Enclosing the urban commons: Crises for the commons and commoners

For Garett Hardin and new institutional economists inspired by his work or variations of it, marketising the commons is the surest way to managing it effectively. 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 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 recurrently demonstrated much like 'the Beggars' Strike' in Aminata Sow Fall's novel (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 potential to exert pressure for the possible destruction of corporate water monopoly and state complicity.