IntroductionRapid urbanization and growing consumptive demands as currently experienced in many cities of the developing world have put increased pressure on natural resources and services, and have in many cases contributed to high pollution levels causing ill health among urban populations (Hardoy et al, 2001; UNCHS, 1996). In such situations where natural resources and a clean environment seem increasingly scarce, open and disguised conflicts are very likely to emerge as environmental interests tend to vary along the lines of location, class, gender, and ethnicity. Therefore, the improvement of environmental quality in cities is not a mere matter of proper management but equally one of power and politics.The study of environmental interests and conflictsöor the relationships between the biophysical world, society, and politics öhas long traditions in geography and other social sciences, and has more recently been addressed in the interdisciplinary field of political ecology. Regional political ecology was originally formulated as``combining the concerns of ecology and a broadly defined political economy'' (Blaikie and Brookfield, 1987, page 17), and has been used to examine how resource users act within wider institutional and structural contexts, and has led to numerous empirical studies mostly in local rural and agricultural contexts. (1) The field of political ecology also has drawn upon different theoretical approaches (see Bryant, 1998), and has developed into various theoretical strands and core themes, including political economy, social movements and resistance, and the social construction of (environmental) knowledge (see Walker, 1998).Recently, political ecology also has moved beyond the focus on rural landscapes in developing countries to involve the study of society^environment interactions in urban contexts. (2) Most notable in this regard is perhaps the work of Swyngedouw and his

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While researchers in the growing field of urban political ecology have given significant attention to the fragmented hydroscape that characterizes access to drinking water in the global South, so far the (re)production of other urban waters and its related power relations have been underexplored. This article seeks to contribute to filling this gap by exploring the everyday negotiations over access to urban water bodies, in particular ponds. These are understood as a composite resource that is simultaneously water, land and public space. This analysis draws on a case study from a small city in West Bengal, India, and is based primarily on data from open interviews with different actors with a stake in urban ponds. The article demonstrates that in a context of ambiguity of the statutory governance regime and fragmented control, the (re)production of the pondscape is embedded within complex relationships of power whereby social marginalization can be offset at least momentarily by local institutions such as neighbourhood clubs and political parties.

Urban political ecology (UPE) has mainly evolved within the discipline of geography to examine the power relations that produce uneven urban spaces (infrastructures and natures) and unequal access to resources in cities. Its increasingly poststructuralist orientation demands the questioning of received categories and concepts, including those of (neoliberal) governance, government, and of the state. This paper attempts to open this black box by referring to the mostly anthropological literature on everyday governance and the everyday state. We argue that UPE could benefit from ethnographic governance studies to unveil multiple state and non‐state actors that influence the local environment, their diverse rationalities, normative registers, and interactions across scales. This would also to enrich and nuance geographical UPE accounts of neoliberal environmental governance and potentially render the framework more policy relevant.

Poor people confront the state on an everyday basis all over the world. But how do they see the state, and how are these engagements conducted? This book considers the Indian case where people's accounts, in particular in the countryside, are shaped by a series of encounters that are staged at the local level, and which are also informed by ideas that are circulated by the government and the broader development community. Drawing extensively on fieldwork conducted in eastern India and their broad range of expertise, the authors review a series of key debates in development studies on participation, good governance, and the structuring of political society. They do so with particular reference to the Employment Assurance Scheme and primary education provision. Seeing the State engages with the work of James Scott, James Ferguson and Partha Chatterjee, and offers a new interpretation of the formation of citizenship in South Asia.

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Participation' has become an essential part of good developmental practice for Southern governments, NGOs and international agencies alike. In this article we reflect critically on this shift by investigating how a 'participatory' development programme -India's Employment Assurance Scheme (EAS) -intersects with poor people's existing social networks. By placing the formalized process of participation in the EAS within the context of these varied and uneven village-level relationships, we raise a number of important issues for participatory development practice. We note the importance of local power brokers and the heterogeneity of 'grassroots' (dis)empowerment, and question ideas of power reversals used within the participatory development literature.

Urban parks in India are often discussed as positive environmental projects, and their creation appears as unproblematic in public discourse. This paper presents the creation of a municipal park in a small city in Gujarat, India. Using insights from history and architecture, we stress the importance of reading parks as political and to some extent ideological projects in the larger context of city-making. The political ecology and history of the particular park studied here allow us to problematise the socio-ecological project of urban "beautification" via park creation. The municipal park, established in the centre of a small urban agglomeration after displacing a slum settlement from the site, is -as we argue -an integral part of a local geography of power. As such it expresses several registers of values upheld by local elites and brings into focus highly conflictive social relations. The case study contributes to further developing a situated urban political ecological approach that starts theorising cities from the South. It moreover offers a critical perspective on the understudied urban nature of small towns. ARTICLE HISTORY