The goal of the study is to strengthen the analytical purchase of the term water governance and improve the utility of the concept for describing and analyzing actual water distribution processes. We argue this is necessary as most writing on water governance is more concerned with promoting particular politically inspired agendas of what water governance should be than with understanding what it actually is. We believe that water governance at heart is about political choices as to where water should flow; about the norms, rules and laws on which such choices should be based; about who is best able or qualified to decide about this; and about the kind of societal future such choices support. We identify distributions-of water, voice and authority, and expertise-as the empirical anchor and entry-point of our conceptualization of water governance. This usefully allows foregrounding questions of equity in water governance discussions and provides the empirical foundation for a meaningful engagement with the politics of water governance.

There are growing concerns about the impacts of climate change on equitable urban development. As cities are becoming increasingly exposed to anthropogenic droughts, stakes are particularly high in contexts of severe vulnerability. Yet, the impacts of future urban droughts and the societal responses they will elicit remain poorly understood. Here we develop social-environmental scenarios of anthropogenic drought-related impacts in postcolonial cities, characterized by highly uneven development and differentiated levels of vulnerability. We show how unprecedented droughts are expected to polarize existing inequalities in water access and well-being across genders, race and socio-economic groups.Specifically, unprecedented droughts will likely exacerbate spatial inequalities, generate localized public health crises, and regress development progress in water access. These results suggest that effective climate policies must address water insecurity and other preexisting inequalities, and develop equitable water conservation measures to ensure effective adaptation to future unprecedented extreme droughts. Main textAnthropogenic climate change, urbanization, deforestation, and/or large water infrastructure have intensified the severity of recent droughts in several regions, including Brazil 1 , California 2,3 China 4,5 , Spain 6 , and Southern Africa 7 . These regions are therefore at risk of experiencing future droughts that are unprecedented in the historical record. At the same time, the rapid urban growth of the past two decades, much of which has occurred and

Maputo, Mozambique’s capital city, is marked by clear socio-spatial divisions in access to sanitation services and distributions of environmental risks. Current development plans tend to reproduce these inequalities and suggest that some residents’ sanitary needs are more important than others. We contest this logic of differentiation underpinning current interventions in Maputo, revealing how the assumption of different sanitary needs has become normalized and naturalized in the urban environment. We use a genealogy of sanitation in Maputo and the former colonial city of Lourenço Marques to trace how colonial power relations worked to normatively distinguish urban spaces and the people who live in them, making some residents and places more deserving of public protection and investments than others. Drawing on Foucauldian theorizations of governmentality, we analyse colonial authorities’ sanitary plans and interventions to show how differences and separations between spaces and bodies were and are produced. Projects of drainage and land reclamation created clean, dry and sanitary habitats for the privileged white few, the existence of which simultaneously created the wet, unhealthy and muddy spaces deemed good enough for the non-white majority. Such manufactured spatial distinctions, in turn, worked to strengthen the perception of differences in cleanliness between people. These differences were consequently mobilized by the Lourenço Marques health service to further mark and legitimize racial segregation. This is how social and spatial inequalities became naturalized in the urban environment over time, culminating in the stark sanitary divides that continue to mark the contemporary city.