Rewiring Citizenship: The Politics of Privatized Service Delivery in Urban Pakistan

Abstract States frequently outsource service delivery to private businesses. Companies contracted to rationalize service delivery must also re-socialize citizens in pay-to-use norms, transitioning away from long-held understandings of entitlements. I suggest that the attempt to privatize centralized services, such as electricity, in low-capacity contexts, confronts challenges when targeting rewards and punishments to payers and non-paying consumers. I use the privatization of electricity in Karachi, Pakistan to demonstrate the implementation of a policy that aggregates rewards and punishments, imperfectly differentiating between paying consumers and defaulters. A dataset of 24,150 service delivery clusters and an original survey experiment ( N = 1019) are used to illustrate the use of extensive public relations campaigns as part of this policy, emphasizing persistent electricity outages are a result of theft and criminality. I suggest this policy has political impacts: it fails to improve support for the private firm and reduces trust in other individuals. Higher-income individuals are particularly susceptible to these messages. I show that pay-for-use systems in low-capacity states, while effectively relieving the burden of provision on the state, are ill-equipped to protect vulnerable groups from intense energy outages. These findings have important policy implications for highly unequal urban centers on the front line of global warming and climate change.