Cost Recovery and the Crisis of Service Delivery in South Africa

There has been a dramatic shift worldwide from welfare municipalism--where the state both subsidized and provided essential municipal services--to a neoliberal vision of balanced budgets, fiscal restraint and privatization. Cost recovery is at the heart of this new municipal vision with far reaching implications for access to services, affordability and privatization. This is the first book in South Africa--and internationally--to bring together a theoretical and empirical review of the impact of cost recovery on basic municipal services such as water, refuse collection and electricity.