I argue for some paradigmatic departures in defining and conceptualizing peri-urban water security. I argue for abandoning the notion of the peri-urban as an area contiguous to the city; reorienting our thinking from emphasizingstate intervention to improve water security to a more broad-based notion of "network governance" (Mathur 2008); and finally, moving away from quantifiable measures of water (in)security to more qualitative, process-based assessments that capture the daily lived experiences of people inhabiting peri-urban spaces who are losing access to water and their struggles in negotiating access to it.

The word "peri-urban" is a confusing term, with different frames of reference. However, the most widely used connotation of the term is a place located at the periphery of a city that is being gradually engulfed by it. Thus, it refers broadly to rural areas that are in the process of being urbanized; in this process, they provide resources like land and water to meet the growing needs of the city, while receiving its wastes. The typical peri-urban problematique is that of rural areas facing the brunt of urban expansion and suffering from state apathy and institutional neglect.

In the growing academic literature on the peri-urban, it is conceptualized as a zone that reveals both urban and rural characteristics; urban and agricultural forms of land use and settlement coexist and are intensively intermingled. Given the pattern of urban expansion in the global south, this co-existence of the rural and the urban can exist in the heart of the city, and not just at its periphery (Singh and Narain 2020). It is not uncommon to see gated communities, shopping malls, and amusement parks in the midst of rural settlements, interspersed with small patches of agricultural land, village ponds and grazing lands. Rural-urban boundaries are constantly blurring, making the identification of an area contiguous to a city as problematic.

Alternatively, if we see the peri-urban as a construct that captures rural-urban transformations led by land use and other changes, we could think of the peri-urban as an ecosystem where rural and urban land uses, economic activities and institutions co-exist. A peri-urban space could be a wetland, mangrove, a coastal belt, delta or estuary, not just a piece of land bordering the city. These spaces need to be recognised as ecosystems as such, and not mere extensions of the city. This may call for moving away from framings such as "peri-urban" itself, that position such spaces simply as city margins.

Commonly understood dimensions of peri-urban water (in)security include the encroachment or acquisition of water commons for urban expansion; the physical flows of water between rural and urban areas, for instance, through water tankers; the appropriation of groundwater from rural to urban uses; and the pollution of rural water sources through industrial and domestic waste. However, much of the transitions taking place, for instance around a wetland, could also be studied using a peri-urban conceptual lens. The same could be said for studying changes in mountain settings where the aesthetic beauty of the place drives land use change, depriving local communities access to such water sources as springs, representing cases of what is called amenity-led migration (Narain and Singh 2019).To think of these spaces as necessarily bordering cities can be problematic, but the nature of water insecurity being experienced in such cases is akin to that experienced by other rural areas losing water to the city.

Dominating public discussions and discourses around efforts to improve peri-urban water security is an argument that since peri-urban spaces lie between rural and urban jurisdictions, there is an institutional void; this can be filled by bringing such "areas" under formal urban governance structures. This is a very simplistic assumption. The peri-urban space is a messy space in transition, where the diversity of actors is matched only by the diversity of resource allocation mechanisms. Equating "governance with "government" can be misleading here. Most of what we call peri-urban "areas", do have functioning local governance structures and mechanisms, though they may be outside the statutory sphere. Ignoring these in attempts to bring such spaces under urban statutory governance mechanisms will create more problems than it will solve.

Not accounting for the diversity of water sources through which peri-urban resource users access water overlooks and possibly undermines the role of non-state actors in water provisioning. Paradoxically, this could translate into an overestimation of the supply-demand gap in peri-urban spaces. At the same time, it projects peri-urban resource users as passive recipients of the changes brought on by urbanization, undermining human agency. Planned adaptation measures targeted at improving peri-urban water security need to be based on an understanding of both statutory and non-statutory mechanisms of water provisioning in the peri-urban.

Improving water access and addressing water resource degradation challenges require grounded efforts at mobilizing communities, bringing them into dialogue with state agencies, and advocacy by non-government and civil society organizations. Simply bringing them under a formal urban statutory governance structure does not do justice to the complexities in water access and its iniquitous use in peri-urban spaces.

Finally, given the diversity of water sources in peri-urban contexts and the rapid changes affecting water access, quantitative yardsticks of water security [1] may be difficult to apply. On the one hand, such water sources as village ponds, lakes and tanks are constantly being acquired or encroached upon to meet the needs of urban expansion, and groundwater is being steadily depleted to meet urban needs or being pumped and transferred to the cities through water tankers; on the other hand, new sources of water such as wastewater for irrigation keep steadily emerging. There is a wide diversity of sources of water to which people may have access, depending on the location of their agricultural fields, social relations and norms of co-operation. In such contexts, we need dynamic framings of water (in)security that capture the transitions underway, and their implications for changing and differential water access, as well as peri-urban water users' differential abilities to negotiate it.

Vishal Narain


References

Cook, C., & Bakker, K. (2012). Water security: Debating an emerging paradigm. Global environmental change, 22(1), 94-102.

Mathur, K. (2008). From government to governance: A brief survey of the Indian experience. New Delhi: National Book Trust.

Narain, V., & Singh, A. K. (2019). Replacement or displacement? Periurbanisation and changing water access in the Kumaon Himalaya, India. Land Use Policy, 82, 130-137.

Singh, A. K., & Narain, V. (2020). Lost in transition: Perspectives, processes and transformations in Periurbanizing India. Cities, 97, 102494.


[1] For a review of the emergence of the paradigm of water security and different measures to operationalize and measure it, see Cook and Bakker (2012).