Sustainable development, climate resilience and the technologies of water apartheid

While the majority in the Global North have enjoyed modern drinking water systems for nearly a century, powerful actors including the World Bank and the OECD are pushing for innovations aimed at addressing access gaps in the world’s poorest communities. These efforts seek to revive private sector involvement in the water sector, which has declined significantly over the past two decades. This paper situates the drive for innovation within a broader restructuring of international development cooperation that positions private finance and technological innovation as central to achieving Sustainable Development Goal 6 (SDG 6). I conceptualize this restructuring as part of a climate-sustainable-development industrial complex (CSDIC): an assemblage of state institutions, multilateral agencies, and financial actors mobilizing sustainability discourses to open new frontiers for capital accumulation. Drawing on political ecology, water justice scholarship, and theories of racial capitalism, I examine how Africa has been constructed as both a site of humanitarian crisis and a frontier for investment, and how techno-financial reforms rescale water governance, discipline public provision, and convert racialized precarity into opportunities for private investment. The analysis combines a critical document review of global water policy interventions with solidarity-based research in Cape Town, South Africa. I show how innovations advanced under the banner of climate resilience and sustainable development contribute to ’water apartheid’, disproportionately burdening Black working-class communities while consolidating new financial claims over water infrastructure in the Global South. Drawing from a case study of grassroots resistance in Cape Town, the paper also highlights pathways for solidarity and underscores the need to reassert collective, public, and anti-colonial approaches to water governance.