Critical approaches to urban water governance: from critique to justice, democracy, and transdisciplinary collaboration

Abstract

As global urban regions grow and transform, water systems present a unique set of challenges to stakeholders. Municipalities often struggle to pay for and maintain aging infrastructure as well as create equitable access for growing populations-especially in the rapidly urbanizing Global South. Critical approaches to urban water governance have made tremendous contributions to our collective knowledge of how these systems work. In this study, we argue that the most important direction for these approaches to urban water governance is to translate the insights generated by critique into the positive project to construct more just and democratic systems and practices of governance. However, we contend that in order to do this work, critical scholarship on urban water governance will need to continue deepening its engagement with two larger sets of debates. First, to help realize more just and democratic systems, it will need to grapple with the complex dimensions of debates on how to theorize and conceptualize justice and democracy. Second, in order to create effective alternatives to current paradigms of water governance, it will need to show how recent conceptualizations of urban water as hybrid or heterogeneous assemblage can help build truly transdisciplinary collaborations. We explore these debates through a review of recent critical approaches to urban water governance, with attention to ways forward that embrace epistemological pluralism and transdisciplinary collaboration.

Whose water? Whose profits? The role of informal water markets in groundwater depletion in peri-urban Hyderabad

“…Water users, policy makers, activists and scientific communities need to work towards improving the political participation of marginalised peri-urban communities that are excluded or whose voices are silenced. 'Democratisation' of water is needed so that marginalised voices are heard and included in the water debate (Finewood & Holifield, 2015;Sultana, 2018). The communities have to take measures to report water theft and fight for the rights of water.…”

Remaking stormwater as a resource: Technology, law, and citizenship

“…Stormwater is a complicated governance problem and the broad shift toward viewing it as a resource instead of a hazard mirrors a transition away from command‐and‐control and state‐centric governance (Cousins, ; Finewood & Holifield, ). This change in discourse and institutional practice flows from the need to address several, but interrelated, problems of urban water governance.…”

Strategic siting of contingency bases : assessing options for potable water

“…Beyond a consideration of the mere physical presence of water, an analyst also needs to take into account how the local populace values water and uses it. Peoples' use of a resource is influenced by cultural preferences and social dynamics, as well as by access to technology (e.g., infrastructure; see e.g., Swyngedouw 2004;Finewood and Holifield 2015). Cultural preferences regarding the acquisition and use of water influence the type, amount, and management of water that is used for household, commercial, industrial, and agricultural purposes.…”