Everyday states and water infrastructure: Insights from a small secondary city in Africa, Bafatá in Guinea-Bissau

Abstract

A rich body of work on everyday governance and urban infrastructure has produced nuanced understandings of the situated power relations and manifold practices shaping urban infrastructure in diverse cities. However, there is little research focusing on the practices and relations of state actors, and examining how these might shape different infrastructural configurations and relate to broader processes of state formation. This is particularly the case for secondary cities in Africa. This article draws on anthropological explorations of the state and debates on local ownership in aid to examine how state practices and relations have shaped water infrastructure in a small secondary city (Bafatá, Guinea-Bissau), and how the state is constituted in this process. Based on extensive ethnographic work, this research demonstrates that in a context of aid dependency, state influence is necessarily constituted through its relations with non-state organisations. Formal state presence therefore depends on the subtle and erratic recognition bestowed on the state by non-state organisations. However, local state actors continue to shape water provision in Bafatá in fundamental ways not through following policy and regulatory frameworks, but through their (informal) decisions, practices and interactions with non-state organisations. Overall, it is argued that anthropological explorations of states open our analytical lens to the mundane ways in which states shape different types of urban infrastructure, and the ways these practices relate to broader processes of state formation, particularly in context where states appear elusive.

Conflicts, cooperation and experimentation: Analysing the politics of urban water through Accra’s heterogeneous water supply infrastructure

“…Most significantly, these analyses are not only concerned with the production of socio-spatial inequalities, but also how they might be challenged, or substantially altered by the diversity of efforts to circulate water across the city. Such goals and perspectives align with recent proposals for a practice-based understanding of water governance (Alba et al, 2019;Cornea et al, 2017;Neves Alves, 2019;Truelove, 2019) acknowledging 'the messiness, creativity and contingencies in water governance processes, while also allowing a better appreciation of how water decisions and actions may be as much the outcome of pragmatic or tactical choices, as of strategic, power-laden ones (Kemerink-Seyoum et al, 2019: 3). These practice-based analyses echo Lawhon et al (2017), calling for recognition of how 'societal orders, and the governance these assume or produce are always in-the-making and inherently performative -and therefore open to change' (Kemerink-Seyoum et al, 2019: 2).…”

Domestic groundwater abstraction in Lagos, Nigeria: a disjuncture in the science-policy-practice interface?

“…The result is a complex reality for groundwater governance, one that has not yet been fully considered by scholars in this field. Whilst Neves Alves (2019) suggests that the blurring of state-society boundaries in everyday water practices highlights the importance of previously hidden actors, such as households, our findings about boreholes in Lagos State sheds new light on the nature and scale of the part played by households in everyday groundwater management practices in cities such as Lagos. Current literatures on groundwater management underplay the fundamental role played by these actors, which is an important omission given the significance of in situ self-supply from groundwater in cities across Africa (Foster et al 2018).…”

Doing the work: Locating labour in infrastructural geography

“…Human practices of metabolic transformation have become crucial to understanding diverse forms of infrastructural provision in majority worlds across diverse urban contexts (Alda-Vidal et al, 2018; Amankwaa and Gough, 2021; Anand, 2011; Munro, 2020; Neves Alves, 2021; Pilo’, 2020; Truelove, 2019). Analyses of these ways of doing have contributed greatly to scholarly conceptualisations of infrastructure as being in flux and always unfinished (Baptista, 2019; Niranjana, 2021).…”