Social Rights and User Charges : Resistance or Subsumption

Increasingly, governments have put in place user charges for health and education services that were once provided free at the point of delivery. These charges may, potentially, alter the nature of these public services and, moreover, realign citizen-state relations into relationships that resemble more that of a citizen-consumer. The chapter will provide an overview of the rationales and recent history of user charges for public services in general, and in health and education sectors in particular. It will then inquire whether the right to education and the right to health have the potential to serve as a gatekeeper to this ‘disruptive forces of money' and reinforce the boundaries between the public sector and market norms. Conversely, it is possible that these policies, and the ideology that underwrites them, will overtake social and economic rights, and reconstitute them as subordinate to market interests