This paper utilizes a critical governmentality approach to theorize the processes through which urban elites become stakeholders in the "world-class city". Through a case study of public consultations for urban development plans in Chennai, India, the paper explores the technologies that produce urban actors who "participate" in urban governance. Key to these technologies is a discourse of participation that privileges and normalizes citizens as urban stakeholders. The paper contributes to current explorations into the technologies of inclusion that are central to an emerging civic governmentality in South Asia. In Chennai this civic governmentality engages various segments of civil society in processes of urban governance through the mechanism of public consultation. It is through these public consultations that elites come to exert influence over urban plans and consolidate a vision and desire for the world-class city.
Agro-ecology has been recognized as a potential route to realizing the multiple economic, social, and environmental benefits increasingly required of agricultural systems. However, views on what constitutes agro-ecology differ considerably between countries, and also between stakeholder groups such as natural scientists and farmers. To identify areas of convergence and divergence in understandings of agro-ecology in the Scottish context, we used a novel co-constructed mental modelling approach with a sample of 8 scientists and 7 farmers in the North East of Scotland. Results show that agro-ecology in Scotland is currently mainly understood as a scientific discipline applying ecological analysis to agricultural systems. Farmers' mental models show a wider consideration of the food system, including consumer health, markets and sustainable energy. Precision farming featured prominently in farmers' mental models but not in the scientists' mental models. Our discussion therefore raises the question to what extent precision farming and agro-ecology support or contradict each other. We conclude that although farmers and scientists differ considerably, there are areas of shared understanding, such as the potential of novel crops and new crop rotations, which could be the starting point of working towards an agriculture that delivers multiple benefits.
Citizen social science has been developing in meaning and prevalence over the past few years, building on experiences with both citizen (natural) science and established social science methods such as participatory action research. However, most of the debate is still at the conceptual level, with strong calls for more empirical insight. Here, we critically examine the promises and challenges of citizen social science, based on two small-scale, co-created and locally embedded projects on people's relationships with urban greenspaces and community food growing, conducted as a collaboration between professional and citizen social scientists. Our findings illustrate the complexity of such research in practice and identify five dilemmas that arise from tensions between the aspirations and hopes associated with co-created citizen social science, and the pragmatic and procedural realities of citizen research in practice. We argue that citizen social science projects will have to actively engage with these in order to be successful.
Rural areas in developing countries face the twin challenges of water scarcity and risk of groundwater contamination due to lack of water treatment options. A decentralized greywater treatment system for reuse is an option that addresses both of these challenges. This study reports the performance of a decentralized greywater treatment and reuse system which was constructed and operated for over 12 months in a government-managed school in rural India. The handwash and kitchen wash wastewater streams were treated separately due to differences in the initial greywater characteristics. The treatment stages included pre-treatment using screens and grease traps, slow sand biofiltration combined with anaerobic sludge bioreactor, and aeration before the final ozone-based disinfection stage. The treated water at the end of all these stages was used for toilet-flushing in the school. The treatment system was operated for one year and sampling was performed to investigate the system performance. The overall treatment system showed removal efficiencies of 99 %, 98 %, 66 %, 73 %, 98 %, 96 % and >99.99 % for the parameters of turbidity, total suspended solids, nitrate, total phosphorus, biological oxygen demand (5 days), chemical oxygen demand and fecal coliform respectively. This study quantifies the performance of each subsystem and demonstrates for the first time that a decentralized greywater treatment can be operated effectively and economically in a rural Indian setting.
This paper considers urban environmental sustainability in cities of the global South. Drawing on the insights of urban political ecology and a critique of participatory development, the author argues that environmental sustainability initiatives mask the political economy of environmental injustice and uneven urban development. This argument is fleshed out through a case study of the Adyar Poonga river restoration project in Chennai, India. The case study highlights two key dimensions of what is termed the 'depoliticisation' of the production of urban nature. First, the political conflicts that surround urban environmental projects are neutralized through a definition of sustainability that is primarily concerned with making environmentalism and economic development compatible. Second, conflicts surrounding urban environments are ostensibly 'depoliticized' through highly selective practices of 'participation'. Generalized in this way, the discourse and practice of participation gloss over the power asymmetries that characterize the civic sphere in urban India. As environmental best practice is being actively formulated and replicated through projects like the Adyar Poonga, it becomes ever more urgent, to interrogate the mechanisms of political inclusions/exclusion and to question who benefits from urban environmental change.
Water infrastructures are often living infrastructures, whose operation relies on processes involving other-than-human living beings. This article considers the materiality of waterscapes by attending to this liveliness. We argue that critical water research can benefit from situating social relations and water transformations within more-than-human worlds. Our conceptual framework brings hydrosocial scholarship into conversation with more-than-human geography. This opens avenues for interdisciplinary water research that weaves together ecology and qualitative social research. The analytical potential of such a framework is explored through an empirical account grounded in two constructed wetland projects in rural India. These infrastructural assemblages engage humans, other living beings and objects in webs of material-semiotic processes. We present three stories of intra-action that focus on particular plants, microbes and animals within these waterscapes. Our analysis highlights the crucial importance of other-than-human living beings in the production of waterscape knowledge and suggests a need to go beyond the problematisation of ‘uneven’ waterscapes. Approaching waterscapes as more-than-human collectives prompts us to consider the power relations that underpin waterscape knowledge and the politics of multispecies justice. A focus on more-than-human infrastructures opens up the possibility of interdisciplinary water research that is better attuned to the hybrid nature of social and ecological processes, as well as the politics embedded therein.
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