland D.M. and Caplan A.J., 1999, ‘Household valuation of curbside recycling’, Journal
of Environmental Planning and Management, vol. 42, no. 6, pp. 781-799.

U
Aadland D.M. and Caplan A.J., 2006, ‘Curbside recycling: Waste resource or waste of
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resources?’, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, vol. 25, no. 4, pp. 855-874.
A

Alchian A.A. and Demsetz H, 1973, ‘The Property Right Paradigm’, The Journal of
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Economic History, vol. 33, no. 1, pp. 16-27.

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Amnesty International, 2015, Too Toxic To Touch? The UK’s response to Amnesty
International’s call for a criminal investigation into Trafigura Ltd, Amnesty International,
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London.
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Anderson A, 2015, ‘Garbage in, garbage out’, The Economist, p. 139

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Anderson B, 2015, ‘Marcelo Diversi and Claudio Moreira: Betweener Talk: Decolonizing
Knowledge Production, Pedagogy, and Praxis’, Journal of Economic Issues, 49:3,891-893
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Anderson, T. L. and Libecap, G. D, 2014, Environmental Markets: A Property Rights

Approach, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Author Biography

Franklin Obeng-Odoom has made various contributions to political economy. He is the

author of four books, including Oiling the Urban Economy

<https://www.routledge.com/Oiling-the-Urban-Economy-Land-Labour-Capital-and-the-

T
State-in-Sekondi-Takoradi/Obeng-Odoom/p/book/9780415744096> (Routledge, London),

IP
The Myth of Private Property (University of Toronto Press, Toronto), and Reconstructing

R
Urban Economics<https://www.zedbooks.net/shop/book/reconstructing-urban-economics/>

SC
(Zed, London). He guest-edited the special issue of the Journal of Australian Political

Economy on 'Global Economic Inequalities and

U
Development<http://australianpe.wixsite.com/japehome/copy-of-current-issue-1>'. Dr.
N
Obeng-Odoom is Associate Editor of the Forum for Social Economics,
A

<http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?show=aimsScope&journalCode=rfs
M

e20> the substantive Editor of African Review of Economics and Finance,

ED

<https://upjournals.co.za/index.php/AREF/about/editorialPolicies#focusAndScope> and the

General Editor of the Anthem Book Series: Reclaiming Urban Economics as a Pluralist
PT

Social Science. More about his work can be found at obeng-odoom.com

E
CC
A

33
Table 1: Epistemological, Ontological, and Theoretical Features of the Research Approach

Research Epistemology Ontology The role of theory in

Approach relation to empirical
research

Narratives Hermeneutic, Constructivism Theory generation

Interpretivism, and
Phenomenology

Institutional Critical Realism (Critical) Guided Inductivism;

T
Political Economy Objectivism/Social Theory

IP
Provisioning illustration/application

Conventional Positivism (Naïve) Pure Deductivism;

R
Economics Objectivism/homo Theory Testing

SC
economicus

U
Sources: Adapted from Bryman, 2008, pp. 4-28, 556- 560; Marsh and Furlong, 2002;
Czarniawska, 2004
N
A
M
ED
E PT
CC
A

34