Monday 13 October 2003 5.00 pm

Venue: Centre for Socio-Legal Studies Seminar Room

Organised by Centre for Socio-Legal Studies

Speaker: Dr. Bronwen Morgan (Woods Research Fellow at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies and Fellow of Wadham College)

Ongoing debates in political economy regarding the appropriate limits of the market economy increasingly appeal to social and economic human rights as an important strategic route for ‘humanising’ the harsher distributive effects of markets. Arguably, the discourse of social and economic rights increasingly shapes debates that were in earlier times more typically conducted as debates about the welfare state (in the industrialized world) or the developmental state (in the developing countries). This shift in the terms of the debate is especially pronounced at the international level, but is also prevalent in some national contexts, including that of South Africa, whose constitutional codification of political transformation is partly grounded on an impressive set of socio-economic rights.

The paper explores the implications of a (human) rights-based version of welfare state aspirations by showing how the search for improved delivery of water services since the advent of democracy in South Africa has generated a struggle around what might be termed ‘norms of appropriate consumer behaviour’. This struggle illuminates and challenges a dichotomy all too often glibly stated: that between the consumer and the citizen. The paper seeks to demonstrate first, the way in which the regulatory framework of water provision interacts with the scope of rights-based claims to construct a threshold of acceptable (legal) consumer activism . Secondly, it places that interaction in a structural context that throws a very different light on the state-citizen relationship: that of an emerging skeletal architecture of a global ‘welfare state’ bolstered by the administrative capacity of multinational corporations and the fiscal intermeshing of official aid and private investment. The resulting analysis has important implications for future research on globalization, social justice and transnational pressures on the welfare state, in particular the multiple and contradictory roles that law plays in that arena.