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.