Presentation short abstract

In Mathare, Nairobi, water tanks are political currency as politicians gift them to youths in the guise of empowerment for support. This paper examines how clientelist politics drives the hybridisation and fragmentation of water infrastructure and metabolic flows.

Presentation long abstract

In Nairobi's Mathare informal settlement, water tanks have emerged as critical political infrastructure that mediates both patron-client relations and urban water metabolism. Drawing on qualitative social network analysis, field observations, and in-depth interviews, this paper examines how politicians, from local assembly members to parliamentary aspirants and even the President, deploy water tanks to consolidate youth support by mobilising youth groups through entrepreneurship and economic empowerment discourses.

In Nairobi's informal settlements, characterised by enduring inequality and multiple forms of state neglect and deprivation, water tanks are increasingly serving as a form of political currency in patron-client exchanges. Politicians strategically engage youth groups heavily involved in water provision (both legal and illegal), framing infrastructure gifts as enduring symbols of public service. Meanwhile, the state exercises strategic forbearance towards informal water activities, selectively tolerating them to secure political allegiances.

I argue that water tanks, legitimised through decades of youth unemployment and economic empowerment policy discourses, further fragment and hybridise Mathare's metabolic flows while simultaneously reshaping the settlement's governance dynamics. The analysis demonstrates that urban informality operates as both a site of marginalisation and a resource for political control.

Contributing to urban political ecology debates on heterogeneous infrastructure configurations, this research traces the social and political networks mobilised through water tanks as both symbolic and material resources. By examining how political discourse mediates metabolic relations, the paper offers new insights into the governance of essential services and illuminates the distinctive politics of infrastructure in informal settlements.