The violence of full cost recovery: Financing water infrastructure, and the history and future of perpetual crisis in Mombasa

Foregrounding the role of finance, this paper examines the historical production and future trajectory of urban water crisis in Mombasa. Drawing on archival research and contemporary fieldwork, it traces how principles of full cost recovery – institutionalised during the colonial period and later reworked through post-colonial commercialization – generated and perpetuated unequal and inadequate access to water. Colonial water infrastructures were explicitly designed to prioritise revenue generation, curtailing supply to racialised populations, embedding socio-spatial inequalities into the material fabric of the city. These financial and infrastructural logics have proven remarkably durable, structuring post-independence reforms and contemporary efforts to attract private investment. As a result, Mombasa has been locked into a condition of perpetual water crisis, characterised by chronic scarcity, deteriorating infrastructure, high non-revenue water, and the proliferation of costly non-networked alternatives that further fragment urban space. The paper develops the notion of the violence of full cost recovery to connect literatures on colonial urban water, urban political ecology, and the financialization of development. By historicising contemporary financialized water governance, the paper cautions against treating commercial and market-based solutions as neutral or inevitable, and highlights their tendency to reproduce colonial patterns of uneven urban development in cities across the global South.