Suchergebnisse

Cover -- Contents -- Figures, Tables, and Boxes -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- Abbreviations -- 1 Alternative Service Delivery -- 2 Understanding ASD -- 3 Driving Forces -- 4 Leaky Governance -- 5 Challenging ASD -- 6 ASD and the Goal of Efficiency -- 7 Conclusions -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index.

'State failure' came to prominence in the 1980s to explain a range of challenges facing water supplies. Given the apparent problem, water supply was said to require organizational reform which would reduce government involvement in and influence over service delivery. Service providers, it was argued, should be independent from government. Among the associated reforms privatization has drawn the most attention, but alternative service delivery (ASD) has also proven important. Concomitantly, the regulatory role of senior governments was initially 'rolled back'. Since that time, regulatory oversight at higher scales has been reasserted in many cases, yet the perceived need to circumscribe the role of municipal governments through organizational reforms like ASD persists. Using a case study of water sector reform in Ontario, Canada, I argue that such views conflate organizations with governance, thus ignoring underlying municipal issues affecting water supply. This, in turn, can limit the effectiveness of regulatory improvements at higher scales. Given the increased focus on institutions to resolve water-supply challenges, these findings have implications for other contexts. In Canada a municipality is a local government whose powers and responsibilities are defined by the provinces under their respective municipal acts. While these powers are typically limited compared with other jurisdictions, in keeping with trends elsewhere municipal responsibilities have been increasing.

This article draws on scholarship in Southern theory to 'world' the study of water's urbanization. This means complicating scholarship by widening the focus beyond the application of Northern norms to engage with complex and diverse practices in Southern cities. For water's urbanization, this means focusing on what water supply is for the majority: neither the centralized piped‐water network nor its absence, but the range of practices and technologies that unite people, nature and artefacts in a complex socio‐ecological politics of water. Drawing on scholarship from Southern urbanisms, urban political ecology, and science and technology studies, we illustrate how expanding water's urbanization to include more than networked infrastructure in Jakarta draws attention to the importance of ecological connections between piped water, groundwater, wastewater and floodwater. Thinking beyond the network requires deeper engagement with the ecological connections between the diverse flows of water in and around urban environments. These produce distinct forms of fragmentation that are missed when analysis is limited to piped‐water supply. The emphasis on ecological connections between flows of water and power seeks to draw attention back to the importance of the uneven exposure to environmental hazards in cities in which neither water nor nature are wholly contained by infrastructure.