https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7693-1376
The papers presented in this special issue advance debate and critical assessment of the state’s role in water provision. Focusing on hybrid water provision (e.g., formal/informal) and the role of the state, this special issue develops a new frame to engage the political dimensions of everyday water security beyond a state-centric model or technocratic approaches – such as hard path solutions. Exploring different scales, the papers reveal a cleavage between lived reality of household water insecurity, community-based provisioning systems, and the state-centric models that seek to govern them. Reflecting on these cleavages, these contributions enable us to envision new pathways to more just and secure water systems for all. We prioritized scholarship from a range of contributors–authors at different career stages and from a variety of research institutions placed in the Global South and the Global North. As a result, this special issue offers the chance to reflect over water insecurity and state from different angles, theoretical backgrounds, and positionalities. We organize the diverse papers in this issue around three main themes: water insecurity and state; crises and water insecurity, and challenges of non-state actors in securing water.
The first theme addresses how the state’s presence is understood by different population groups in three distinct settings, from Indigenous land in Canada and the USA, rural areas in Latin America, and four status-differentiated communities in Phoenix, USA. From a decolonial perspective, Nicole Wilson, Teresa Montoya, Rachel Arseneault and Andrew Curley in their paper ‘Governing water insecurity: navigating indigenous water rights and regulatory politics in settler colonial states’, examine how tensions between state and indigenous populations manifest over jurisdiction and regulatory politics to produce and reconstitute water insecurity. The authors argue that decolonization of water governance should acknowledge indigenous peoples’ claims and allow their participation as protagonists in developing alternative institutions and relations to assure their water rights. Sarah Romano, Jami Nelson-Nuñez and Thomas LaVanchy, in their article ‘Rural water provision at the state-society interface in Latin America’, find that the state’s strategy to ensure water provision in rural areas in Latin America is based on centralized management practices and the expectation that water consumers become responsible for the management of the system as well as the costs for maintenance. Both papers call attention for the need in changing how the state works and relates with such populations placed in more remote areas. The state is necessary and key; the problem is how it works and who privileges the most. On the other hand, the article ‘Anticipating elite capture: the social devaluation of municipal tap water users in the Phoenix metropolitan area’, written by Alexandra Brewis, Katie Meehan, Melissa Beresford and Amber Wutich, shows how the views and values of people in an elite neighbourhood drive the social devaluation of people who use tap water. In this sprawling, economically-diverse U.S. desert city, the authors argue, elite devaluation of tap-water users lays the rhetorical groundwork for ‘elite capture’, in which public resources are allocated for the benefit of social elites, and ultimately the dependence of lower-status neighbourhoods on commoditized water and water services.
In a second block, papers examine how the state responded to water crises across cities in the Global North and Global South. Despite South Africa’s codified policy to support the human right to water, G. Thomas LaVanchy, Michael W. Kerwin, Gregory J. Kerwin, and Meghan McCarroll recount how state responses to the drought in 2018 and impending ‘Day Zero’ revealed the cleavage between the entitlement of affordable water and policy response. Drawing on an extensive study conducted in Langa, a township southeast of Cape Town’s business district, the paper describes how demand management policy had differential impacts across the city and exacerbated water insecurity inequalities for Langa residents. The study demonstrates that even if state policy supports water entitlements, stakeholders need to have adequate input in crisis response because, as it was made clear in the paper, without it, it may be impossible to realize water security for the most vulnerable. Suyá Quintslr, Bruno Peregrina Puga, and Thanti Octavianti compare how power geometries within water governance regimes respond to crises of drought and flooding in ‘Mobilization of bias: Learning from drought and food crises in megacities Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Jakarta’. They draw striking comparisons that reveal how common patterns of discursive, social, and institutional power are mobilized during water crises to advance policies of state-centred regional water securitization rather than address water insecurity challenges at community or local scales. The last paper compares state response to COVID-19 pandemic, understood as another water security crisis. In the paper ‘Wash your hands with water and soap: case studies on water security in São Paulo and London’, Estela Macedo Alves, Jo-Anne Geere, Mariana Gutierres Arteiro da Paz, Pedro Roberto Jacobi, Edson Abreu de Castro Grandisoli and Samia Nascimento Sulaim reflect on this challenge by comparing public responses. This paper discusses water security and wellbeing within a public health perspective and focuses on urban areas with high population density. It analyses access to safe water and the multiple challenges to water security in São Paulo and London, comparing differences and similarities.
The third block of papers draws on examples from Bangalore, Mexico City, and Puerto Rico to examine how communities and households attempt to secure water under conditions of informality and the significant absence of state-centric water supply. Each paper describes how contingent social relations respond to gaps in water provision that operate on the informal side of water-supply continuum, where self-provision, multiple sources, and contested politics shape hydro-social experiences and water (in)security. While they describe and theorize the social and material relations of informality that define everyday experiences of securing water, the authors refrain from idealizing these practices and instead reflect on the material and political limitations for longer-term water security. The first two papers delve into the complexities of water sharing as a coping mechanism. First, Georgina Drew, M. G. Deepika, Amalendu Jyotishi and Shruthi Suripeddi describe how social embeddedness of water provision are structured by social networks and contingent materialities of informal waterscapes in communities, what they call ‘patchwork adaptation’, across neighbourhoods in Bangalore. They explain that the capacity of these residents to adapt their water sources is tied to social relationships and place-based geographies. However, they note that this ‘adaptation’ may delay formal improvements, and thus, the reader can conclude that the costs of these adaptive systems, which are unequally borne by women, may not result in long-term water security as they subsidize the absence of more systemic changes to water provision. The theme of social networks and water sharing is further developed in the article ‘Autogestión and Water Sharing Networks in Puerto Rico after Hurricane María’ written by Anais Roque, Amber Wutich, Alexandra Brewis, Melissa Beresford, Carlos García-Quijano, Hilda Lloréns, and Wendy Jepson. The authors describe autogestión (self-supply) to illustrate how social networks scaffold water-sharing practices at the household and community-scale in the face of state abandonment after Hurricane María. While important for acute response to broken water systems and state failure, the paper also makes an important point about the politics of water sharing. They warn that autogestion needs to be tied more directly to broader decolonial political agenda so that these modalities of sharing do not simply subsidize mismanagement and state neglect.
In the third paper, the theme of water informality and discourse of water futures are taken up by Bertha Hernández Aguilar, Amy M. Lerner, David Manuel-Navarretec, and J. Mario Siqueiros-García. They examine precarious and informal waterscapes as they focus on the discourses of water provision solutions across stakeholder in two communities in Xochimilco, a district in Mexico City. Their qualitative research uncovered three ‘solutions’ to water provision that reflect a range of pragmatic approaches to water insecurity: enhanced informalized water provision (e.g., more water trucks), formal water supply through land formalization, and green infrastructure (e.g., rainwater harvesting). The supply solutions reveal different visions of state-society relations – with residents advocating enhanced informal water supply and green infrastructure while state actors advocate for land formalization as a path to water security. This is important because it suggests residents’ decentring the state in ways that provide practical pathways of water security disconnected from centralized water systems. But as they indicate, the authors do not necessarily absolve the state of responsibility to support the human right to water.
Finally, we end this special issue with the viewpoint article ‘Advancing urban water security: The urbanization of water-society relations and entry-points for political engagement’. This multiauthor article results from an international workshop on Urban Water Security which was attended by early career researchers from Brazil and the United Kingdom. Promoted by the British Council and the São Paulo State Research Foundation – FAPESP, the workshop aimed to critically reflect on urban water security processes in the Global South underscoring local scale struggles and solutions. In this piece, the authors argue that urban water security is produced through hydro-social relations that mediate the production of space and nature. From a critical relational approach, they note, urban water security should be understood through urban political economy that underpins the development of the urban space. The paper presents five entering points to reflect on and act towards urban water security processes to reshape the landscape of urban water insecurity and inequality in place: territory, labour relations and citizens’ rights to the city, infrastructure, governance, and social action. The goal was to advance in new paths to promote water security and a more equitable city.
We hope this special issue instigates not only reflection, but also action. The goal is to draw on new voices and perspectives from the Global South to envision new forms of state interaction with other social sectors that lead not just to participation in the spaces of negotiation but, even more importantly, participation in the co-production of solutions that respects the specificity of places and at the same time creates opportunities for horizontal partnerships. We acknowledge the need for new ideas to reimagine the role of the state in regulation, monitoring, and governance. And to advance that goal, it is critical that we amplify the global scholarship in this space. The work from scholars from across the Global South not only engages in larger debates on water insecurity; but, we hope, ultimately these perspectives contribute the necessary work that opens up these conversations to new voices. Such refreshing reflections presented in this collection of articles will contribute to the critical assessment of water security and the paths to assure the universal access to water by means of social mobilization, co-production of knowledge, and solidarity. We seek to inspire new ways of imagining the state, of conceptualizing water security with a view ‘from below’, and of committing to the ideals of shared knowledge production and priority-setting at all scales.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).