2.2 Politics and Justice - Tatiana Acevedo Guerrero

Politics of Water Flows: Water Supply, Sanitation, and Drainage
Politics of Water Flows: Water Supply, Sanitation, and

Drainage
Tatiana Acevedo Guerrero
Subject: Environmental Processes and Systems, Policy, Governance, and Law, Environmental
History, Management and Planning
Online Publication Date: Jan 2020 DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780199389414.013.649
Summary and Keywords
Since the late 20th century, water and sanitation management has been deeply influ
enced by ideas from economics, specifically by the doctrine of neoliberalism. The result
ing set of policy trends are usually referred to as market environmentalism, which in
broad terms encourages specific types of water reforms aiming to employ markets as allo
cation mechanisms, establish private-property rights and full-cost pricing, reduce (or re
move) subsidies, and promote private sector management to reduce government interfer
ence and avoid the politicization of water and sanitation management. Market environ
mentalism sees water as a resource that should be efficiently managed through economic
reforms.
Instead of seeing water as an external resource to be managed, alternative approaches

like political ecology see water as a socio-nature. This means that water is studied as a
historical-geographical process in which society and nature are inseparable, mutually
produced, and transformable. Political ecological analyses understand processes of envi
ronmental change as deeply interrelated to socioeconomic dynamics. They also empha
size the impact of environmental dynamics on social relations and take seriously the ques
tion of how the physical properties of water may be sources of unpredictability, unruli
ness, and resistance from human intentions. As an alternative to the hydrologic cycle, po
litical ecology proposes the concept of hydrosocial cycle, which emphasizes that water is
deeply political and social. An analysis of the politics of water flows, drawing from politi
cal ecology explores the different relationships and histories reflected in access to (and
exclusion from) water supply, sanitation, and drainage. It portrays how power inequalities
are at the heart of differentiated levels of access to infrastructure.
Keywords: water supply, sanitation, drainage, neoliberalization, socio-nature, power relations, properties of water,
hydrosocial cycle
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Introduction
Different relationships and histories are reflected in access to (and exclusion from) water
supply, sanitation, and drainage. Deep disparities in terms of power and access to re
sources translate into differentiated levels of access to infrastructure (Anand, 2017; Von
Schnitzler, 2017). In the urban South, some residents engage in everyday efforts to make
water flow—not only to access (or store) clean water, but also to make other waters (hu
man excreta, household wastewater and storm water) leave (Anand, 2011; McFarlane &
Silver, 2007). At the same time, numerous rural populations around the world live in ar
eas overwhelmed by water scarcity and have little access to sanitation. Moreover, re
search alerts on the ways in which climate change is compromising the water and food
security of many of the world’s poorest communities (Lesk, Rowhani, & Ramankutty,
2016).
The ways in which these flows of water, waste, and rain, are unequally distributed are a
result of complex processes that go beyond the state, and involve practices of coordina
tion and decision making among state institutions, private sector actors, and many other
different voices within society (Tortajada, 2010; Zwarteveen et al., 2017). These involve
not only laws and regulations, but also a range of informal exchanges and negotiations
(Ahlers, Cleaver, Rusca, & Schwartz, 2014; McFarlane, Desai, & Graham, 2014). These
distributions are always contested and frequently reworked.
Water governance involves material water distributions and negotiations of voice and au
thority, but it also involves diverse knowledges (Zwarteveen et al., 2017). There are some
knowledges that are privileged: some ways of knowing that are heard and influence deci
sion making in everything concerning water. Since the 1970s, prominent ideas in econom
ics have had a major influence on environmental and water governance.
This article is divided in three main sections. The first, “ECONOMIC IDEAS AND THEIR
LEGACY IN WATER MANAGEMENT,” explores the way in which water is understood in
works of and drawing from economics, and the ways in which these studies characterize
the relations between humans and the environment. It describes how these knowledges
have influenced water governance and, in turn, the ways in which they have translated in
to particular water, waste, and rain distributions. The second, “ALTERNATIVE AP
PROACHES TO UNDERSTANDING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN HUMANS AND WA
TER,” is dedicated to alternative approaches to constructing knowledge about human re
lations to water. This section specifically delves into political ecological analyses, which
study water as a historical-geographical process in which society and nature are insepa
rable, mutually produced, and transformable (Linton & Budds, 2014). The concluding sec
tion presents “THREE CLUES TO ANALYZE, STUDY, AND UNDERSTAND THE POLITICS
OF WATER FLOWS.”
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Economic Ideas and Their Legacy in Water

Management
Since the late 20th century water management has been deeply influenced by the eco
nomic doctrine of neoliberalism. The resulting set of ideas and policy trends are usually
referred to as market environmentalism, which in very broad terms entails the pursuit of
environmental ends through market means, suggesting the compatibility of environmen
tal concerns and economic growth (Anderson & Leal, 2001; Bernstein, 2001). Market en
vironmentalism started being discussed during the 1970s, in a broader context of fiscal
crisis and heated debate about the role of the state. O’Connor (1973) describes this situa
tion as the fiscal crisis of the state: a crisis triggered by excessive spending, and bloated
or heavy state bureaucracies. The welfare state model, which, among other characteris
tics, involved public responsibility for, and direction of, environmental and resource man
agement and allocation, was under harsh criticism. In this scenario, the state failure hy
pothesis, contending that states are unproductive, inefficient, and ineffective, became
widely accepted (Bakker, 2003, p. 6).
In the specific case of the water and sanitation sector, the model guiding water manage
ment in most of the global North throughout most of the 20th century was one of hy
draulic development as a means of satisfying water demands to ensure economic growth
(Molle, Mollinga, & Wester, 2009). The model also promoted universal provision of water,
state-funded storm sewers and waterborne sanitation (Bakker, 2003; Morales, 2015). Wa
ter was therefore owned or strictly regulated by the state and guided by non-market
rules, with household supply being heavily subsidized by the state (Bakker, 2003). By the
mid-1970s, however, many problems related to water management under this model con
verged. On the one hand, water utilities were unable to cope with the growing demand in
a context of greater urbanization (Winpenny, 1994) and all infrastructures—water supply,
drainage, and sanitation—were beginning to suffer from breakdown due to the lack of
maintenance investment (Gandy, 1997). On the other hand, water quality had declined
due to treatment problems, not only of sewage, but also of industrial waste (Hassan,
1998). By then—and after disasters and controversies surrounding the construction of
ambitious dams—there was also doubt about the environmental and social sustainability
of large infrastructure projects (Mehta, 2007). In the context of fiscal crisis, the hydraulic
development model started being depicted as inefficient and the market was deemed
more efficient than state governments at providing basic services.
Emerging at a time of increasing concern over environmental crises, market environmen

talism also intended to fight environmental hazards. Water scarcity started being depict
ed as a universal condition caused by flawed public management (Goldman, 2005, 2007).
This, in turn became one of the reasons used to justify private sector participation in the
water and sanitation sector. Different authors have pointed to the fact that resource ex
haustion threatened capitalist profitability as it entailed the termination of the
environment’s ability to act as both a source of commodities and the place where industri
al waste and pollution are deposited (Bakker, 2010; O’Connor, 1973). Market environmen
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talism was thus a reaction that transformed environmental threats into new sources of
opportunity for capital accumulation (see Costanza, 1997, 2014; Groot, Wilson, &
Boumans, 2002). Being a policy-oriented approach, it argued that science and technology
should be valued for their actual and potential role in solving and preventing environmen
tal crises, and underscored the importance of market dynamics and economic agents as
carriers of ecological restructuring and reform (Mol & Sonnenfeld, 2000, p. 6). It was
through this set of ideas that the neoliberal doctrine started being incorporated into the
water sector.
Neoliberalism, as many have suggested, is not a formula that can be applied in different
contexts. Instead there is a number of existing neoliberalisms, according to specific his
torical and geographical circumstances (Brenner, Peck, & Theodore, 2010; Castree,
2008A, 2008B). In the water sector, neoliberal ideas1 inspired specific types of reform.
With water being increasingly depicted as universally scarce, neoliberal proponents
claimed that the resource would be more efficiently allocated, and environmental degra
dation reduced or eliminated, by establishing private-property rights, employing markets
as allocation mechanisms (Alhers, 2010; Bakker, 2010). Another issue addressed by the
proponents of neoliberal reform was the underinvestment in water infrastructure. For
this, they prescribed full-cost pricing that would improve resource allocation and reduce
wastage. Thus, reforms also prescribed the reduction (or removal) of subsidies in both
the water and sanitation services (Furlong, 2010). It was argued that the utilities sector
was to be re-conceptualized as potentially profitable, rather than a provider of strategic
resources in need of subsidies. It was also argued that the reduction of subsidies would
ultimately benefit the poor because it would provide an incentive for private capital to in
vest in water infrastructure (Bakker, 2003; Page, 2005). Finally, neoliberal reforms tack
led the issue of poorly performing utilities, arguing that the state was inefficiently manag
ing a scarce resource. The reforms prescribed a transformation in the public sector that
would make it stop providing the service and start regulating it (Ahlers et al., 2014; Fur
long, 2010). Reforms also prescribed private sector management2 to reduce government
interference, prevent corruption, and avoid the politicization of water and sanitation man
agement (Schwartz, 2008; Sheil, 2000).
Neoliberal prescriptions were promoted by key mediating organizations such as the Orga
nization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the World Bank group and
the United Nation agencies (Goldman, 2007). Water was included as an economic good in
the Dublin principles, adopted by the United Nations at the 1992 International Confer
ence of Water and the Environment. By then, many governments in the global North were
enforcing water reforms inspired by this neoliberal doctrine (Furlong, 2010). In the case
of the global South, the restructuring of water management along the lines of the neolib
eral doctrine became a requirement for borrowing money from international organiza
tions, first through structural adjustment programs, and more recently through good gov
ernance approaches (Budds & Sultana, 2013; Furlong & Bakker, 2010).
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The reforms entailed a shift of focus, from creating new sources of supply to managing
demand through a variety of techniques, new tariff structures, and educating consumers
on a new ethic of water use and payment. It was argued that consumers paying per unit
volume, at cost-reflective prices, would use water more efficiently than unmetered house
holds accustomed to treating water as a public service (Budds, 2013; Furlong, 2010). In
this vein, Bakker (2003) underscores that market environmentalism implies a reconfigu
ration of citizenship: if water is a tradable good rather than a government-provided good,
consumers of water are customers rather than voters.
The Many Neoliberalizations of Water and Sanitation Management
Neoliberal reforms triggered distinct processes and outcomes which involved a range of
experiences, levels of implementation, and reformulations across different contexts. Al
though the reduction in government interference and the introduction of competition was
supposed to lead to greater efficiency and cost reduction, reforms led to an increase in
prices in some countries. Kaika (2005) has documented the raising of the price of water
in Athens, both to encourage and to maintain private-sector participation, and Bakker
(2003) and Hassan (1998) have showed how water prices increased significantly during
the years immediately following the implementation of neoliberal reforms in England and
Wales. In the global South, increases in prices were registered in countries like Bolivia
(Assies, 2003), South Africa (Loftus, 2006), and Kenya (Gulyani, Talukdar, & Kariuki,
2005). After reforms were implemented in Zambia during the early 2000s, the adjust
ments of tariffs ranged from increases of 20 % to increases of 50 % (Schwartz, 2008, p.
55). Rises in tariffs have sometimes translated into better services, with improved water
quality in Argentina (Furlong, 2010), and upgraded service quality and reliability in West
Africa (Jaglin, 2002). In other cases, such as in Kenya, increased tariffs did not lead to
service improvement (Gulyani et al., 2005).
Examining the introduction of private-property rights, and markets as allocation mecha

nisms, Furlong (2010) underlines two lessons that can be drawn from these experiences.
Firstly, that there is no such thing as an apolitical market; instead of the technocratic de
politicization of water management, markets have emerged as political outcomes of nego
tiations on different scales. In this regard, work on the Chilean case shows how water re
forms constituted a means of consolidation of economic and political interests that linked
the military, the technocrats (predominantly graduates of the Chicago School of econom
ics), and the country’s main business groups (Budds, 2013). Secondly, local contexts may
constrain the ability to produce market arrangements. Such has been the case in some
Andean countries, where the existing traditional water rights regimes blocked or sabo
taged the establishment of a universal market system (see Assies, 2003; Boelens, Pan
fichi, & Guevara, 2010; Harris & Roa-García, 2013)
Neoliberal reforms also prescribed a change in the role of the state, from a provider of
services to a regulator. This frequently entailed a weakening of environmental and labor
protections to render the public sector attractive to private sector participation (Furlong,
2010). Although governments were supposed to have a regulatory role, the development
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of new regulatory institutions and mechanisms seldom preceded the rolling-back of exist
ing regulations, and sometimes the lack of coordination between the rolling-back and the
creation of new reregulation institutions produced contradictory effects, with the rolling-
back leading to water quality crises and hindering reregulation (Bakker, 2003; Furlong,
2010).
Moreover, and despite an initial emphasis on the privatization of public utilities, reforms
of this type were restricted to very few places (Bakker, 2003; Castro, 2008) and private
sector participation took the form of temporal concession contracts to operate, maintain
or build infrastructure (Budds & McGranahan, 2003). Regardless of the proliferation of
these type of contracts in some countries, this did not necessarily translate into higher
private investments (Furlong, 2016A). Lastly, private sector participation did not benefit
low-income populations; it concentrated on the more lucrative actions rather than on the
most needed (Prasad, 2006). The case study of Barranquilla, the main city of the Colom
bian Caribbean, provides a good example of uneven investment, with private-sector ac
tors showing interest in the management and building of drainage infrastructure needed
to cope with flash flooding, only in high-income areas of the city (Acevedo-Guerrero,
2019). As for the argument that private-sector participation would indirectly help the
poor by freeing up scarce government resources (which would be used in areas of action
more in need of support), the majority of investment in all water supply, drainage, and
sanitation continues to come from public funds even in places with private concession
contracts (Castro, 2008, 2010; Galvin, 2014).
Neoliberal water reforms did not bring about an immediate transition from public to pri
vate control, and are better understood as shifts along a continuum of diverse manage
ment options (Budds & McGranahan, 2003; Furlong, 2010). More importantly, water poli
cies and reforms are not linear nor static, and the public-to-private narrative does not
capture the multiplicity of options and arrangements that take place on the ground
(Bridge & Perreault, 2009; Furlong, 2016A). Thinking about the provision of water and
sanitation services in terms of public vs private (or state vs market) overlooks the great
diversity of small service providers in the global South, which cannot be classified on one
side or the other (Ahlers et al., 2014). Ranganathan (2014) has shown the ways in which
Bangalore’s “water mafias” work in close partnership with local state agents to provide
water in poor and middle-class neighborhoods. Despite being informal providers, they
wield a type of everyday public authority in the neighborhoods where they operate, en
gaging in “electoral lobbying, exploitation, social protection, and the provision of welfare
to constituents” (Ranganathan, 2014, p. 102). Sometimes it is difficult to identify where
the public service ends and the private one begins, as in the case of Jakarta, where infor
mal water providers have been enabled by the public water utility, an arrangement based
on a long-standing and interdependent relationship between informal water providers
and state authority in Indonesia (Kooy, 2014). In some rural and peri-urban areas of the
Andes, water services are predominantly provided by community organizations (acueduc
tos comunitarios) which, by following a community (or cooperative) model based on the
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principle of solidarity, also challenge the public/ private binary (Roa-García, Brown, &
Roa-García, 2015).
Other arrangements that cannot be neatly classified as public or private are pro-poor con
tracts, which aim to promote differentiated cheaper services for poor households; public–
private partnerships designed to develop capacity-building relationships between publicly
owned utilities and private investors; and the corporatization of public utilities, which
promotes the independent, commercial, and technical management of state-owned utili
ties (see Furlong, 2016B; Lloyd Owen, 2016; Paterson et al., 2007). Colombia offers a
good study case on this last alternative. There, city-owned water corporations (providing
water and sanitation services) were established in main cities at the beginning of the 20th
century in combination with a cross-subsidization system where upper-income sectors
were required to subsidize service extension to lower-income sectors. The case reveals a
model that emerged in the context of public limited resources and low institutional capac
ity, challenges common to many Southern countries. Rather than being a “solution” im
posed from the North, Colombian public corporations were the result of the negotiation of
public and private interests in (and influence over) utility services in contexts of relatively
limited government autonomy from the private sector (Acevedo Guerrero, Furlong, &
Arias, 2015).
In the particular case of sanitation, the Millennium Development Goals had projected the
halving, between 1990 and 2015, of the proportion of people without access to sanitation.
However, by 2013 statistics reflected the lagging state of sanitation in the global South,
where an estimated 2.5 billion people lived without even a simple improved latrine and 1
billion people practiced open defecation (Galvin, 2014; O’Reilly & Louis, 2014). Moreover,
in 2017 it was stablished that diarrheal diseases, typhoid and paratyphoid fever, and low
er respiratory tract infections, the main illnesses linked to unsafe water source, inade
quate sanitation, and inadequate hand-washing, affect more than 1 billion people, pre
dominantly in low-income and middle-income countries (Landrigan et al., 2017).
Community Led Total Sanitation (CLTS), a movement with roots in rural Bangladesh, has
significantly influenced sanitation in the global South since its emergence in 1999–2000.
CLTS is based on the participation of communities who are invited to see their unsanitary
behaviors, like open defecation and failure to hand-wash, as both emotionally repugnant
and detrimental to their own health (Bongartz, Musyoki, Milligan, & Ashley, 2010). Fol
lowing a set of predetermined steps to “name and shame” hygiene norm violators, the
community is “triggered” to take action and every household is pressured into building la
trines and/or hand-wash stations until it becomes open defecation free (ODF). One of the
main pillars of the model is the absence of subsidies, of state funding for materials, or
state building of infrastructure (Chambers & Bongartz, 2009).
The model, which has been embraced by international development organizations such as
the Water and Sanitation Program of the World Bank, UNICEF and large NGOs like Wat
erAid, has been implemented in the rural areas of 56 countries in the global South and is
deemed a success by its promoters (see Kar, 2010; Mehta & Movik, 2011). However, some
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have pointed to the lack of accuracy and reliability of these claims in the absence of clear
monitoring and evaluation protocols (Harvey, 2010). Others have pointed to the ways in
which the model might not be sustainable: latrines and hand-wash stations may be built
after “naming and shaming” exercises, but eventually communities stop using or main
taining them (Venkataramanan, Crocker, Karon, & Bartram, 2018). Moreover, the “nam
ing and shaming” dynamics may exacerbate and reinforce power unbalances (in terms of
income, gender, age, and ethnicity) inside communities and lead to the violation of the in
dividual right to dignity (Galvin, 2014). Through statistical cross-cultural work in four dis
tinct global sites, Brewisa et al. (2019) have provided evidence on the ways in which hy
giene norm violators are shown little empathy and are morally stigmatized by the commu
nities. Furthermore, the use of disgust-triggering approaches in sanitation and menstrual
management campaigns implemented at schools can render already vulnerable popula
tions, with little bargaining power, more vulnerable (Joshi, Buit, & González-Botero, 2015;
Joshi, Kooy, & van den Ouden, 2016). The process of monitoring and regulating appropri
ate hygiene behavior frequently reinforces unequal power relations between adults with
authority, such as teachers, and young girls (Joshi et al., 2015).
Despite these limitations, CLTS (and CLTS-inspired approaches) are most often described
positively as “participatory,” “bottom-up,” and “empowering” for local communities (see
Sigler, Mahmoudi, & Graham, 2015). Thus, they will most likely continue to expand across
the global South due to the popularity of behavioral change theories among practitioners
and within some social sciences, and because they are preferred by development agen
cies as they require relatively low investment and effort (Brewis et al., 2019). After study
ing the state promotion of CLTS, with support of the World Bank, in Indonesia, Engel and
Susilo (2014) argue that the popularity CLTS enjoys among international development
networks has to do with the fact that it resonates well with neoliberal policies and struc
tural adjustment plans implemented by the Bank in the 1980s. These policies marked a
paradigm shift from state-sponsored supply to demand-responsive approaches which “en
couraged the poor to ‘take responsibility’ for their own development—and, of course, to
pay for it” (Engel & Susilo, 2014, p. 165).
Alternative Approaches to Understanding the

Relationship Between Humans and Water
Economic ideas have inspired and shaped market environmentalism, and in turn, water
and sanitation management. Market environmentalism understands human relations to
water by seeing environmental crises as challenges for economic reform. Particularly, this
approach trusts in the power of science and technology to prevent crisis and restore wa
ter and the environment to pre-crisis states. Its proponents believe that contemporary so
cieties have the capability of dealing with, and solving their environmental and water
crises (Mol & Sonnenfeld, 2000). In this sense, market environmentalism sees nature as
external: it should be efficiently managed through economic reforms. Thus, it is argued
that water can be affected and harmed by industrialization processes but can also be re
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stored or brought back to an original condition, if humans just choose to enforce the right
economic reforms. Drawing on Robbins (2004) it can be said that market environmental
ism is an apolitical ecology. That is, a (dominant) approach to thinking about the things
people do and places people make, which includes, among several specific tendencies, a
focus on free individual choices and an inclination to think about human actions, those of
individuals or companies, as sovereign relative to the influence of nature.
Instead of seeing water as an external resource to be managed, alternative approaches

explore the networks between social and natural objects (Latour, 1993), and analyze wa
ter via the lens of socio-nature (Peet, Robbins, & Watts, 2011; Swyngedouw, 2004). This
means that water is studied as a historical-geographical process in which society and na
ture are inseparable, mutually produced, and transformable (Linton & Budds, 2014). Po
litical ecological analyses are research-based explorations that understand processes of
environmental change as deeply interrelated with socioeconomic and political dynamics
(Rademacher, 2015; Robbins, 2004). Works drawing from political ecology understand the
flows of water through three main lenses: “UNDERSTANDING WATER AS SOCIO-NA
TURE,” “THE IMPORTANCE OF THE PROPERTIES OF WATER,” and “THE HY
DROSOCIAL CYCLE AS AN ALTERNATIVE TO THE HYDROLOGIC CYCLE.”
Understanding Water as Socio-Nature
Political ecology has argued that urbanization is not the end of nature, but rather its
transformation. Mathew Gandy (2002), for example, argues that the city is not defined by
the absence of nature, but that it is fully part of nature, with nonhuman nature present
everywhere. He introduced the concept of metropolitan natures, which not only refers to
spaces internal to a city—its water systems, highways, parks, pollution, and waste—but
also to transformations outside its borders, as urbanization is achieved through the exten
sion of networks that bring the raw materials of the city from faraway areas.
Gandy (2004, 2014) argues that the study of metropolitan natures must be based on hy
bridized, rather than linear, notions of the city. To develop a hybridized reading means to
understand the relationships between nature and society in urban space as mutually con
stitutive. This hybridized reading evidences the processes through which nature becomes
urbanized. Water from a river, for example, becomes potable water as social and biophysi
cal processes interweave to produce new forms of metropolitan nature. For political ecol
ogy water is a hybrid, embodying biochemical and physical properties, cultural and sym
bolic meanings, and socioeconomic characteristics. Inspired by this ideas, Swyngedouw
portrays the hybridization of water:
If I were to capture some water in a cup and excavate the networks that brought it
there (. . .) these would narrate many interrelated tales, or stories, of social
groups and classes and the powerful socio-ecological processes that produce so
cial spaces of marginality; chemical, physical, and biological reactions and trans
formations, the global hydrological cycle, and global warming, machinations, and
the strategies and knowledges of dam builders, urban land developers, and engi
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neers; the passage from river to urban reservoir; and the geopolitical struggles
between regions and nations. In sum, water embodies multiple tales of socio-na
ture as hybrid.
(Swyngedouw, 1999, p. 445)
Reconceptualizing water as socio-nature has enabled political ecology to move away from
thinking of water as a resource that is external to social relations, towards one in which
social relations are embedded. Through the analysis of the everyday politics of water in
Egypt, Barnes (2014) argues that the Nile river is not a pre-existing body to be managed
and governed, but a resource that comes into being through power-laden relations be
tween actors, such as farmers, bureaucrats, and international funders, who in turn have
different degrees of agency. She documents how this process is meditated by technolo
gies that allow actors to block, release, channel, and divert its waters—controlling how,
where, and when the river flows. Consequently, she argues, the abundance or scarcity of
water in the fields throughout the Nile basin is not a given but is produced through par
ticular sets of social, technical, and political interactions.
Along the same line, Swyngedouw’s (2007B) analysis of Spain’s hydraulic development
between 1939 and 1975 shows how dams, as productions of socio-nature through techni
cal and natural arrangements, are not socially or politically neutral, but express and re-
constitute physical, social, cultural economic, and/or political power relations. Parts of na
ture become enrolled in and reconstituted through the networks of power that animate
this process. Thus, the production of big dams contributed to the maintenance of Francis
co Franco’s rule and ultimately, engineering the flow of water through the country helped
create the Spanish nation. The work of Alatout (2008) also focuses on the production of
socio-natures. Through the study of the Israeli discourses and policies concerning water
scarcity he contends that technical constitution of “freshwater” resources by way of de
salinization plants has been central to the definition of Israeli territory, as a politically sig
nificant scale, and to national state building. Consequently, every political project is also
an environmental project and vice versa.
An analysis of water policies based on a political ecological approach considers power re
lations. This because, while water implies a series of connections between individuals and
social and natural systems, it also implies segregations, reflecting as it does wider ten
sions in society, and cannot be separated from processes of race, ethnicity/ religion identi
ty and class formation (Anand, 2017; Gandy, 2014; Von Schnitzler, 2017). Besides, the use,
management, governance, and knowledge of water and sanitation services and resources
is deeply gendered (see Zwarteveen, Ahmed, & Gautam, 2012). It is important to stress
that processes of water exclusion and stratification are always contested. Residents of the
informal settlements in the urban South rework unequal power relations by contesting
their lack of access to sanitation infrastructure through mobilization, sabotage, and for
mal complaints in government or utility offices (McFarlane & Silver, 2007). Women, who
in many contexts are responsible for household access to water and sanitation, revert to
daily practices such as staying back from work to access water, walking miles in search of
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sanitation, and procuring water from illegal and informal sources (Sultana, 2011; Tru
elove, 2011).Water can be mobilized by exerting pressure on a water utility’s engineers,
asking (or paying them) them to fix a connection or alter a water meter; or by exerting
pressure on politicians, for example, by negotiating the family or community’s future
votes (Anand, 2011, 2017; Gandy, 2008). Every day, residents are able to survive in the
city despite the absence of municipal water supply and sanitation, by using pumps and
other equipment to build clandestine water connections, and by digging temporary pit-la
trines (Anand, 2017; McFarlane et al., 2014).
The Importance of the Properties of Water
Political ecology studies the ways in which politics shape water and, at the same time, it
deals with the ways in which water, and nature in general, shapes politics. This is why
some authors have made calls for more consistent engagements with the properties of
water. Walker (2005), for example, proposes to examine both the social politics of access
to and control over resources and the dynamics of the natural environment. With a simi
lar argument, Braun (2005) contends that we should explore water’s specific properties
(and how these might influence socio-spatial developments):
Water flows. It reacts with certain chemicals and dissolves others; often these dis
solved chemicals are visible, and diffuse rapidly. Water evaporates when warmed,
condenses when cooled, and, expands when it freezes. It obstructs movement and
enables movement, it serves as a pathway for viruses and bacteria, but is also
used to cleanse. It seeps into porous materials, but flows across those that are
nonporous. Do these properties matter to the material form of the technological
networks and bureaucracies that control its movement, or to the narratives, hopes
and fears that circulate around it?
(Braun, 2005, p. 645).
There is thus a need to take seriously the question of how the different materialities of re
sources may be sources of unpredictability, unruliness, and resistance to human inten
tions. One of the authors that makes explicit emphasis on the ways in which water shapes
politics is Karen Bakker. She approaches urbanization as simultaneously natural and so
cial: constituted by (and constitutive of) political ecological processes ~(Bakker, 2003,
2010). This implies a view of urbanization that does not reduce urban nature to “green
spaces,” but rather focuses on the material flows—such as excreta, water, waste—that
move throughout the city, and the different governance processes, power relations, infra
structures, and subjectivities by which these are mediated. Moreover, material properties
of the natural world are often intransigent. Water’s biophysical characteristics, make it
difficult to contain, channel, process, and commercialize. In analyzing these biophysical
properties Bakker (2003) characterizes water as an inherently uncooperative commodity.
Understanding why water is such an uncooperative commodity requires explicit refer

ence to its physical properties. Specific constraints by different biophysical characteris
tics of natural resources will give rise to specific infrastructural outcomes. Because it
Page 11 of 24


flows, water cannot be easily bounded above or below ground, through which externali
ties such as pollution are easily diffused. Water may also serve multiple uses simultane
ously, and perform several functions through the hydrologic cycle (upstream users can
greatly affect downstream users). Besides, since it is a resource that flows, property
rights are difficult to establish, and boundaries are often unclear. Density is another bio
physical characteristic of water that underlies its uncooperativeness as a commodity:
large quantities of water are heavy, difficult to mobilize—water is cheap to store, expen
sive to transport. Water supply tends to be localized, and because of this, may tend to mo
nopolistic control. Finally, the significant differences between water sources (and the neg
ative ecological effects that mixing water from different sources might cause), make in
ter-basin transfers challenging.
The Hydrosocial Cycle as an Alternative to the Hydrologic Cycle
Political ecology has also scrutinized the way in which knowledge about water, and the
environment in general, is constructed. That is, it problematizes the way scientific expla
nations of water situations are formulated and produced. Critical approaches to science
have made calls to acknowledge the situatedness of truth claims, and the intricate ways
in which science and society are mutually related (Gyawali & Dixit, 2001; Jasanoff, 2004;
Whatmore, 2009). This literature invites us to understand how social and political fram
ings are woven into both the formulation of scientific explanations of environmental prob
lems and the solutions proposed to reduce them (Forsyth, 2002). The aim is to identify the
implicit social and political models built into statements of supposed neutral explanation
to increase both the social equity of science and its relevance to environmental problems
experienced in different social settings. Scientific explanations and assumptions about en
vironmental degradation may fail to acknowledge the diverse perspectives and needs of
less powerful groups in society (Forsyth, 2002; Jasanoff, 2004; Whatmore, 2009). There is,
thus, a need to recognize the contingencies and complexities that characterize water
questions, and acknowledge the social embedding of environmental knowledge and expla
nations within wider social and political debates, particularly when applying such expla
nations to a broad range of social and ecological contexts.
Following these calls, Linton (2010) questions the relevance and usefulness of the scien
tific notion of a hydrologic cycle.3 He depicts the hydrologic cycle as a way of represent
ing water that was constructed in, rather than revealed through scientific practice. Un
derscoring the importance of “putting science in its place,” that is, attending to the geog
raphy of the production of scientific knowledge, Linton argues that the geographical par
ticularities of the place in which it was conceived impregnate the hydrologic cycle with a
certain bias.
The hydrologic cycle, delineated by Horton in the United States, helped differentiate hy
drology from the other geosciences. Grounded on the solid mathematical foundation of
the water-balance equation, the hydrologic cycle started being presented as a veritable
natural fact and was adapted (in its visual form) to the needs of state planning agencies
in the 1930s to make water visible—or legible—for the purpose of accounting for, and
Page 12 of 24


controlling it. Linton (2008, p. 639) argues that, by representing water as a constant
(cyclical) flow, the hydrologic cycle establishes a norm that is at odds with the hydrologi
cal reality of much of the world, misrepresenting the hydrological experience of vast num
bers of people. Furthermore this bias nurtured the representation of deserts, arid lands,
and tropical regions as respectively poor, uncivilized, lawless, and violent places that de
mand the intervention of hydrological engineering to be made civilized.
As an alternative to the hydrologic cycle concept, political ecologists started using the
term hydrosocial cycle, emphasizing the fact that water connects individuals not only ma
terially but also politically and socially. Bakker (2003) uses the hydrosocial cycle to illus
trate, for example, the nuances of scarcity. Acknowledging that water is scarce, according
to the hydrological cycle, tells little about the human use of natural resources, which can
only be defined in relation to human needs, practices, institutions, and technologies.
Whether or not water is scarce depends on factors such as population density and distrib
ution, sanitary habits, power relations, and cultural uses. Scarcity, then, is dependent on
the hydrosocial, in addition to the hydrologic cycle.
With a similar argument, Budds (2009) sets out to analyze the hydrological assessment of
a small river basin in Chile, undertaken in response to concerns over a possible overex
ploitation of groundwater resources. The assessment focused exclusively on water vol
umes and flows, the hydrologic cycle, ignoring not only groundwater extractions at the lo
calized basin scale but also sociopolitical processes that configured the hydrosocial cycle
of the region—such as the many economic policies and exemptions promoting and pro
tecting agroindustry. Consequently, the assessment that intended to be a “neutral” and
“technical” study that would resolve the water situation in the valley, made small farmers
more vulnerable, especially in the lower section of the valley. Since it excluded the study
of socio-political processes, those mostly responsible for the situation were not identified,
and moreover, it reproduced the existing unequal pattern of resource use that had given
rise to the situation the assessment was designed to address. Likewise, she argues that
scientific assessments of environmental degradation can be quite inaccurate when they
exclude or separate people from the environment under examination and concentrate ex
clusively on physical or ecological processes, “as if the physical environment existed in
vacuum or could be neatly separated from the social context in which it is
embedded” (Budds, 2009, p. 419).
Concluding Remarks: Three Clues to Analyze,

Study, and Understand the Politics of Water
Flows
This article has explored the way in which knowledges originated in economics, specifi
cally the doctrine of neoliberalism, influenced environmental and water management. The
resulting approach, market environmentalism, argues that environmental goods will be
more efficiently allocated, and environmental degradation reduced or eliminated, through
Page 13 of 24


establishing private-property rights, employing markets as allocation mechanisms, and in

corporating environmental externalities through pricing. Thus, for this approach there is
an external nature which can be harmed by industrialization processes but can also be re
stored—brought back to an original condition—if humans choose to enforce the right re
forms.
On the other side, the article has also reviewed other approaches to constructing knowl
edge about human relations to the natural environment, namely political ecology contri
butions. Political ecology underscores the entanglement of human and environmental his
tory, exposes the artificiality of dualisms between nature and society, the human and the
nonhuman and introduces an interest over the properties of water. This approach studies
the relationship between the human and the nonhuman through the concept of socio-na
tures, and explores the distributions of water, rain, and sewerage flows, studying how
they reflect and reinforce power relations. It also examines scientific assessments of wa
ter, acknowledging their social, geographical, and political embedding, and its tendency
to exclude people from its explanations. In this line of thought, this concluding section ex
plores three clues that assist analysis, study, and understanding of the politics of water
flows.
The Sterility of the Public/Private Management Debate
Overall, the debate on the politics of water flows transcends the dichotomy of public ver
sus private management. Firstly, because emphasizing service delivery the privatization
debate tends to overlook environmental issues, such as in-stream flows and threats to wa
ter quality. Additionally, these accounts have a scale problem, since urban water issues
cannot be separated from the broader watershed context in which they are situated: wa
ter is biophysically multiscalar, but it is used and disposed of locally (Bakker, 2003). The
focus on water service delivery has also been detrimental to other underfunded essential
services such as sanitation and drainage. While urban water-supply networks have been a
focus of several studies, and sanitation is starting to move to the spotlight, drainage sys
tems have received much less attention (Karvonen, 2011).
Furthermore, the public/ private categories might not be appropriate to study water in
the global South as they leave out the great diversity of small service providers, moving
between the formal and the informal, which cannot be placed on one or the other side of
the binomial (Ahlers et al., 2014). It also falls short when analyzing cases like the Colom
bian one, where public water corporations and cross-subsidization were developed in the
early 20th century, as the result of the negotiation of public and private interests in the
context of limited funds and low institutional capacity (Acevedo Guerrero et al., 2015).
There is a need for broader understanding of water and sanitation development beyond
the well-known trajectories of high-income countries. A focus on the understanding of his
tories and every day realities of countries of the global South may shed light on future
challenges in water supply, sanitation, and drainage.
Page 14 of 24


The Analytic Usefulness of the “Hydrosocial Cycle”
In the light of a political ecological approach that explores the way in which historical-ge
ographical processes continuously produce new socio-natures (over space and time), the
idea of some sort of pristine nature that needs to be saved (or managed), becomes in
creasingly problematic. It becomes evident that there is no such thing as an originally
harmonious nature that is out of sync but can be properly managed through neoliberal re
forms. Rather, political ecology teaches us that there are a multitude of natures and a
multitude of existing or possible socio-natural relations, and it is important to question
which kinds of natures different actors wish to preserve, to make, or destroy.4
The concept of the hydrosocial cycle underscores the fact that water connects individuals
not only materially but also politically and socially. The concept can be put to work in
helping promote social justice and environmental sustainability wherever intervention in
the hydrologic cycle has produced inequitable or uneven access to water and water ser
vices (Linton & Budds, 2014). The hydrosocial cycle is then an invitation to understand
the integration of water and humans as a perfectly natural process, rather than as a form
of pollution:
Shifting from the hydrologic cycle to the hydrosocial cycle, from aquatic ecosys
tems to hybrid ecosystems, means seeing ourselves in the products of our collabo
rations with water instead of seeing water as something apart from ourselves, it
means that instead of trying to maintain the integrity of the hydrologic cycle we
devote our efforts to maintaining a healthy working relationship with water, one
that is conducive to the wellbeing of people, fish, invertebrates and the many oth
ers with a stake in this relationship
(Linton, 2008, p. 646).
The Importance of Power Relations
An analysis of the politics of water flows should consider power relations, that is, it should
identify who has access to or control over resources or other components of the environ
ment. In rural and urban contexts, communities without access to services will engage in
everyday activities to make water for irrigation or human consumption flow. Water can be
mobilized by exerting pressure on plumbers and water utility’s engineers, asking (or pay
ing them) them to fix a connection or alter a water meter; or exerting pressure on politi
cians, for example, by negotiating the family or community’s future votes. Due to power
asymmetries built on the basis of race, gender, religion, income, and/or age, some resi
dents will have more or less agency in the pursuit of water and sanitation services. There
are those who do not get the opportunity to negotiate but are able to survive, despite the
absence of infrastructure, by using pumps and other equipment to divert rivers, access
drainage channels, and build informal pit-latrines and water connections (Anand, 2017;
Barnes, 2014; McFarlane et al., 2014).
Page 15 of 24


Suggested Readings
Bakker, K. (2010). Privatizing water: Governance failure and the world’s water crisis.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Barnes, J. (2014). Cultivating the Nile: The everyday politics of water in Egypt. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press.
Brewis, A., Wutich, A., Bray, M., Maupin, J., Schuster, R., & Gervais, M. (2019). Commu
nity hygiene norm violators are consistently stigmatized: Evidence from four
global sites and implications for sanitation interventions. Social Science & Medi
cine, 220, 12–21.
Furlong, K. (2010). Neoliberal water management: Trends, limitations, reformula

tions. Environment and Society: Advances in Research, 1(1), 46–75.
Goldman, M. (2007). How “Water for All” policy became hegemonic: The power of
the World-Bank and its transnational policy networks. Geoforum, 38 786–800.
Kooy, M., & Bakker, K. (2008). Technologies of government: Constituting subjectivi

ties, spaces, and infrastructures in colonial and contemporary Jakarta. Interna
tional Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 32(2), 375–391.
Gandy, M. (2004). Rethinking urban metabolism: Water, space and the modern city.
City, 8(3), 371–387.
Joshi, D., Buit, G., & González-Botero, D. (2015). Menstrual hygiene management: ed
ucation and empowerment for girls? Waterlines, 34(1), 51–67.
Linton, J. (2010). What is water? The history of a modern abstraction. Vancouver, BC:
UBC Press.
O’Reilly, K., & Louis, E. (2014). The toilet tripod: Understanding successful sanita
tion in rural India. Health & Place, 29, 43–51.
Swyngedouw, E. (2004). Social power and the urbanization of water: Flows of power. New
York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Swyngedouw, E. (2009). The political economy and political ecology of the hydro-
social cycle. Journal of Contemporary Water Research & Education, 142(1), 56–60.
Ranganathan, M. (2014). “Mafias” in the waterscape: Everyday public authority and

informality in Bangalore. Water Alternatives, 7(1), 89–105.
Zwarteveen, M., & Boelens, R. (2014). Defining, researching, and struggling for wa
ter justice: some conceptual building blocks for research and action. Water Inter
national, 39(2), 143–158.
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Notes:
(1.) The neoliberal doctrine encourages privatization, that is, the assignment of clear pri
vate property rights to environmental phenomena that were previously state-owned, un
owned or communally owned. It also promotes marketization, or the assignment of prices
to phenomena that were previously shielded from market exchange or underprized. In or
der to lure private sector participation, it endorses deregulation, the rolling back of the
state interference in areas of social and environmental life; and reregulation, which in
volves state intervention to facilitate the marketization of increasingly broad spheres of
social and environmental life. Finally, neoliberal ideas endorse the managing of any re
maining public entities as if they were private, competitive businesses, and to motivate
Page 23 of 24


civil society groups to provide services that were previously provided by the state (see
Castree, 2003, 2008a, 2008b; Goldman, 2005).
(2.) Concerning the participation of private sector and the application of commercial prin
ciples to water management, it is important to recall that the private sector had been par
ticipating in public service delivery in a variety of modalities long before anyone talked
about neoliberalism, and that some populations had been buying water from private sup
pliers, for decades (see Acevedo Guerrero, Furlong, & Arias, 2015, p. 2005). In this sense,
what is new in market environmentalism doctrine is the idea that private-sector participa
tion presents a universal and infallible solution to all challenges.
(3.) The concept of hydrologic cycle can be explained like this: Water evaporates from the
oceans and the land surface, is carried over the Earth in atmospheric circulation as water
vapor, precipitates again as rain or snow, is intercepted by trees and vegetation, provides
runoff on the land surface, infiltrates into soils, recharges groundwater, discharges into
streams, and ultimately, flows out into the oceans from which it will eventually evaporate
once again (Linton, 2008, p. 630).
(4.) There is a great variety of distinct and different natures, and a multitude of existing
or possible socio-natural relations. In the words of Swyngedouw (2007a, p. 17): “Dirty wa
ter, bird-flu virus symbiosis, stem cells, heat waves, tsunamis, hurricanes, genetic diversi
ty, CO2, to name just a few of the ‘natural’ phenomena frequently highlighted on the
press, are radically different things, expressing radically different natures, pushing in
radically different directions, with radically different outcomes, and with radically differ
ent human/ nonhuman connectivity. These examples certainly suggest that there is an ur
gent need to interpolate human understanding of nature and revisit what is meant by na
ture and what nature is assumed to be.”
Tatiana Acevedo Guerrero
UNESCO-IHE Institute for Water Education
Page 24 of 24


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Politics of Water Flows: Water Supply, Sanitation, and Drainage

Politics of Water Flows: Water Supply, Sanitation, and

Summary and Keywords

Instead of seeing water as an external resource to be managed, alternative approaches

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Economic Ideas and Their Legacy in Water

Emerging at a time of increasing concern over environmental crises, market environmen­

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The Many Neoliberalizations of Water and Sanitation Management

Examining the introduction of private-property rights, and markets as allocation mecha­

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Alternative Approaches to Understanding the

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Instead of seeing water as an external resource to be managed, alternative approaches

Understanding Water as Socio-Nature

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(Swyngedouw, 1999, p. 445)

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The Importance of the Properties of Water

(Braun, 2005, p. 645).

Understanding why water is such an uncooperative commodity requires explicit refer­

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The Hydrosocial Cycle as an Alternative to the Hydrologic Cycle

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Concluding Remarks: Three Clues to Analyze,

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establishing private-property rights, employing markets as allocation mechanisms, and in­

The Sterility of the Public/Private Management Debate

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The Analytic Usefulness of the “Hydrosocial Cycle”

(Linton, 2008, p. 646).

The Importance of Power Relations

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Furlong, K. (2010). Neoliberal water management: Trends, limitations, reformula­

Kooy, M., & Bakker, K. (2008). Technologies of government: Constituting subjectivi­

Ranganathan, M. (2014). “Mafias” in the waterscape: Everyday public authority and

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Anand, N. (2011). Pressure: The PoliTechnics of water supply in Mumbai. Cultural

Assies, W. (2003). David versus Goliath in Cochabamba—Water rights, neoliberal­

Bakker, K. (2003). An uncooperative commodity: Privatizing water in England and Wales.

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Braun, B. (2005). Environmental issues: Writing a more-than-human urban geogra­

Bridge, G., & Perreault, T. (2009). Environmental governance. In N. Castree, D. De­

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establishing private-property rights, employing markets as allocation mechanisms, and in

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Braun, B. (2005). Environmental issues: Writing a more-than-human urban geogra

Bridge, G., & Perreault, T. (2009). Environmental governance. In N. Castree, D. De

Castree, N. (2008a). Neoliberalizing nature: the logics of deregulation and reregu

Castree, N. (2008b). Neoliberalizing nature: Processes, effects, and evaluations. En

Castro, J. E. (2008). Neoliberal water and sanitation policies as a failed develop

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