Tristl, C. (2025). Turning water into a commodity: digital innovation and the private sector as development agent. Bristol University Press. ISBN: 9781529245479 (hardcover), 9781529245486 (ebook). From £27.99 GBP.
(URL: https://bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/turning-water-into-a-commodity)
Jeremy Schmidt
Department of Geography and Environmental Science, Queen Mary University of London, UK
To cite this Review: Schmidt, J. (2026). Review of “Turning water into a commodity: digital innovation and the private sector as development agent”, Bristol University Press, by Christiane Tristl, Water Alternatives, http://www.water-alternatives.org/index.php/bor/765-commodity
There is a woman Christiane Tristl calls Elisa, and who appears an ideal candidate to use the digital water dispensers set up in numerous places in Kenya. The dispensers, called PAYGo machines, have other names elsewhere, like water ATMs. In Kenya, as in India, Ghana, and many other countries, the machines have been rolled out at remarkable speed and scale over the past decade. Kenya, however, has been a key site for testing the technologies that underpin them: cloud computing, nearly indestructible screens displaying information, and payment systems using smart cards and smartphone apps. The latter favour users familiar with technologies that Elisa is also comfortable with. She has a solar system in her home and uses M-PESA, the app-based payment system popular across Kenya. Ultimately, and most importantly, Elisa needs to fetch water for household needs.
Yet Elisa doesn’t use the machine nearest her. In fact, she travels past the nearest PAYGo option to a privately run and more expensive water source. Why go further and pay more? It’s because of the donkey that hauls the water home. You see, to make the trip worthwhile Elisa ties four water containers to her donkey, which restlessly shifts while the containers are filled. The private water dispenser has a hose long enough to fill the containers without untying them from the animal. The PAYGo machine doesn’t, and Elisa can’t manage lifting and tying full water containers while the donkey fidgets. So, she goes further and pays more.
Tristl argues that, in view of the larger technological, economic, and social relations contextualising PAYGo machines, the donkey is infrastructure. It’s a bold claim. It also fits the theoretical arguments that attend Tristl’s examination of the technological manufacturers of PAYGo machines, the organisations that fund their installation, the people that use them, and the economics that crisscross the lot. Rather than treat machines, people, and technologies as discrete parts of the economies taking shape around PAYGo machines, Tristl seeks an account of the effects the machines have. To do so, the book theorises across literatures on economisation and actor-network theory to rework approaches to water and development. The result? Tristl’s book is as much an account of the impact of digital water technologies on water development as it is a provocation to consider the work, experimentation, and persistence behind the ways new machines are put to work to transform water into a commodity.
For Tristl, PAYGo machines can have these transformative effects if seen as part of a broader socio-technical system, not merely as discrete instruments. This entails interpreting fieldwork through the approach to economies and markets made popular by scholars like Michel Callon and in which performative practices are part of how markets are made. Tristl couples this approach with Bruno Latour’s notion of actor-network theory to incorporate technologies as part of what makes markets too. The result is a socio-technical system very different than one geared to straightforward supply and demand equations, or getting institutions right, or to seeing technology as a solution to development challenges that come already framed.
Tristl’s argument takes the reader through interviews with people who made and tested pumps. It follows their realisation that the individuals buying water weren’t the main market, but rather it would be the NGOs that installed and serviced them that were key customers. It is also a view built on research from user perspectives to see what changes locally—tensions abound—as new technologies push out other water practices. Very little goes to plan in the rollout and uptake of PAYGo machines. It is within the muddiness of trial and error, uncertainty and ambivalence, Tristl argues, that the technology needed to transform water into a commodity takes shape within, and gives shape to, an emerging digital water economy.
To tell this empirical and theoretical story, Turning Water into a Commodity takes the reader to multiple fieldwork sites in Kenya, including a town Tristl calls Kondo, and to a major pump manufacturer in Europe called “Pumpinski.” These and other pseudonyms pepper the text and anchor Tristl’s emphasis on the processes take shape around, and through, new technologies. If the reader wants to identify the company it doesn’t take much since, while its name is changed, the titles of company reports give things away. I mention this not as critique, but because it is important to note that, as much as the book’s argument is about processes, those processes operate in particular places and with particular actors. When process and place come together this book raises provocative questions. Among them: are donkeys infrastructure?