(In)formality: the meshwork of water service provisioning

Abstract

Cities in developing countries have for many decades been characterized by the co-existence of different service provision modalities. These modalities usually include a formal water utility and an array of small-scale private or community-based service providers. In recent years, the topic of informality in water provisioning has been subject to an upsurge in interest of both policy makers and academics. Frequently, literature on the topic distinguishes between informal providers and formal providers suggesting that a provider belongs to either a formal or informal domain. By highlighting the infrastructure, financing, and regulatory institutions of small-scale service provisioning in Greater Maputo, Mozambique, this article illustrates how informality and formality are interdependent and permeate throughout the water provisioning process creating a meshwork of service provisioning. Actors involved in service provisioning embody multiple identities and use these identities in various sites of governance in order to develop their water business. By adopting this approach to informality, it becomes impossible to distinguish convincingly between formal and informal providers. Instead, it leads to a focus on water provisioning rather than providers, in which informality and formality traverse through the service provision process.

Water Brokers: Exploring Urban Water Governance through the Practices of Tanker Water Supply in Accra

“…Practice-oriented approaches have been particularly useful for gaining fine-grained understandings of how the distribution of water actually happens in face of policy requirements and ideal models [27,30,[41][42][43][44]. Documenting the practices of planning, maintaining, repairing, and accessing water and water related infrastructure has illuminated how "consumers, providers, engineers, plumbers, politicians, policy-makers, and government authorities interact through a dynamic set of social and material relations to access, provide, and control water supply" [45] (p. 32).…”

Engaging with the politics of water governance

“…Resulting water distributions, as a consequence, seldom adhere to original plans or legal prescriptions but are ambiguous and, at least to some extent, unruly. Such work is important in view of rethinking ways to organize and govern interventions in the provision of water services in cities in support of more equitable distributions (see e.g., also our work on small‐scale water operators in Maputo, Mozambique …”

Modes of governance in India's hydropower development

“…In this context, documents become gatekeepers and mark entry into progressively wider circles of sociality and alliance, and collectively and in interaction, shape large‐scale water and energy projects. The outward appearance of this document production and exchange is that it tangles up compliance and noncompliance behaviors connected to environment and forest protocols, policies, regulations, and laws, creating a kind of policy ‘meshwork’ like the entanglements of formal and informal described by Ranganathan and Schwartz et al This notion of document exchange provides another way to look at meshworks and urban water informality by focusing on the production and procurement of important documents and what they mean for social, ecological, and hydrological order. This focus contributes to the idea that policies are created through multiple processes and compliance and implementation of these policies may be highly variable.…”

“…She also argues that analysis should avoid conceptualizing these practices of authority as isolated sectors. Following Schwartz et al, she argues that they constitute a ‘meshwork.’ Taken this way, these practices show that multiple sets of rules and practices are intersecting to constitute another mode of governance. Some practices are legitimized by official rules and procedures while others are illegal but culturally legitimate.…”