Territorialising control in urban West Bengal: Social clubs and everyday governance in the spaces between state and party

In Indian cities, a variety of state and non-state political actors and institutions play a role in regulating infrastructures in the everyday. Anthropological approaches to the everyday state have demonstrated how residents experience and discursively construct the state in relation to key services and amenities. However, less is known and theorized regarding how city-dwellers and public authorities understand and experience political space and power related to urban infrastructure that includes a variety of actors operating in tandem with, or even outside the bureaucracies and purview of, the state. This article partially addresses this lacuna through ethnographic research on (1) residents’ experiences and narrations of the everyday infrastructural governance of water and (2) the practices of key political actors who engage in regulating urban water infrastructures in Delhi’s neighborhoods. This research demonstrates that political actors’ and residents’ narratives and practices related to the infrastructural governance of water sharply contest both singular and dichotomous (state/non-state) readings of state power, instead revealing nuanced and situated understandings of hybrid and negotiated forms of “infrastructural power.” In particular, the practices and narratives of both residents and political authorities bring attention to the ways social and political power is decentered in the everyday and the porosity of the institutions of everyday infrastructural governance. My findings show the complex ways that infrastructures are tied to differing experiences, understandings, and articulations of power in relation to urban environments.

Section: The 'Infrastructural Turn' and Everyday Urban Governancementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The 'Infrastructural Turn' and Everyday Urban Governancementioning

confidence: 99%

Who is the state? Infrastructural power and everyday water governance in Delhi

Truelove

2020

“…Here, non-state actors shape the state's informal decision-making practices when it comes to water infrastructure, but also continue to exert power over water provisioning on the ground, revealing their influence on not only the state but also localized forms of everyday water politics. Thus, this nuanced analysis shows how non-state actors shape governance and politics in the everyday in ways that suggest they go beyond being simply intermediaries of the state (see also Cornea, 2020), doing complex work with the potential to both extend and curtail state space.…”

Section: Everyday Governance As a Window Into The Urban Politicalmentioning

confidence: 93%

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

Truelove

Cornea

2020

Self Cite

In the global South, urban infrastructures and environments are marked by significant heterogeneity and the presence of multiple overlapping systems, configurations and actor networks that keep the city working – water flows, electricity is available, and waste is collected. This occurs in the face of what has been traditionally characterized as failed or incomplete infrastructures and the presence of governance practices that often deviate from formalized norms and policies. However, increasingly academics are arguing that such heterogeneity represents not failure but spaces of possibility and transition. This introduction lays out some of the theoretical underpinnings and conceptual ideas that frame urban environmental and infrastructural governance in the everyday. We then outline how the contributions of this Special Issue (SI) reveal the contested, negotiated, and situated nature of everyday urban governance and the multiple ways that politics become spatialized and power shapes contemporary cities, urban environments, and infrastructures. The SI brings together an interdisciplinary and diverse range of contributions focusing on case studies in secondary and metropolitan cities in India, Tanzania, Malawi, Kenya and Guinea-Bissau, and Brazil. Read together, the papers in this issue contribute to four primary debates and discussions in urban studies and social science studies of the urban environment. These include responding to noted absences in studies of urban political ecologies, contributing to new understandings of the urban political, focusing on the practices that produce political subjectivity and render groups governable, and highlighting everyday spaces of possibility for a more equitable urban future.

“…In turn, the study shows how the materiality of infrastructure affect social relations at the household, 'para,' and city levels. Though the role of 'para' club members as intermediaries shapes everyday life in West Bengal, their practices of exerting local influence have got little empirical attention in the urban governance context (except for Cornea, 2019;Cornea et al, 2016). We intend to contribute to this growing body of work.…”

Section: Theoretical Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Researchers who take a critical look at the working of the everyday state, argue there are many players beyond the state who are inextricably involved in urban governance (Cornea, 2019;Lindell, 2008;Schindler, 2014). Multiple stakeholders, formal and informal, involved in regulating and governing water access, are deeply enmeshed in one another through complex and shifting configurations.…”

Section: Gendering Access and Everyday Negotiations Around Watermentioning

confidence: 99%

Pipe dreams? Practices of everyday governance of heterogeneous configurations of water supply in Baruipur, a small town in India

Kundu

Chatterjee

2020

This article compares a networked and a non-networked artefact and the diverse practices of everyday governance around these localised configurations of water infrastructure in Baruipur, a peripheral and rapidly urbanising small town in the Kolkata Metropolitan Area. Plagued by arsenic contamination, the state has been pushing to expand and consolidate a networked piped infrastructure bringing in treated surface water. This shift threatens to reconfigure the existing diverse infrastructure configurations that are fragmented, incremental in nature. We examine the scholarship on the situated and embodied forms of Urban Political Ecology to understand how everyday social relations and plural practices at the level of the town, the ‘para’ (roughly neighbourhood), and the household to understand how socio-material artefacts shape lived experiences and local networks of power. The shift in the socio-technical configurations, in turn, lead to new forms of power coalitions, network conflicts, and collaborations. Through an in-depth qualitative examination, we conclude that heterogeneous infrastructure configurations and everyday practices are not only gendered but also intricately embedded within intersections of social affinity, intimate geographies, and embodied class power relations in the ‘para’.