The commercialisation of development funding and changing nature of basic services provision

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Commercial financing has promised to enable achieving the UN's Sustainable Development Goals. Lately, 'traditional' donors have promoted the approach for sectors such as water and sanitation. Aid has been oriented to mobilise private resources by de-risking investment and creating intermediaries to bring together investors and water utilities.My PhD research looked into these trends in Kenya, investigating the row of donor initiatives that gradually imagined, trialled, and promoted commercial approaches to financing the country's water sector. I theorised this ongoing commercialisation of development funding and associated transformation of the sector as a contested, incomplete, and unstable process where formerly corporatised yet still publicly owned utilities have begun to 'emit debt'. This builds on Social Positioning Theory (Lawson 2019, 2021), an ontological elaboration of the structure(s) of social reality developed by the Cambridge Social Ontology Group, to investigate the changing nature of commercially financed basic services provision. The intensive case study produced a rich empirical account of the historical development of commercialised water sector funding, enabling a structural and causal analysis of the nascent commercially financed water sector, including its emergent tendencies of improved yet more uneven services provision.I plan to publish journal articles that a) elaborate on 'linked positioning', one of my PhD research's key theoretical contributions to Social Positioning Theory, and b) use it to theorise the nature of financialisation as a linked positioning process to help understand it better in Kenya's water sector and beyond.The research left two questions open: how commercialised funding approaches have survived and possibly recovered from Covid-19, which put more stress on basic services provision while significantly reducing collections; and why other forms of commercialised development funding that have promised cheaper funding with more public control (most crucially a 'MajiBank' modelled after the Dutch 'Waterbank') have remained non-starters. I plan to address these two questions through further (limited) research that updates my PhD research for the post-pandemic period and looks more deeply at the historical (non-)development of a 'MajiBank' in Kenya. This includes investigating investors' (next to commercial banks') interest in, and approaches to, investing in Kenya's water sector. Together with my PhD research, this will form the basis of a third journal article that c) unpacks different forms of financialisation and their tendencies to produce different forms of development. Importantly, it will inform development of a book proposal and writings targeted at policy and practitioner circles.I also plan to develop a proposal for future research. To explain the changes in Kenya's water sector, my PhD analysis looked at the 'normative circles' (Elder-Vass 2010, 2012) that have endorsed commercialised forms of funding. I plan to prepare future research on these and donors' efforts to form them and shape their composition, internal division of labour, and orientation to endorse/enforce certain norms of development and its funding. This will help to better understand these circles and their operation, and how the financialisation of development may help donors to maintain some of their slipping power in the wake of growing South-South cooperation and emerging multipolarity, how such power looks like, and how donors have attempted to achieve this.Importantly, I plan to engage in policy debates on basic services development and its funding, and liaise with related organisations (GIZ, KfW, World Bank, WFF, Aqua for All, ...) to disseminate my research findings beyond academia. This includes writing blogs, participating in the World Water Week, and informal knowledge exchange. Furthermore, I plan to use the fellowship and associated mentorship & training for career and personal development