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

Abstract

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.

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

“…In each study, these authors show how negotiating access in particular urban spaces has diverse and situated effects on differing residents and state and non-state actors, deepening marginality for some, while empowering others with increased access, control, or decision-making power (see also Cornea et al, 2016). Similarly, Truelove (2021) shows how the multiple configurations of governance over water in Delhi's informal settlements do not ultimately uniformly include or exclude residents of informal settlements from rights and resources, even when an official right to centralized water is granted to one settlement. Rather, these everyday governance regimes "have complex and uncertain outcomes, sometimes increasing and at other times diminishing access to resources, urban inclusion, and in-roads to the city" (Truelove, 2021: 297).…”

“…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.…”

“…Previous research has demonstrated the ways in which spaces of governance may overlap, as people navigate multiple boundaries and territorialized authorities that may or may not recognize the authority and influences of the other actors or the processes through which they establish territory (Cornea, 2020;Cornea et al, 2016). Everyday practices that appropriate and territorialize the city (Fenster, 2005) create places where the influence of actors may wax and wane temporally or situationally (Palat Narayanan, 2019;Schindler, 2014;Truelove, 2021). Pilo' (2021) demonstrates quite clearly the ways in which materiality of infrastructures and their performance represent complex arrangements and negotiations of socio-spatial norms and the "negotiated order" of the city.…”

Theorizing Public Participation and Local Governance in Urban Resilience: Reflections on the “Provincializing Urban Political Ecology” Thesis

“…Therefore, this article uses "economic determinism" or similar terms with no intentions of homogenizing the contributions of either UPE, or urban political economy, but rather, to highlight and to question one of the major roots of their analytic vectors.) Rejecting the idea that a pre-existing political-economic structure determines singular urban transformation patterns, postcolonial theories emphasize such concepts as environment, knowledge, and power and the ways these analytic components can influence the development of urban change [37][38][39][40][41][42]. The term "provincialize" is a major critique that postcolonial scholars adopt to criticize political economy, as it tends to universalize, totalize, and eventually homogenize urban experiences in various geopolitical contexts.…”

“…Instead of taking Marxism as a framework for its theoretical construction, situated UPE questions the logic of city-making by contextualizing its arguments based upon on-site observations and the interpretation of incremental changes. For example, Truelove [42] examined social and political power from the non-state political actors and residents operating in accordance to and in relation to the bureaucracies. As such, it is the combination of the state and non-state actors that constitutes the hybrid networks of "everyday infrastructural governance".…”