The goal of the study is to strengthen the analytical purchase of the term water governance and improve the utility of the concept for describing and analyzing actual water distribution processes. We argue this is necessary as most writing on water governance is more concerned with promoting particular politically inspired agendas of what water governance should be than with understanding what it actually is. We believe that water governance at heart is about political choices as to where water should flow; about the norms, rules and laws on which such choices should be based; about who is best able or qualified to decide about this; and about the kind of societal future such choices support. We identify distributions-of water, voice and authority, and expertise-as the empirical anchor and entry-point of our conceptualization of water governance. This usefully allows foregrounding questions of equity in water governance discussions and provides the empirical foundation for a meaningful engagement with the politics of water governance.

In their work and life, urban service providers are continually torn between policies and pressures from higher scales and the realities of the cities they inhabit. The ways in which they negotiate these tensions imply the complex adjudication of a range of normative issues, conditioned by the variety of socio-technical, political, and economic factors that are underscored in the literature. In this way, geographical debates on pragmatism and ethics have an important, yet largely overlooked, contribution to make to the study of urban services. These approaches can promote the careful consideration of how people engaged in service provision manage such complexity – including its normative dimensions – through their long-term embodied experience. Pragmatic and related ethical perspectives necessarily contextualize decision-making, taking us beyond ideology or institutional exigencies to debates about practical reason, everyday ethics and embodied practice.

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In recent years attention has been paid to the matter of waters' infrastructure as part of a broader social science inquiry into infrastructure systems. From different approaches, works have documented how as infrastructure extracts, contains, channels, processes, leaks, or distributes waters it produces new kinds of spaces and reproduces inequalities or differences between them. Scholars studying water infrastructure have also participated in debates on nonhuman agency, materiality, and malfunction. This article provides a summarized account of the main strands of this literature with the purpose of providing an introductory overview of analyses on water infrastructure. This article is categorized under: Engineering Water > Sustainable Engineering of Water Human Water > Water Governance

Aedes aegypti, the primary vector for dengue, chikungunya and zika, breeds mainly in stored/stagnant water and thrives in contexts of rapid urbanization in tropical countries. Some have warned that climate change, in conjunction with urbanization, could drive the proliferation of Aedes aegypti mosquitoes. In Colombia dengue has been endemic since the 1990s and the country had the highest number of cases of zika virus in the world after Brazil. Studies have found that domestic stored water contributes to high percentages of the total Ae. aegypti pupal population in Colombian urban sectors. In particular, neighborhoods where water service provision is intermittent are vulnerable to mosquito-borne diseases as water is stored inside households. This article draws on archival work, interviews, and entomological literature to reflect on the ways in which rapid urbanization in the context of armed conflict, infrastructural inequality, the absence of formal jobs, and specific water laws and regulations produce water and Aedes aegypti in the city. It offers an initial attempt to theorize water with larvae by focusing on two interrelated processes. First, the historical and geographic processes that underlie the production of stored water, which despite being treated can become a place of fertility where mosquitoes can flourish. Secondly, the processes by which water, mosquitoes, pathogens, and human bodies become interrelated. This entails thinking about some homes in Barranquilla as socioecological assemblages that are dynamically produced, socially and materially.