Everyday practices in the production of uneven water pricing regimes in Lilongwe, Malawi

Abstract

Recent scholarship has called for widening investigations of cities through the analysis of everyday practices that shape urban life. Critical water studies have contributed to this emerging debate by using an everyday lens to document the diversity of practices of accessing and distributing water. Thus far, little attention has been given to the everyday practices of setting water prices and how these shape access. We contribute to this gap by investigating the practices of setting prices in two distinct service modalities within Lilongwe's water supply network. Our study reveals the hybrid and dynamic arrangements that shape pricing regimes, formed through the formal and informal negotiations on subsidies, incentives, tariff increases and distribution of profits. In these negotiations, the decision makers opportunistically mobilise their different and at times conflicting mandates (business and social) and guiding principles (equity versus cost-recovery). We conclude that pricing regimes are the outcome of intertwined structural processes and everyday practices that exacerbate uneven water flows in the city.

Rethinking urban environmental and infrastructural governance in the everyday: Perspectives from and of the global South

“…This includes research that is attentive to local histories and everyday practices and processes that do not necessarily fit received concepts in urban studies, and often intersect with, supersede, or modify and situate processes of capitalist urbanization. Studies in this SI on urban electricity (Pilo', 2021), water (Kundu and Chatterjee, 2020;Alves, 2019;Schramm and Ibrahim, 2021;Truelove, 2021;Pihljak et al, 2021) and waste (Schindler et al, 2021) bring a situated approach to everyday urban governance, giving attention to local institutions, histories, diverse infrastructural configurations and multi-scalar power relations.…”

“…The creation of a public who will be governed and who conforms to or consents to a system of control may rely on practices that tap into multiple normative registers and moral relations. In examining the fabrication of consent for pricing decisions by the Water User Associations (WUA) in Lilongwe, Pihljak et al (2021) details the ways that democratic and participatory normative registers and traditional/cultural loyalties are employed in complex ways. The WUA meetings employ a nominally democratic and participatory normative register to fabricate consent for decisions that have already been made.…”

“…This multiplicity of governance regimes not only shapes heterogeneous infrastructure configurations, but it also determines whether and how residents can switch from one system to another.”The original research in this SI demonstrates that “actually existing” infrastructural governance involves complex assemblages of human (economics, politics, institutions, social relations) and non-human (biophysical processes, material decay, environmental factors) associations (see also McFarlane, 2008: 348). Thus, our understanding of how cities are governed in the everyday must increasingly account for actors, practices and processes at registers that have too often received little scholarly attention: the electricians who shape patterns of inequality within the network (Pilo', 2021), the informal strongman who regulates local wells in particular neighborhoods (Truelove, 2019), and water governance actors who act as both the state and its outside at different points in time (Kundu and Chatterjee, 2020; Pihljak et al., 2021).…”

“…The papers in the SI do not conform to a single understanding or theorization of the everyday or everyday governance and our intent was not to make a homogenizing conceptual claim. Rather, we make an analytical claim: examining the everyday with regard to urban environments, as both a temporal field of action and a practice, exposes hereto unseen forms for agency and resistance, cooperation and conflict, inclusion, and exclusion (see also Pihljak et al., 2021; Schramm and Ibrahim, 2021; Truelove, 2011). Doing so has potential to open new ways of thinking through politics, practice, modalities of power and unequal lived experiences in contemporary cities.…”

The Cost of a Sustainable Water Supply at Network Kiosks in Peri-Urban Blantyre, Malawi

“…Reviewing water governance, Pihljak et al [16] recognize the influence of management reform apparent in water supply over recent decades, and the emergence of Water Users Associations (WUAs). WUAs have been established as participatory delegated management groups involving local communities in water supply and decision-making, aiming to make them affordable and sustainable [4,15].…”