Going 'off script': The influence of instrument constituencies on the Europeanisation of Turkish water policy

Burçin Demirbilek
Department of Political Science and Public Administration, Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences, Çankırı Karatekin University, Çankırı, Turkey; bdemirbilek@karatekin.edu.tr

Oscar Fitch-Roy
Centre for Geography and Environmental Science and Centre for European Governance, University of Exeter, UK; o.fitch-roy@exeter.ac.uk

David Benson
Environment and Sustainability Institute and the Department of Politics, University of Exeter, UK; d.i.benson@exeter.ac.uk

Jenny Fairbrass
Norwich Business School, University of East Anglia, UK; j.fairbrass@uea.ac.uk

ABSTRACT: The European Union (EU) has established a major role in directing policy change both internally and beyond its borders, a phenomenon known as Europeanisation. This article examines the Europeanisation of water policy in Turkey in relation to implementation of the EU Water Framework Directive (WFD). Although some principles of EU water policy have been adopted in Turkey, the WFD has also been subject to significant domestic modification, prompting questions about how and why such patterns of partial implementation occur. In this respect, learning and socialisation within transnational 'instrument constituencies' (ICs) is shown to be an important explanatory factor. It follows that diffusion of EU water policy and the WFD beyond its borders may be enhanced by promoting the capacity for instrument constituency learning – or the 'cognitive environment' – in non-EU countries.

KEYWORDS: Water Framework Directive, instrument constituencies, policy diffusion, social learning, Europeanisation, Turkey

The theory and practice of water pricing and cost recovery in the Water Framework Directive

Julio Berbel
Water, Environmental and Agricultural Resources Economics (WEARE); and Universidad de Córdoba, Spain; berbel@uco.es

Alfonso Expósito
Water, Environmental and Agricultural Resources Economics (WEARE); and Universidad de Málaga, Spain; aexposito@uma.es

ABSTRACT: Article 9 of the Water Framework Directive (WFD) requires member states to take account not only of the principle of cost recovery of water services, including environmental and resource costs (ERCs), but also of the use of water pricing as an environmental policy instrument; nevertheless, no common methodology exists for the estimation of financial costs, nor is there a practical definition of ERC. The review of public evidence and scientific research regarding the effect of pricing on demand shows the limitations of water pricing and the need to integrate pricing and non-pricing instruments. Cost recovery remains a convenient policy for the financing of existing and future water infrastructures. This study offers a brief discussion on the theory and practice of pricing in Article 9 of the WFD and proposes the adoption of a more realistic approach to the implementation of cost recovery, one which abandons the unrealistic objective of monetisation of ERCs and proposes alternatives to the current emphasis on water pricing as a component of water resources management.

KEYWORDS: Water Framework Directive, cost recovery, water pricing, affordability, environmental and resource costs

'Praying for rain': A case of drought mismanagement in Barcelona (2007-2008)

Alvar Closas
International Consultant, Canberra, Australia; alvarclosas@gmail.com

ABSTRACT: Focusing on the severe drought suffered by the city of Barcelona, Spain, in 2007 and 2008, the aim of this paper is twofold. First, it examines the panoply of emergency measures that were enacted as responses to the drought; second, it contextualises the event within the wider political context of water scarcity and resource management in Catalonia. An examination of this drought is used to reveal structural deficiencies in water management policies. By combining the concepts of path dependency and the 'hydraulic mission', this paper situates drought management in Barcelona along the traditionalist continuum of supply-side technology-focused water management solutions in Spain. Fraught with contradictory policies, political bickering and partisan alliances, drought management in Barcelona becomes subject to party agendas and dependent on technological fixes; this undermines the possibility of establishing effective and adaptive drought management plans for the future.

KEYWORDS: Drought, hydraulic mission, path dependency, water politics, Barcelona, Spain

The EU Water Framework Directive twenty years on: Introducing the Special Issue

Timothy Moss
Integrative Research Institute on Transformations of Human-Environment Systems (IRI THESys), Humboldt University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany; timothy.moss@hu-berlin.de

Gabrielle Bouleau
Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire Sciences Innovations Société (LISIS), UGE, CNRS, INRAE, Marne-la-Vallée, France; gabrielle.bouleau@inrae.fr

José Albiac
Agrifood Research and Technology Center (CITA-DGA) and IA2, Zaragoza, Spain; maella@unizar.es

Lenka Slavíkova
Faculty of Social and Economic Studies, J. E. Purkyně University, Ústí nad Labem, Czech Republic; lenka.slavikova@ujep.cz

ABSTRACT: Twenty years ago, the European Union launched one of its flagship environmental regulations, the Water Framework Directive (WFD). Since its inception in 2000, the WFD has been a guiding light for water professionals within and beyond the EU; it has pioneered ecological standards for water quality, cycles of river basin management planning, participatory forms of water governance, novel economic instruments, and a recurrent assessment regime. At the same time, the WFD has – by virtue of the far-reaching nature of its interventions – aroused political resistance and encountered bureaucratic lethargy; together with many other factors, these have significantly limited its positive impact on the aquatic environment. This Special Issue looks back over the past 20 years to assess what the WFD has achieved, where it has fallen short of expectations, and why. In this introductory piece, the guest editors set the scene and summarise the key findings of the 12 subsequent papers in terms of 6 processes that are characteristic of the WFD’s trajectory: implementation, indication, incrementation, inspiration, imitation and insubordination.

KEYWORDS: European Union, Water Framework Directive, water policy, implementation

Bottling water differently, and sustaining the water commons? Social innovation through water service franchising in Cambodia

Isaac Lyne
Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University, New South Wales, Australia; i.lyne@westernsydney.edu.au

ABSTRACT: Until recently, bottled drinking water was a cause for concern with regard to development in the Global South; now, however, it is embraced as a way to reach the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal target 6.1, which calls for the achievement by the year 2030 of "[u]niversal and equitable access to safe and affordable drinking water for all". Reaching the SDG 6.1 target through the use of bottled drinking water is controversial as there are broad questions about how any form of packaged – and therefore commodified – water can be ethical or consistent with "the human right to water" that was ratified in 2010 by the United Nations member states. By examining a social innovation enacted by a Cambodian NGO called Teuk Saat 1001, this research questions the polarising narratives of marketised and packaged water. Teuk Saat 1001 operates a social enterprise service franchise that delivers treated family-scale drinking water in refillable 20-litre polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastic bottles directly to customers’ houses. In contrast to literature that focuses on the strategic development of such organisations, this research combines a bottom-up view of community interaction with an analysis of hybrid institutional arrangements and ethical debates about the role of the state in water regulation. From a postcapitalist perspective, it considers entrepreneurial subjectivities fostered by bottled water as a 'service' and asks if this mode of packaged water can – contrary to the general arguments – actually help to sustain the water commons. The paper also considers temporality and water ethics; it concludes that models like this require close monitoring, considering the general history of commercial non-profits.

KEYWORDS: Drinking water, postcapitalism, Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), social enterprise, social innovation, the commons, Cambodia

Soft power, discourse coalitions, and the proposed interbasin water transfer between Lake Chad and the Congo River

Ramazan Caner Sayan
United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH), UNU-INWEH, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada; canersayan@gmail.com

Nidhi Nagabhatla
United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH), UNU-INWEH, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada; and School of Geography and Earth Sciences, McMaster University, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada; nidhi.nagabhatla@unu.edu

Marvel Ekwuribe
School of Geography and Earth Sciences, McMaster University, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada; and United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH), UNU-INWEH, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada; ekwuribm@mcmaster.ca

ABSTRACT: Since the 1960s, Lake Chad’s declining water level has been a hot topic on the political agendas of the Sahel region. For some decades, diverting water from the Congo River to Lake Chad via an interbasin water transfer (IBWT) has been considered to be the only way that Lake Chad can be saved. Accordingly, two IBWT projects have been put on the table. The first one, the Transaqua Project, has been in development since the 1970s; it involves the construction of a 2400-kilometre-long canal between the two basins. The second proposal was drafted in 2011 and entails the construction of a shorter canal (1350 km) which aims to divert water from two reservoirs that are to be constructed on the Ubangi River, one of the main tributaries of the Congo River. In 2018, the Lake Chad Basin Commission (LCBC) chose the first proposal as their preferred option to revive Lake Chad. While the IBWT idea has been promoted as part of political agendas, French scientists and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) have been firmly opposed to it. This article focuses on the discourse coalitions which are competing to promote or block the IBWT project and include companies, the riparian states of both basins, non-riparian states, international organisations, NGOs, and experts. The paper applies a mixed methods approach of discourse, document, and media analysis. Diplomatic and technocratic processes related to the IBWT issue, and the motivations of multiple actors to promote or object to the IBWT projects, are revealed through an examination of soft power tactics and strategies such as agenda setting, knowledge construction, securitisation, issue linkage, and exclusion from negotiation processes. Overall, this article examines the transboundary water interactions between the two relatively under-researched basins of Lake Chad and the Congo River; it highlights how non-state actors (particularly companies) have led to a reshaping of transboundary water politics.

KEYWORDS: Transboundary water politics, discourse coalitions, soft power, interbasin water transfer, Lake Chad, Congo River

The challenge of irrigation water pricing in the Water Framework Directive

José Albiac
Agrifood Research and Technology Center (CITA-DGA) and IA2, Zaragoza, Spain; maella@unizar.es

Elena Calvo
Faculty of Economics and Business, University of Zaragoza, Spain; ecalvo@unizar.es

Taher Kahil
International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), Laxenburg, Austria; kahil@iiasa.ac.at

Encarna Esteban
School of Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Zaragoza, Spain; encarnae@unizar.es

ABSTRACT: The scarcity and degradation of water resources is an important environmental challenge in Europe, which is being addressed by the Water Framework Directive, the Urban Waste Water Directive, and the Nitrates Directive. Water pricing is an essential component of the Water Framework Directive, and the increase of water prices up to full recovery costs is a valuable measure in urban networks. However, water pricing may not be the best reallocation instrument for irrigated agriculture. In irrigated agriculture, water pricing is challenging because water for irrigation is usually a common pool resource. Water pricing could recover costs and indicate scarcity in the long run, but it doesn’t seem feasible in the short run for irrigation water reallocation. Other policy instruments such as water markets and institutional cooperation seem more operational for water reallocation. The Water Framework Directive includes the 'polluter pays principle' as the suitable rule for pollution abatement. But the principle cannot be applied to agricultural pollution since this pollution is non-point, and water pricing is not the right abatement instrument. Also, the flimsy outcomes from the Nitrates Directive since 1991 call for a revision of the pollution abatement measures. This paper reviews the water policy instruments that could be more suitable for achieving the objectives of the Water Framework Directive, and the paper highlights the need for combining instruments to deal with the public good, common pool resource, and private good characteristics of water.

KEYWORDS: Policy instruments in irrigation, Water Framework Directive, Nitrates Directive, water pricing, collective action

Despite great expectations in the Seine River Basin, the WFD did not reduce diffuse pollution

Gabrielle Bouleau
Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire Sciences Innovations Société (LISIS), UGE, CNRS, INRAE, Marne-la-Vallée, France; gabrielle.bouleau@inrae.fr

Rémi Barbier
Ecole Nationale du Génie de l’eau et de l’environnement de Strasbourg, UMR INRA-ENGEES GESTE, Strasbourg; remi.barbier@engees.unistra.fr

Marie-Pierre Halm-Lemeille
Ifremer, Port en Bessin, France; marie.pierre.halm.lemeille@ifremer.fr

Bruno Tassin
Ecole des Ponts, LEESU, Champs-sur-Marne, France ; Univ. Paris Est Créteil, LEESU, Créteil, France; bruno.tassin@enpc.fr

Arnaud Buchs
Univ. Grenoble Alpes, Sciences Po Grenoble, CNRS, INRAE, Grenoble INP, GAEL, Grenoble, France; arnaud.buchs@sciencespo-grenoble.fr

Florence Habets
CNRS and ENS Laboratoire de Géologie, Ecole normale supérieure, Paris, France; florence.habets@ens.psl.eu

ABSTRACT: European stakeholders engaged in combatting the eutrophication of the North Sea welcomed three Water Framework Directive innovations: a more holistic approach to quality, the binding nature of WFD objectives, and greater public participation. Twenty years later, however, there has been a disappointing amount of progress in the reduction of diffuse pollution. In the Seine River Basin, the amount of livestock rearing is low; yet the basin is subject to significant diffuse pollution due to agriculture. This paper reports our study of this case; we examine the literature on WFD implementation policy in order to identify the physical and social causes of this failure to reduce diffuse pollution. We show that the nitrates, phosphorus, and pesticides that affect ground, surface and marine waters are attributable to structural changes in agricultural production rather than to inefficient farming practices. We describe how a series of instruments that were designed to combat the diffuse agricultural origins of pollutants have had little effect. We identify the main obstacles to improvement as being the dispersion of the targeted public and the dispersion of benefits, given the current nature of legitimacy in the European Union. This case illustrates the fact that intensive agricultural production has an impact on water quality far beyond the problem of excess manure from livestock production.

KEYWORDS: Diffuse pollution, policy implementation, output legitimacy, regulatory space, intensive agriculture, WFD, Seine River Basin, France

Participation in river basin planning under the Water Framework Directive – Has it benefitted good water status?

Marlene Rimmert
Leuphana University Lüneburg, Lüneburg; marlene.rimmert@stud.leuphana.de

Lucie Baudoin
Universitat Ramon Llull, ESADE, Sant Cugat, Spain; lucie.baudoin@esade.edu

Benedetta Cotta
Leuphana University Lüneburg, Institute of Sustainability Governance, Lüneburg, Germany; cotta@leuphana.de

Elisa Kochskämper
Leibniz Institute for Research on Society and Space, Erkner; elisa.kochskaemper@leibniz-irs.de

Jens Newig
Institute of Sustainability Governance, Leuphana University Lüneburg, Institute of Sustainability Governance and Center for the Study of Democracy, Lüneburg, Germany; newig@uni.leuphana.de

ABSTRACT: The participation of societal groups and of the broader public has been a key feature in implementing the European Water Framework Directive (WFD). Non-state actor participation in the drafting of river basin management plans was expected to help achieve the directive’s environmental goals, but the recent literature leaves us doubtful whether this has in fact been the case. This study examines a structured online survey of 118 public water managers, covering the six biggest European Union states ofFrance, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain and the UK. We assess multiple facets of participation, for example the involved actors, the intensity of communication exchange, and participants’ influence on planning. Results show that participatory WFD implementation has included a wide range of actor groups but rarely citizens, and that there has been minimal provision for interactive communication. The value of active involvement to the reaching of environmental goals was assessed as limited and that of public consultation as insignificant. Participants who were actively involved mainly contributed by advocating for stronger environmental standards and by providing implementation-relevant knowledge. Potential reasons for the overall poor record of participation include the strong influence of agriculture and the lack of public interest. Our findings suggest that, in hindsight, the European Commission’s conviction that participation benefits good water status appears overly naïve.

KEYWORDS: Active involvement, river basin management, ecological outcomes, mandated participatory planning, European water governance, participatory governance, stakeholder involvement

Perception of bottlenecks in the implementation of the European Water Framework Directive

Aude Zingraff-Hamed
Technical University of Munich, Chair for Strategic Landscape Planning and Management, Freising, Germany; aude.zingraff-hamed@tum.de

Barbara Schröter
Leibniz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research, Müncheberg, Germany; barbara.schroeter@zalf.de

Simon Schaub
Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg, Institut für Politische Wissenschaft, Heidelberg; simon.schaub@ipw.uni-heidelberg.de

Robert Lepenies
Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research GmbH, Leipzig, Germany; robert.lepenies@ufz.de

Ulf Stein
Ecologic Institute, Berlin, Germany; ulf.stein@ecologic.eu

Frank Hüesker
Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research GmbH, Leipzig, Germany; frank.hueesker@ufz.de

Claas Meyer
Leibniz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research, Müncheberg, Germany; claas.meyer@zalf.de

Christian Schleyer
Institute of Geography, Leopold-Franzens University of Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria; christian.schleyer@uibk.ac.at

Susanne Schmeier
IHE Delft Institute for Water Education, Delft, The Netherlands; s.schmeier@un-ihe.org

Martin T. Pusch
Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries (IGB), Berlin, Germany; pusch@igb-berlin.de

ABSTRACT: The European Water Framework Directive (WFD) entered into force in December 2000; it marks a decisive turn in European water governance and related policies, management practices and restoration trends. After 20 years of implementation through two management cycles, EU member states have transposed the WFD requirements into national law, performed baseline assessments of water bodies, and implemented first measures such as hydromorphological river restoration which aims to achieve 'good ecological status', or at least the potential level targeted for that particular water body, by 2027. So far, however, WFD implementation has shown limited success; this weak result has given rise to studies, which are mainly discussions about possible technical limitations of WFD implementation and the appropriateness of monitoring procedures. This paper complements these studies by exploring governance-related bottlenecks that have emerged in the last two decades, as perceived by scientists and practitioners. An online survey was conducted which built on a list of 24 barriers to WFD implementation; these barriers had been identified previously by more than 40 researchers during a workshop in January 2019 and through a literature review. In this survey, the list of perceived barriers to WFD implementation was shared to 130 scientists and practitioners, who were asked to prioritise the items on list. Taken together, four main barriers to WFD implementation were identified: 1) problems related to horizontal intersectoral communication, 2) insufficient land reserves, 3) insufficient staff capacities, and 4) inadequate funding. The results of the analysis of WFD implementation indicated a bottleneck at the governance level that was due to insufficient horizontal collaboration and communication. This result is not in line with previous surveys that identified policy integration as the main bottleneck. We conclude from this that the governance dimension of WFD implementation merits more attention in terms of both research and political consultation in order to identify the needs for action that are key to improved WFD implementation.

KEYWORDS: Water governance, water-related institutions, cross-sectoral river management, river restoration, European Water Framework Directive

The ontological fallacy of the Water Framework Directive: Implications and alternatives

Jamie Linton
Université de Limoges, Limoges, France; james.linton@unilim.fr

Tobias Krueger
IRI THESys, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany; tobias.krueger@hu-berlin.de

ABSTRACT: This paper argues that in many cases the failure to reach the implementation goals of the Water Framework Directive (WFD) is not due to a lack of political will or to implementation deficits; rather, it is due to a fundamental conceptual problem that we characterise as an ontological fallacy that is built into the directive. This ontological fallacy is founded on a radical conceptual separation of nature from human society, one which Bruno Latour identified over 25 years ago as the "modern Constitution" (Latour, 1993). We draw mainly from research in political ecology to develop this argument; in the process, we discuss some of the main features of what we call the WFD system, especially the concept of 'reference conditions' and the Driver-Pressure-State-Impact-Response (DPSIR) framework. We build on this critical research by analysing controversies in England and France that surround efforts to attain good ecological status for water bodies under the WFD. Our paper is intended to help address what Boeuf and Fritsch (2016) identify as "a conspicuous lack of theory in WFD scholarship". We argue that unless European water policy is placed on a more realistic ontological footing, it risks losing political legitimacy as well as popular and scientific credibility.

KEYWORDS: Water Framework Directive, ontology, nature/society, reference conditions, DPSIR

Public banks + Public water = SDG 6?

David A. McDonald
Global Development Studies, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada; dm23@queensu.ca

Thomas Marois
Department of Development Studies, SOAS, University of London, London, UK; tm47@soas.ac.uk

Susan Spronk
School of International Development and Global Studies, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Canada; susan.spronk@uottawa.ca

ABSTRACT: Sustainable Development Goal 6 aims to achieve universal access to water and sanitation services by 2030; this is expected to cost an estimated US$150 billion per year. Where will this funding come from? One possibility is private finance in the form of direct equity investment from private water companies and lending from commercial banks. Evidence suggests, however, that private investments in water and sanitation have not materialised as planned due to the sector’s risk – return profile. Water and sanitation are considered 'too risky' by private investors and returns insufficiently rewarding. One alternative that may help to fill the water supply and sanitation (WSS) funding gap is an as yet untapped source of public finance: public banks. There are over 900 public banks in the world, with US$49 trillion in assets; they have, however, been largely underestimated as an important source of water and sanitation funding and have also been neglected by academic research and by mainstream policy organisations such as the World Bank. There is a need to better understand how public banks can be mobilised as effective funders of public water. In this article we provide a brief history of public banking practices in the water sector, review their pros and cons, and discuss the significance of the emergence of a new type of public water operator and the potential these entities offer for financing in this sector.

KEYWORDS: Public banks, public water, finance, SDGs, remunicipalisation

Incarnating water in Central Asia: Hydro-relations along a transnational river

Jeanne Féaux de la Croix
Eberhard-Karls University Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany; jeanne.feaux@uni-tuebingen.de

ABSTRACT: Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork as well as collaborative events with artists and policy makers in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, I demonstrate how water concepts and forms of interaction are anchored in the particular water incarnations of springs, lakes, glaciers and big rivers. As main water arteries for the Aral Sea, the Naryn and Syr Darya Rivers are managed between shifting alliances of the farming interests, International Non-governmental Organisation (INGO) bodies and national agencies of four riparian states. These Central Asian rivers have been subject to big dam-building programmes since the mid-Soviet period, while international companies now mine on the glaciers of the Naryn headwaters. I analyse socionatural water relations on a spectrum of three 'incarnations': first, river water as an exploitable resource; second, enspirited springs and lakes; and third, glaciers as indexes of human wrongdoing. While the multiplicity of water relations has been documented in many parts of the world, the concept of water incarnations highlights their topographical anchoring. This Central Asian case further shows how this anchoring can support claims of national entitlement. Finally, this paper argues that the situated heterogeneity of water relations can make it difficult to connect them to more sustainable water relationships in the region.

KEYWORDS: Transboundary agreements, modern water, commons, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Central Asia, springs, sacred sites, glaciers, Aral Sea

Jamaican river waters: Collapsing time and the politics of rural life-making

Anne M. Galvin
Associate Professor of Sociology and Anthropology, St. John’s University, New York, United States; galvina@stjohns.edu

ABSTRACT: The Black River, which runs through the parish of St. Elizabeth, Jamaica, is an ecological, agricultural and aquaculture resource and a source of drinking water. Research among residents and workers highlights the ways in which river waters become layered with meanings and uses in the postcolonial setting of former plantation economies. Time collapses within the landscape as river geographies house, and are reconfigured by, sediments of colonial European settlement, plantation slavery, recent industrial histories, and continuities of rural subsistence. River social geographies are shaped by historical shifts in governance and economics under racio-colonial capitalist systems that grew out of plantation slavery. How have the logics of colonisation that created sugar plantations shaped physical and social geographies surrounding river water in contemporary agricultural districts? In what ways have contemporary global capitalist industries like rum production affected Jamaican river waters and how have they operated on top of pre-existing riverine social geographies? This research explores the negotiation of rural Jamaican life-making norms – including subsistence fishing and farming practices – in relation to river waters, as understood by private citizens and other political actors. It examines the multiple registers that river water occupies in rural Jamaican life and the complex water politics that grows out of collapsing time within the post-plantation rural landscape of Jamaica.

KEYWORDS: Caribbean, postcolonial temporality, plantation protocapitalism, river water, political ecology, Jamaica

Waters, water and the hydrosocial politics of bathing in Mexico City, 1850-1920

Casey Walsh
University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, USA; cwalsh@ucsb.edu

ABSTRACT: Before the emergence of microbiology in the 1860s, the relationship between health and water was understood to hinge mostly on its manifold mineral qualities; medical treatments often involved bathing in particular waters to take advantage of their curative powers. With the help of microscopes, those waters came to be seen as home to dangerous microbes and a cause, as much as a cure, of disease. But while biology placed water management on a new footing, ideas from chemistry about the diverse positive medical effects of mineral waters continued to justify the use of those heterogeneous sources for bathing in pools and spas. In this article, I trace this slow, incomplete transition from chemical to biological understandings of waters and health in Mexico City in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Contradictory hydrosocial processes took shape as scientists, businesspeople and politicians sought to deliver biologically pure, potable public water to individual bathrooms and to, at the same time, promote the healing properties of social bathing in chemically heterogeneous waters.

KEYWORDS: Bathing, water, infrastructure, medicine, history, Mexico

Examining the cracks in universal water coverage: Women document the burdens of household water insecurity

Lucero Radonic
Department of Anthropology and Environmental Science and Policy Program, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan, United States; radonicl@msu.edu

Cara E. Jacob
Department of Anthropology, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan, United States; jacobca1@msu.edu

ABSTRACT: Universal access to safe drinking water is assumed to be a defining characteristic of cities in the Global North. This article documents the daily challenges facing working class women in Flint, Michigan, when the promise of modern water infrastructure cracks. In 2014, in order to reduce costs, Flint’s drinking water source was switched from Lake Huron to the Flint River. This change, and specifically the way it was managed, resulted in contamination of the water supply with lead and pathogens. While the experience of Flint is now an emblematic case of water insecurity in the Global North, it is not unique. Through a case study developed in the context of a community-based participatory research project, this article details how water insecurity transferred the burden of clean water provisioning back to individual households, and specifically to women. Rather than being able to rely on the labour and technical expertise that have rendered water safe in the modern city, Flint residents were abruptly made responsible for ensuring their own water security. We detail how the Flint water crisis brought about a 'new normal'; we consider the ways in which it gave rise to a new relationship to potable water that was characterised by a (re)turn to bottled or filtered water (from tap water) and a shift in who is responsible for the labour necessary to render water safe. The women’s testimonies that we present here illustrate how, when modern uniform water fails, people begin to see heterogeneous waters.

KEYWORDS: Water, water security, household water insecurity, infrastructure, gender, photovoice, Flint, USA, Global North

Implicit or illicit? Self-made infrastructure, household waters, and the materiality of belonging in Cape Town

Angela D. Storey
University of Louisville, Louisville, KY, US; angela.storey@louisville.edu

ABSTRACT: Residents of informal settlements in Cape Town, South Africa, access water through a maze of infrastructural pieces stitched together by social connections, political solidarities, and intersecting needs. In the absence of sufficient formal provision, the labour of informal settlement residents creates and maintains many of the pieces of water infrastructure used daily to fill gaps in access. Water lines are extended, shared, split and broken, and wastewater disposal spaces are constructed, each forging routes of access beyond formal provision and yet tying residents to wider systems. Based on a decade of ethnographic work conducted with residents of informal settlements in the Khayelitsha area of Cape Town, this article examines the difficulty of differentiating between formal and informal, legal and illegal, and public and private pieces of water systems. I argue for understanding such material pieces at the edges of water systems as implicit infrastructures, wrought at the intersection of local labour to manage multiple household waters, persistent structural exclusion, and neoliberal reworking of public services. Such a naming requires understanding infrastructural systems for water as both porous and exclusionary, highlighting the ways through which logics of urban resources frame everyday lives as beyond the purview of the state.

KEYWORDS: Water, infrastructure, informal settlements, urban anthropology, South Africa

Water, modern and multiple: Enriching the idea of water through enumeration amidst water scarcity in Bengaluru

Lindsay Vogt
Department of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies (ISEK), University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland; lindsay.vogt@uzh.ch

ABSTRACT: Numeric abstractions relied upon by modern water management are reductive by design, but their political effects need not be reductionist, as an example from Bengaluru attests. Prompted by a water supply crisis that briefly shut down an IT corridor, one multinational corporation looked to a small environmental consultancy named Avaani, and its customised enumerative technologies – metering, tariff design, water audits and environmental balance ledgers – to mitigate water scarcity and its corresponding business interruptions. This occasioned the meeting and merging of two understandings of water: the modern water stripped of place and history that is so sought by the corporation in its daily water provisioning, and the water that is imbued with moral imperatives and local histories and which is tended by the non-profit organisation. As the enumerative idioms of Avaani soon proliferated throughout the corporation and its public outreach, the non-profit largely avoided the reduction, alienation and abstraction that characterises governmental enumeration; it did so in two ways: by using data collection as a 'spin-off' to curate and compound friendly encounters between people and water, and by embedding water accounting with moral considerations. This case shows how enumerative regimes, depending on their design and deployment, may contribute to a more multiple and multiply contextualised sense of water, even in situations of water scarcity where reductionist measurement tends to abound.

KEYWORDS: Enumeration, measurement, audit cultures, groundwater, water scarcity, NGO, development, Bengaluru, India

Co-producing drinking water in rural Ethiopia: Governmentality in the name of community management

Linda Annala
Hanken School of Economics, Centre for Corporate Responsibility, Helsinki, Finland; linda.annala@hanken.fi

ABSTRACT: In rural drinking water governance, the reliance on community management has permeated development programmes and water policies for decades. Moving away from a community-centric view, this paper expands the focus to a broader landscape in order to investigate how the state, citizens and other non-state actors co-produce drinking water in the Amhara region of Ethiopia. The study seeks to understand what kinds of power relations are being (re)produced among co-producing actors through the discourse of community management. The conceptualisation of power relations is undertaken by employing Foucault’s governmentality perspective. As its empirical material, besides an examination of policy documents, the study utilises interviews with community Water, Sanitation and Hygiene Committees (WASHCOs), woreda (district) and regional water officials, private suppliers, NGO representatives, artisans and other actors. As a conceptual contribution, the paper makes power visible in the otherwise depoliticised literature of co-production. For governments and development practitioners, the study urges the opening up of spaces for discussion by showing how the vocabulary of community management can be appropriated to (re)produce power structures.

KEYWORDS: Co-production, community management, governmentality, rural drinking water governance, Ethiopia