Short Abstract

This panel explores the practical realities of donor driven water and wastewater interventions, and the production of complex urban African environments at the confluence of diverse political, economic, social, technical, and administrative interests

Long Abstract

Urban Africa faces myriad developmental challenges with ever-increasing demands for effective and resilient infrastructure. In efforts to solve service provision shortcomings and pressing climate related challenges, many African capitals are undertaking multiple, large-scale investments, constructions, and interventions to improve water and wastewater management and governance. Despite outward appearances as inclusive and sustainable ventures, they invariably (re)produce local geographies of vulnerability and gendered inequality, (re)create opportunities for elite capture, (re)agitate contestation between political and economic public and private actors, and (re)produce conflicting claims between state institutions and local level stakeholders. As such, exploring the practical realities of water and wastewater interventions, including the politics of service provision, processes of policy implementation, and examples of local contestation and adaptation, provides multifaced evidence of how urban governance is shaped by junctures of diverse and changing organizational and institutional interests across spatial levels. Conceptually, the panel wants to explain water and wastewater intervention realities in terms of contests and compromises between different agents and to understand better the implications for different stakeholder groups. One aim is to challenge notions of consensus about common developmental and sustainability objectives by seeking to frame emerging manifestations of urban development as confluences of contrasting, distorting, and multiple positions of diverse actors and institutions. In this optic, this panel welcomes critical examination of water and wastewater interventions in urban Africa, which take, for example, a point of departure in perspectives inspired by, but not limited to, political economy, geography, political ecology, and anthropology.

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