Paper short abstract:

Drawing insights from political ecology the article unpacks emerging socio-spatial relations of water pollution in urban and peri-urban Delhi, and uses empirical evidence to argue for an elaborated understanding of the diverse patterns of emergence of pollution and its significance for different groups.

Paper long abstract:

Political ecology offers a framework that can support critical explorations of the role of knowledge, and provokes deeper thinking on the power and competing value systems that govern human-environment interactions. This paper draws insights from political ecology thinking to unpack emergent socio-spatial relations of water pollution in urban and peri-urban Delhi, and offers a deeper analysis of how these relations become dynamically co-constructed by multiple actors in both material and subjective ways. Thus the 'extremes' of pollution witnessed today in several 'world cities' of the Global South, are treated as not purely symptomatic of flawed state driven policies and interventions, but partly as a consequence of the wider political, economic and technological forces driving contemporary urbanisation and peri-urbanisation. Urban water pollution is often (misleadingly) assumed to present (more or less) the same impact across urban (and peri-urban) social and ecological landscapes. However, in this article, and based upon rich empirical evidence from interviews and document analysis in Delhi, it is argued that knowledge brokering between different actors, the intertwined nature of the material, cultural and policy dimensions of water pollution, as well as the varying degrees of exposure of different social groups to pollution, suggests the emergence of new socio-spatial relations. A deeper understanding of these relations, becomes essential as cities in the Global South continue to grow.