the skills, resources, and scope of for-profit organizations that ostensibly makes “privatization” an
attractive alternative to state-led development.
As for the latter, community-based service delivery is emblematic of what others have referred to
as “decentralization by default” (Davis et al., 1994; Manor, 1999; Oxhorn, 2004). CBO efforts to
mobilize local resources and/or to obtain them from elsewhere, namely TAAs, in an effort to pro-
vide basic services or infrastructure need to be understood as a response to state incapacity. The
local authorities that have resulted from ambitious efforts to decentralize government in Tanza-
nia currently have neither the financial resources nor the administrative capacities to implement
a wide range of development projects. By virtue of producing public goods which are widely
viewed as the responsibility of local government, CBOs serve to extend the “decentralized” state
territorially and functionally. As the ensuing narrative will show, both processes — i.e., privati-
zation and decentralization by default — undermine the favorable impacts usually attributed to
community-based service provision.
The paper is organized in three sections. The first section, which follows this introduction, briefly
summarizes the trajectory of water privatization in contemporary Tanzania. Next, I present the
data and methods. The third section, which is the empirical bulk of the paper, analyzes the two
main ways in which CBOs provide water in contemporary Dar es Salaam. The paper concludes
by arguing that the commonplace divide between state, market, and society is both overstated
and a conceptual obstacle to understanding the actual practice of service provision in the global
South.
1
WATER IN DAR ES SALAAM
Among the myriad problems facing Dar es Salaam’s residential areas, lack of sufficient water sup-
ply is arguably the most enduring, problematic, and important. As a consequence of crumbling
and insufficient infrastructure, not to mention chronic drought, the vast majority of the city’s 2.5
million residents struggle to meet their basic daily needs for water. The magnitude of the prob-
lem was captured in a recent report by a prominent international nongovernmental organization
(INGO) (ActionAid, 2004: p. 5):
4
Convention