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Paper short abstract

Based on comparative research in Mexico and Puerto Rico, this paper examines how households use decentralised water and energy systems to add redundancy to failing infrastructures, shaping uneven capacities to absorb climate shocks and revealing the politics of everyday adaptation.

Paper long abstract

Current debates in development studies are often dominated by abstract accounts of the global polycrisis, paying limited attention to how climate disruption is materially experienced and managed in everyday life. This paper argues that the future of development must be examined from the ground up, through the ways households respond to climate-related shocks and recurrent infrastructure failure. Drawing on comparative research in Mexico and Puerto Rico, the paper examines the growing reliance on decentralised water and energy systems—such as rainwater harvesting and distributed solar power—as strategies through which households introduce redundancy into precarious urban service environments.

The paper shows how decentralised infrastructures function as household-level forms of material and socio-political capital, enabling differentiated capacities to absorb, adapt to, and sometimes reconfigure exposure to droughts, hurricanes, and other climate disruptions. By adding redundancy to unreliable centralised systems, these infrastructural constellations reshape everyday practices, redistribute responsibility for risk management, and alter relationships between households, communities, and the state. However, access to and control over such redundancy is uneven, reflecting broader social inequalities and differentiated abilities to mobilise financial resources, technical knowledge, and social networks.

By foregrounding lived experiences and place-specific dynamics, the paper connects global processes of climate change and structural inequality to household strategies of crisis responsiveness. It critically interrogates whether infrastructural redundancy enables transformative pathways toward more secure and inclusive urban futures, or whether it stabilises existing inequalities by shifting the burden of adaptation onto households themselves.