Water Materialities and Citizen Engagement: Testing the Implications of Water Access and Quality for Community Engagement in Ghana and South Africa

Abstract

We analyze the relationship between perceptions of domestic water access, and quality, in relation community engagement. While others have suggested linkages between material conditions of water access and engagement (e.g., that poor water access might spur engagement), to date there have been no studies those test these relationships using statistical methods. Based on a quantitative analysis of survey data from underserved sites in Accra, Ghana, and Cape Town, South Africa, our results show that water access and quality are both predictive of community engagement. The analysis also makes a strong case that there are different dimensions when considering the material conditions of water-in this case, water access and quality each condition engagement in opposite directions. Furthermore, consistent with other studies, our study also shows different demographics (notably gender) mediate these relationships in important ways. Introduction: Community Engagement and Materialities of Water Recent conceptual debates have highlighted linkages between conditions of environmental resources and community engagement-from work in environmental citizenship (Latta and Wittman 2012), to "environmentality" (Agrawal 2005) or notions of "hydraulic citizenship" (Anand 2011). While several works have suggested that material conditions of resources influence and shape sociopolitical processes of engagement, governance, or citizenship, there is still limited understanding of these dynamics. To address this gap, we offer a statistical analysis of the relationship between water materialities and community engagement. Drawing on survey data from underserved urban areas of Accra, Ghana, and Cape Town, South Africa, the analysis considers two dimensions of water materialities: access and quality. Results suggest that water access and quality are significant predictors of community engagement, albeit in opposite directions (access has a negative relationship, and quality a positive one). As such, our study lends support to the broad interest in the ways that material resource conditions influence sociopolitical processes, while also underscoring the need for clarity regarding specific facets of materialities. Our results also validate arguments in the literature related to the variability of water-society linkages 2 with respect to gender and country context. Resource Materialities: Debates from Political Ecology, Science and Technology Studies, and Allied Fields Literatures on materiality from political ecology, science and technology studies, and allied traditions have pointed to the biophysical and ecological characteristics or qualities of resources, suggesting that material and infrastructural conditions have important consequences for sociopolitical processes, including the ways in which resources are used, governed, or imagined (cf., Bakker 2003). For instance, Kaika (2005) discusses how infrastructures that enable easy access to water (by simply turning on a home tap) may contribute to a sense of disassociation between residents and...

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