Paying for Pipes, Claiming Citizenship: Political Agency and Water Reforms at the Urban Periphery (original) (raw)
Related papers
Negotiating marginalities: right to water in Delhi
Urban Water Journal, 2012
As Indian cities expand, water becomes extremely necessary to support the process of urbanisation. These growing water needs are translated onto the body of the city in the form of intense conflicts over the limited supply. These conflicts place water at the centre of socio-spatial, cultural, political and ecological tensions in the city. Through persistent struggles to access water by strategies such as passive resistance, self help, individual resistance and social mobilisation, the marginalised groups and individuals in the contemporary Indian city negotiate their water claims. However, the State through its ability to legalise (or make illegal) certain practices and spaces, controls the right to potable water in the city. This paper explores how the right to potable water and the right to the city are defined and challenged by the politics of the State and the counter politics of the marginalised groups in the context of urban poor in Delhi.
Hydraulic City: Water and the Infrastructures of Citizenship in Mumbai (Introduction)
In Hydraulic City, Nikhil Anand explores the politics of Mumbai's water infrastructure to demonstrate how citizenship emerges through the continuous efforts to control, maintain, and manage the city's water. Through extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Mumbai's settlements, Anand found that Mumbai's water flows, not through a static collection of pipes and valves, but through a dynamic infrastructure built on the relations between residents, plumbers, politicians, engineers, and the 3,000 miles of pipe that bind them. In addition to distributing water, the public water network often reinforces social identities and the exclusion of marginalized groups, as only those actively recognized by city agencies receive legitimate water services. This form of recognition—what Anand calls "hydraulic citizenship"—is incremental, intermittent, and reversible. It provides residents an important access point through which they can make demands on the state for other public services such as sanitation and education. Tying the ways Mumbai's poorer residents are seen by the state to their historic, political, and material relations with water pipes, the book highlights the critical role infrastructures play in consolidating civic and social belonging in the city.
Re)Conceptualizing water inequality in Delhi, India through a feminist political ecology framework
Geoforum, 2011
This article demonstrates how a feminist political ecology (FPE) framework can be utilized to expand scholarly conceptualizations of water inequality in Delhi, India. I argue that FPE is well positioned to complement and deepen urban political ecology work through attending to everyday practices and micropolitics within communities. Specifically, I examine the embodied consequences of sanitation and 'water compensation' practices and how patterns of criminality are tied to the experience of water inequality. An FPE framework helps illuminate water inequalities forged on the body and within particular urban spaces, such as households, communities, streets, open spaces and places of work. Applying FPE approaches to the study of urban water is particularly useful in analyzing inequalities associated with processes of social differentiation and their consequences for everyday life and rights in the city. An examination of the ways in which water practices are productive of particular urban subjectivities and spaces complicates approaches that find differences in distribution and access to be the primary lens for viewing how water is tied to power and inequality. 1 Identity and subjectivity, while often used interchangeably in literature, stem from two theoretical strands. Subjectivity comes from a Foucauldian approach to power that gives less attention to human agency, but rather attends to the discursive rendering of subjects. Studies of identity are more inclined to acknowledge how human agency interacts with a variety of other (discursive and structural) forces in shaping identities (Silvey, 2004, pp. 498-499). In this article, I analyze how discourses and practices shape subjectivities, but also attend to the agency of urban dwellers in creatively navigating their lives and identities.
2015
This dissertation comprises three papers that focus on the interplay of formal and informal institutional processes in the sharing of water between the Mumbai Metropolitan region and an agricultural area to its north and east in Thane district. The first paper focuses on the interests and motivations that influence the everyday practices of the canal bureaucracy in the Surya project in Dahanu. This paper is largely a critique of the application of rational choice theory to analyzing bureaucratic corruption in a literature in development studies that was pioneered by Robert Wade. Using an ethnographic narrative style, the paper seeks to provide an account of bureaucratic corruption by focusing on tensions within the local Irrigation Department over bribes and transfers. The poor maintenance of the canal system by engineers in Dahanu and the consequent wastage of water are highlighted as providing a rationale and justification for diversion of water to the Mumbai Metropolitan Region. The second paper traces the historical evolution of institutional practices and local water policy in the Tansa-Vaitarna (T-V) water district, a major source of water for Greater Mumbai and others towns in the Mumbai metropolitan region. It analyzes the failure of collective action in the water district over local water needs and identifies prior appropriation and the fragmentation of metropolitan water governance as the two major factors that are constraints in meeting the water needs of the rural population in the TV water district. The third paper focuses on the experiences of farmers with water scarcity and dispossession from land on a canal system in two villages in Dahanu. The paper uses survey and interview data from interviews with farmers to understand how water ! ii scarcity is manufactured on the canal minor system and discourses of efficiency, abundance and waste are deployed by wealthy commercial farmers and local elites to deprive small and marginal tribal farmers from water.
In this paper we argue that in South Africa the state is understood and narrated in multiple ways, notably differentiated by interactions with service provision infrastructure and the ongoing housing formalisation process. We trace various contested narratives of the state and of citizenship that emerge from interactions with urban water service infrastructures. In effect, the housing formalisation process rolls out through specific physical infrastructures, including, but not limited to, water services (pipes, taps, water meters). These infrastructures bring with them particular logics and expectations that contribute to a sense of enfranchisement and associated benefits to some residents, while others continue to experience inadequate services, and linked exclusions. More specifically, we learn that residents who have received newly built homes replacing shack dwellings in the process of formalisation more often narrate the state as legitimate, stemming from the government role as service provider. Somewhat surprisingly, these residents at times also suggest compliance with obligations and expectations for payment for water and responsible water consumption. In contrast, shack dwellers more often characterise the state as uncooperative and neglectful, accenting state failure to incorporate alternative views of what constitutes appropriate services. With an interest in political ecologies of the state and water services infrastructures, this paper traces the dynamic processes through which states and citizenship are mutually and relationally understood, and dynamically evolving. As such, the analysis offers insights for ongoing state-society negotiations in relation to changing infrastructure access in a transitioning democracy.
Urban Geography, 2015
This article reconsiders the epistemic and geographic boundaries that have long separated scholarship on urban water poverty and politics in the Global North and South. We stage an encounter between the seemingly dissimilar cases of Tooleville outside of the city of Exeter in California’s Central Valley and Bommanahalli outside of Bangalore, India, to illuminate the geography of water marginalization at the fringes of urban areas, and to deepen cross fertilization between two geographic literatures: environmental justice (EJ) and urban political ecology (UPE). We argue that there is scope for transnational learning in three arenas in particular: (1) water access, (2) state practice, and (3) political agency. In so doing, we aim to advance a genuinely post-colonial approach to theory and practice in the pressing arena of urban water politics.
Sites of entitlement: claim, negotiation and struggle in Mumbai
This paper develops a conception of “sites of entitlement” as a basis for better understanding how infrastructure and services are perceived and experienced in informal settlements. While legal and policy frameworks are often viewed as the source of entitlements to infrastructure and services, the complexity of provision, access and negotiation in informal settlements demands a conception of entitlement that exceeds those domains. Based on ethnographic research on sanitation and water in informal settlements in Mumbai, we focus on the ways in which people’s everyday experiences, interactions and practices constitute sites of entitlement. These sites are unevenly produced, contested, often in flux and ambivalent, sometimes made through collective struggle and at other times through quiet individual practice, and always constituted by social relations. Sites of entitlement emerge in close relation to moral economies, and are characterized by often profound and – for research, policy and practice – challenging levels of spatial and temporal variation. We argue that sites of entitlement are vital for thinking through the possibilities of realizing the universal right to sanitation and water.
The Right to Water, Law and Municipal Practice: Case Studies from India
Water
Recognition of the right to water in Indian courts has had little impact on the ground. This paper explores the seeming disjuncture between what happens in the court and the everyday reality of living with a less-than-perfect claim on city water services in India’s urban slums. The paper seeks to understand and contextualise a court ruling which looks like it declares a right to water for people in urban slums, but in effect gives them little beyond what they already had. The paper also looks at the ‘everyday reality’ of municipal administration and the provision of drinking water in slums through in-house connections and community taps. In both case studies, the author looks to understand how the practice relates to frameworks of law and policy that shape the rationality and scope of action of the actors concerned, both judges and municipal officials. She found that the issue of land was the main stumbling block in both places, but it was conceptualized a little differently in each...