Turning Water into a Commodity

Christiane Tristl examines how private companies and digital innovations reconfigure water provision in rural and peri-urban Kenya, turning access to water into a commodified, market-driven service.

Using the life of a specific water dispenser as an ethnographic lens, she traces transnational corporate practices, dashboards, and philanthropic-private partnerships that define users as paying customers and reshape local infrastructures.

The book critiques assumptions that digital automation and Northern-designed technologies are universally appropriate, showing how they become entangled with messy local practices and existing informal economies.

Tristl highlights how data dashboards and financialization obscure local preferences and labor, producing inclusion that primarily benefits providers and investors.

She argues for recognizing heterogeneous infrastructures and the socio-political consequences of market-based development approaches to water.