Urban Water Management and Governance in Southeast Asian Cities
Urban Water Management and Governance in Southeast Asian Cities
- Vanessa LambVanessa LambDepartment of Social Science, York University
- , and Indrawan PrabaharyakaIndrawan PrabaharyakaHumboldt University of Berlin
Summary
Scholarship on the topic of urban water management in Southeast Asian cities, both contemporary and historical, centers on issues of contested control over water, reliance on infrastructure, and governance of populations. Such work offers insights regarding the enactment of power relations in Southeast Asian cities, particularly via infrastructure, and how this has played out with myriad effects across the region.
To approach the study of water management in cities in the region is to simultaneously inquire into topics of fragmentation, informality, climate change, urban ecologies, and sanitation. Across this varied work is a concern for the ways that water infrastructure developments and failures have shaped the ways that Southeast Asian cities provide, or deny, access to the most vulnerable. The resulting unevenness and fragmentation have meant that water management and infrastructure have been sites of struggle.
Examination of this scholarship highlights new insights into power and water across work by anthropologists, historians, geographers, political ecologists, and development studies scholars. In this literature, there are broader conceptual and practical shifts in focus that move from an emphasis on water management as control, to the emergence of governance of not only water but also the control of populations and urban space as a key concern and the “internal” politics of the governed. In other words, attempts to control water create and shape access and exclusion to urban water and therefore play a role in struggles and contestations over power in Southeast Asian cities.
Keywords
Subjects
- Environmental
- Postcolonial Studies
- Science and Technology
- Southeast Asia
- Urban
