Water Injustice Paper Follow up

Geoforum 54 (2014) 158–166

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Geoforum

j o u r n a l h o m e p a g e : w w w . e l s e v i e r . c o m / l o c a t e / g e o f o r u m

Global environmental justice and the right to water: The case of peri-urban Cochabamba and Delhi

0016-7185/$ - see front matter � 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2013.05.014

⇑ Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: [email protected], [email protected] (L. Mehta), j.allouche@

ids.ac.uk (J. Allouche), [email protected] (A. Nicol), [email protected] (A. Walnycki).

1 There are also of course many indigenous expressions of similar conc examples, the notion of Buen Vivir which is an overarching alternative dis sustainable development that has been adopted by the Ecuadorian and government and is based around the idea of living well as opposed to living practice though, such expressions have been undermined by the on-going e of the extractive industries and the infrastructure development such as highw dams all over the Andes (see Bebbington and Bebbington, 2010). Many activists do not actively draw on the concept of environmental justice due to America origins. This is not to say that the on-going environmental struggle the global south do not speak to the frameworks of EJ and GEJ as we dem through our example of peri-urban Cochabamba.

Lyla Mehta a,b,⇑, Jeremy Allouche a, Alan Nicol a, Anna Walnycki a a Institute of Development Studies (IDS), Library Road, Brighton BN1 9RE, UK b Norwegian University of Life Sciences, Universitetstunet 3, NO-1432 Aas, Norway

a r t i c l e i n f o

Article history: Available online 28 June 2013

Keywords: Environmental justice Right to water Peri-urban interface

a b s t r a c t

This article applies the global environmental justice (GEJ) approach to the problem of universal access to safe and potable water. Nowhere is the challenge more pressing than in peri-urban spaces where the lack of formal water provision and increasing environmental pollution lead to significant challenges for human wellbeing. We examine how and whether global discourses concerning the human right to water can be strengthened by resorting to GEJ, not least to allow for sustainable human–environmental inter- action, in order to meet growing water needs in rapidly expanding urban areas. By drawing on local peo- ple’s experiences and mobilisations around water in peri-urban localities in Bolivia and India, the article examines the contradictions around the implementation of the right to water in charged peri-urban spaces. It demonstrates how environmental injustices and rights violations often go hand in hand and that struggles to access water are also struggles about environmental justice and sustainability. Still, while global frameworks provide moral imperatives, urban spaces in the global south offer certain chal- lenges to realising rights and environmental justice. This is due to the contradictory nature of the state and its disregard for marginalised people, unequal experiences of citizenship, elite biases in policy mak- ing and planning, resource capture by powerful players as well as significant distributional, recognition and procedural problems. Thus, even though GEJ is a powerful tool to counter local injustices, its actual uptake will be shaped by diverse national and local political economies which may not be conducive to realising justice and rights.

� 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

epts, for course to

Bolivian

1. Introduction: Access to safe water and global environmental justice

The concept of global environmental justice (GEJ) is emerging as an important concept in the field of environmental and develop- ment (Schlosberg, 2004). It builds on the ‘Environmental Justice Paradigm’ which attempts to link environment and race, class, gen- der, and social justice concerns in an explicit framework’ (Taylor, 2000, 542). Historically, this had a narrow focus as a US based movement and academic discourse against the siting of toxic waste and polluting industries in spaces inhabited by minority and disen- franchised populations (see Bullard, 1994; Agyeman, 2005). More recent conceptions take a wider and more global focus to look both substantive and distributive aspects, as well as procedural aspects

where all people can be meaningfully involved in environmental decision making (Agyeman et al., 2002; Schlosberg, 2007).1

As Sikor and Newell (2014) argue environmental justice concerns are not only universal(ising), but also increasingly oper- ate at a global scale. GEJ has particularly resonated amongst cli- mate justice activists who have pushed for a fair international regime that would simultaneously prevent climate change and protect people’s right to move out of poverty (see Adger et al., 2006; Okereke, 2008; Roberts and Parks, 2007). In article we ask

better. In xpansion

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L. Mehta et al. / Geoforum 54 (2014) 158–166 159

how GEJ would look in other domains with different material, spa- tial, biophysical and socio political properties and in diverse devel- oping country settings. We thus take the case of access to safe water in environmentally degraded peri-urban spaces and ask whether globally articulated concerns around the human right to water (RTW) help enhance water justice at the local level.

Why is access to safe water a global environmental justice is- sue? Firstly, water embodies the link between human needs and sustainability of resources that is so-present in environmental jus- tice (EJ) debates (Agyeman et al., 2002). It also highlights the po- tential tension between access and social justice on the one hand and environmental quality and protection on the other. While for many EJ activists, the link between environmental justice and so- cial justice is obvious and complementary (see McDonald, 2002), Agyeman (2001) rightly points out that EJ often pays too much attention to issues of environmental quality, such as nature and biodiversity, while other basic human rights and equity issues and needs remain unprotected and unaddressed. As distributive environmental justice is also increasingly concerned with benefits, one could argue that clean water and safe disposal of wastewater contribute to enhancing ‘environmental quality’ and allowing all to experience ‘quality environments’ (Agyeman, 2001).

Secondly, decision making about who has access to safe water (or not) and how it is managed is deeply political and contested (see Zeitoun, 2013). Traditionally, the water domain has been dom- inated by top-down and closed decision making processes where the concerns of the marginalised and disenfranchised citizens have not been taken seriously (Mehta et al., 2007). Even though some of this procedural injustice is being reversed through new participa- tory processes, as Mehta et al. (2007) and Zeitoun (2013) argue, these can also by-pass the interests and needs of the poor and dis- franchised and legitimise unjust outcomes.

Thirdly, universal access to safe water has been the goal and focus of much global collective action since the Mar del Plata conference of 1977 (Finger and Allouche, 2002). The past three decades have seen a host of global declarations2 explicitly calling for universal access to safe water and sanitation, and increasingly on the basis of the human right to water and sanitation (see Section 3). Even though there is widespread recognition that access to safe water is key to achieving global justice for poor women and men, about 800 million people lack access to safe water and almost 2.4 billion people – 40% of the world’s population – lack access to adequate sanitation (WHO, 2010).

Nowhere is the challenge more pressing than in peri-urban areas of the global South. The future is increasingly urban, with about 60% of the world’s population likely to live in urban areas by 2030 (Davis, 2004). Alongside this rapid expansion comes the emergence of the peri-urban interface which is characterised by the increasing intensifi- cation and co-existence of urban/rural linkages, the ‘glocal’ dynamic flows of people, commodities, capital, natural resources, waste and pollution, and conflicts over land tenure and water insecurity (STEPS and Sarai, 2010). All these dynamic changes raise significant chal- lenges with respect to basic service provision and the management of ecosystem services, especially for the most marginalised residents.

By drawing on local people’s experiences and mobilisations around water in peri-urban localities in Bolivia and India, this arti- cle examines the application of GEJ to the water domain. Specifi- cally, it examines the contradictions around the implementation of the right to water in charged peri-urban spaces where experi- ences of citizenship are highly unequal. The article demonstrates how environmental injustices and rights violations often go hand in hand and struggles to access water are also struggles about envi-

2 E.g. the New Delhi Declaration of 1990, the 1992 Dublin Statement on Water and Sustainable Development, the UN Millennium Development Goals, the 2010 UN General Assembly recognition of access to clean water and sanitation as a human right.

3 See Debbané and Keil (2004) for a sceptical analysis of the application o environmental justice to urban water.

ronmental justice and sustainability. Thus, global discourses con- cerning the right to water can be strengthened by resorting to glo- bal environmental justice approaches in order to allow for sustainable human–environmental interaction in rapidly expand- ing urban areas. However, our case study material from Bolivia and India highlights that while global frameworks provide moral imperatives, their application may be limited in contexts charac- terised by deep inequality and marginality. By drawing on work of Partha Chatterjee (2004), we spell out some of the limits of rights-based approaches in post-colonial contexts and how GEJ need to be more cognizant of the struggles and realities of the poor. Thus, even though environmental justice has moved from what Da- vid Harvey once called militant particularism (1996) to address wider structural forms of inequality, our study concurs with Williams and Mawdsley’s (2006) to argue that complex realities in the global south provide certain challenges to realising rights and environmental jus- tice.3 This is due to the contradictory nature of the state and its disre- gard for marginalised people, unequal experiences of citizenship in the periphery, elite biases in policy making and planning, resource capture by powerful players as well as significant distributional, recognition and procedural problems. Thus, even though GEJ is a powerful tool to counter local injustices, its actual uptake will be shaped by diverse national and local political economies which may not be conducive to realising justice and rights (Sikor and Newell, 2014).

This article is divided into three sections. The first section looks at experiences of citizenship. governmentality and water injustices in peri-urban localities. We then examine several unresolved issues with the globally endorsed right to water and also explore its links with global environmental justice. The article then turns to examine issues concerning water access and environmental injustice in Cochabamba and Delhi, focussing on the dynamics of access, provi- sion and waste in both contexts. The paper concludes by arguing that despite the potential of the GEJ frame, it does not go far enough to realise water justice for poor and marginalised communities.

2. Citizenship, governmentality and water injustices in peri-urban localities

Urbanisation and peri-urbanism in the global South have chal- lenged the model of universal water and sanitation provision – usually public – that followed on from the water and sanitation re- forms of 19th century Europe. This model is promoted as a crucial way to meet water and sanitation provision in most parts of the world (see UNDP, 2006). While the success of universal provision has limits even in the global North where infrastructure is old and waste and leakages are not uncommon, it has not taken off at all in the global South. In mega cities, large populations continue to lack access to state supplied water (UNDP, 2006).

In particular, peri-urban areas challenge the logic of universal provision. The peri-urban is characterised by administrative and jurisdictional overlaps and ambiguities and intensifying urban– rural linkages (Marshall et al., 2009). It is also marked by environ- mental degradation, marginalisation, lack of services and regula- tion, informality and illegality. It is thus a challenge for most citizens to access water that is safe and secure (see Allen et al., 2006). Peri-urban areas are often (fallaciously) viewed as tempo- rary by policy makers. Thus, they can be either completely bypassed by planning processes or become the subjects of flawed planning decisions. Both rural and urban authorities often fail to address the needs of peri-urban communities that are often char- acterised by political marginality (Bakker, 2008).

Peri-urban sites often lack water mains and sewer lines. The insecurity of land tenure and housing rights and dense housing

f

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create very difficult conditions in which to build sustainable water and sanitation systems. The lack of proper disposal of waste can lead to water contamination, leading to significant challenges to human health (Bartram and Cairncross, 2010). Informal vendors and small-scale private suppliers abound in peri-urban settings. They provide water through tankers, by selling bottled water and by recycling waste water in urban regions (Sansom, 2006). These hybrid private players are not subject in most cases to any regula- tory frameworks and often flout basic environmental standards (Allouche, 2011; UN Habitat, 2010).

How do people access water and how are rights to water rea- lised in such dynamic and largely ‘ungoverned’ spaces? Here it is useful to consider the limitations of liberal theories concerning the dialectical relationship between the state and its citizens. Mostly, rights for universal and equal citizenship as imagined in classical political theory are not prevalent in peri-urban settings. As pointed by Partha Chatterjee (2004: 6) in most parts of the post-colonial world, there are limits to the ideal of universal citi- zenship premised on the notion of equal citizens as bearers of rights. Instead, due to technologies of governmentality (cf. Fou- cault, 1991) the modern state has created a distinction between citizens who are rights bearers and populations who are the targets of government policies, laws and interventions.4 As pointed out by Chatterjee, poorer people in most countries of the global south are considered to be members of social groups that ‘transgress the strict lines of legality in struggling to live and work’ (2004: 40). Here the distinction between ‘civil society’ and ‘political society’ is important. The former comprises the middle and upper classes who are the fo- cus of policies and state attention. By contrast, political society often comprising so called ‘illegal’ and disenfranchised citizens meet gov- ernmental agencies by wit, stealth and usually access services via informal means and through patronage. Their livelihoods or resi- dence may often be considered ‘illegal.’ The majority of peri urban dwellers who live in so – called informal or illegal colonies and who access basic services through informal means would fall within this category according to Chatterjee.5

At the heart of Chatterjee’s (2004) analysis is the current dis- connect between the legal order and social practices in many developing contexts. He distinguishes between two major dynam- ics of state-society relations: ‘One is the line connecting civil soci- ety to the nation-state founded on popular sovereignty and granting equal rights to citizens. The other is the line connecting the populations to governmental agencies pursuing multiple poli- cies of security and welfare.’ (Chatterjee, 2004: 37). It is through these welfare activities that different demographic categories of governmentality and groups emerge (e.g. for example, the poor, illegal, informal localities, etc.). It is also through these categories that claims are exercised and services are accessed.

This is particularly true for water, a basic resource for survival. In keeping with Chatterjee’s analysis above and as will be demon- strated in our case studies, the vast majority of peri-urban resi- dents and so called ‘informal settlements’ colonies remain unserved in most parts of the world and excluded from the formal water system (see Allen et al., 2006; Graham and Marvin, 2001). As the Bolivia case shows, there is a long tradition of collective mobi- lisation for access to water, simply because they are forced to get

4 Governmentality according to Foucault (1991) is an ensemble formed by institutions, tactics, procedures that allow for the exercise of complex forms of power that empower some and silence others (see also Gordon, 2001). It has a long history and in many cases pre-dates the modern nation state where the colonial state considered populations as subjects, not citizens. These trends continue to be endorsed by the post-colonial state (Chatterjee, 2004).

5 Chatterjee has been criticised for not recognising the blurriness between civil and political society (see Baviskar and Sundar, 2008). In fact, in peri urban areas bourgeois civil society also transgress recognised norms and resort to informal means and patronage to access services.

by without the state or because they are completely by-passed. As we describe in India, in many cases, they also opt out of the for- mal system, devise their own strategies and do not hope for any benefits from the state. Still, the state plays a key role as an arbiter of rights and justice and through different forms of control, has the power to determine their status. Can a globally and nationally recognised right to water provide new spaces for engagement be- tween peri-urban communities and the state? Can the global rec- ognition of the right to water advance global environmental justice in peri-urban contexts? It is to these issues that we now turn.

3. The unresolved issue of the right to water and global environmental justice

As Sikor and Newell (2014) argue, global rights are a key com- ponent of the global justice movement. The discourse on rights is based on the notions of rights holders and duty bearers (UNDP, 2006). The now globally endorsed human right to water has been the result of intense global struggles since decades.6 Through much lobbying and struggle, in July 2010 access to clean water and sanita- tion was finally recognised by the General Assembly of the United Nations as a human right and later that year the UN Human Rights Council affirmed by consensus that the right to water and sanitation is derived from the right to an adequate standard of living, which is contained in several international human rights treaties and that it is both justiciable and enforceable.7 The official recognition of the right to water was a great victory for the global water justice movement and has been used as a powerful mobilising tool for water struggles all around the world.

However, there remain several unresolved issues concerning the implications and practicalities of the human right to water which have been the subject of much debate by several scholars (Mehta, 2003; Anand, 2007; Bakker, 2007; D’Souza, 2008; Sultana and Loftus, 2011). Bakker (2007) has argued that the human right to water is individualistic, anthropocentric and state centric and not entirely incompatible with private sector provision. Further, as with other social and economic rights, implementing the right to water has been challenging. This is because governments in the south often do not prioritise their international commitments at the national level or may lack the financial capacity to imple- ment them. Bustamante et al. (2011) contend that adopting the hu- man right to water in certain post-colonial contexts such as Bolivia has led to the state being mandated with the power to undertake a task that it has historically been unable to do, namely to define, then grant or deny the right under its own terms and laws. This is particularly true in contexts where the autonomous manage- ment of resources has long operated without state intervention, something we go onto describe in Bolivia.

Legalistic and individual notions of human rights can also fail to recognise the social, cultural, and economic role that water plays in everyday life and how it can be implemented in light of varied local political and cultural realities (Cowan et al., 2001). Peri-urban localities, the focus of this article, pose particular cultural and political realities. Traditional conceptualisations of the right to water may be more applicable where the state has established legitimacy as the water provider. But in peri urban spaces where

6 It was only implicitly mentioned in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Mehta, 2005; Gleick, 1999). In November 2002, the United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights adopted the General Comment on the right to water. The Committee stressed the State’s legal responsibility in fulfilling the right and defined water as a social and cultural good and not solely an economic commodity (UN, 2002).

7 United Nations, 2010. News: UN united to make the right to water and sanitation l e g a l l y b i n d i n g . h t t p : / / w w w . o h c h r . o r g / e n / N e w s E v e n t s / P a g e s / D i s p l a y - News.aspx?NewsID=10403&LangID=E (accessed January 2011).

8 Ideas of citizenship in Bolivia are especially complex. Over 60% of the population ascribed themselves as indigenous in the 2001 census, yet indigenous groups have historically had a tumultuous relationship with the state. During the 20th century numerous governments have attempted to assimilate indigenous groups, more recently the state has endeavoured to recognise the rights of indigenous communi-

L. Mehta et al. / Geoforum 54 (2014) 158–166 161

informal mobilisation and provision are both widespread, commu- nities often group on social or consumption rights based on their collective identities (e.g. illegal residents or residents of informal colonies). These are often different from the individualist notion of rights enshrined in western liberal-rights frameworks (Bakker, 2007, p. 38).

There have been growing calls that argue that the human right to water should go beyond just ensuring people with sufficient vol- umes of water (Sultana and Loftus, 2011). Thus a key unresolved issue is about how the right to water fits with the role that water as a resource plays in the hydro-social cycle and eco-system. As water is an environmental resource, it is complicated by notions of place, space, ownership and quality. It can be a source of life but also disease and pollution. In many ways, a combined approach to addressing water needs – the need to access quantities of suffi- cient quality to guarantee life and well-being – requires the use both of the lens of environmental justice as well as human rights.

Thus, pushing forward the concept of the right to water can build on several of the core concepts intrinsic to GEJ as outlined by Schlosberg (2007). These include equitable distribution of envi- ronmental risks and benefits and ensuring the capability of com- munities and individuals to function and flourish in society. Thus an environmental justice route through approaching access to safe water means ensuring the wider equitable balancing of environ- mental risks and benefits between poorer and richer communities. These groups include communities in Bolivia and India to be out- lined below.

Furthermore, the right to water is nested within wider notions of the right to an adequate ‘standard of living’, which is fundamentally a human development concern. But such debates have tended to ignore issues concerning environmental sustainability and the need to protect environmental flows of water in order to ensure sustain- able provision. In other words, future provision of water in response to human entitlements also has to balance environmental entitle- ments. In both the Delhi and Cochabamba cases to be discussed, cur- rent models of water provision are unsustainable in the long run and may not be able to meet future demands. As Swyngedouw argues, water in urban areas is often brought in at the expense of an expand- ing water frontier, leading to both social conflicts and socio-ecologi- cally unsustainable water practices of expanding resource extraction and intensified control or access (Swyngedouw, 2007).

Finally, the right to a safe environment has been advocated as an essential aspect of fundamental human rights (Nickel, 1993). Environmental injustices occur due to human rights transgres- sions. Thus, we follow Adeola (2000) in arguing that environmental injustices and human rights violations are inextricably interwoven and that right to water discourses can usefully engage with GEJ. As discussed in the theory and practice article on GEJ in this special issue (Sikor and Newell, 2014), there is a need to examine the links between larger sets of practices and processes operating at global scales in relation to local struggles for justice. The right to water has emerged out of global environmental justice concerns and could therefore provide the impetus for addressing environmental injustices and water access problems in peri-urban areas. We now go onto explore these issue through case studies in peri-urban Coc- habamba and New Delhi. Despite being in different continents and hugely different in size, they provide a range of complementary in- sights into why global frameworks around human rights and GEJ may not make a significant different to the lives of peri-urban communities.

ties. The rights and status of indigenous groups has been elevated since the election of the country’s first indigenous president in 2006. Indigenous communities in rural and mining areas have forged social movements that have demanded indigenous rights, and these have been constitutionalised by the Morales administration (Postero, 2010; Albro, 2010), however, and as demonstrated in this article, indigenous migrants to the city, particularly the poor peripheries, often have their social and economic rights overlooked.

4. Water justice in Cochabamba

Cochabamba in Bolivia became internationally famous for the ‘Water Wars’ of 2000/2001 when local residents successfully

ejected the international company Bechtel, terminating both the private concession (Olivera and Lewis, 2004) and the appropriation of communitarian systems of irrigation and water provision in rur- al and peri-urban Cochabamba (Crespo, 2003). The appropriation of communitarian systems and price increases of up to 200% (Oli- vera and Lewis, 2004) as well as the continued exclusion and mar- ginalisation of indigenous groups as part of the El Alto-La Paz pro- poor concession (Crespo and Laurie, 2007) had clearly highlighted how water privatisation in Bolivia failed to extend service provi- sion to the poor.

The well-documented Water Wars were one of many popular uprisings between 2000 and 2005 around natural resource man- agement and access in Bolivia (see Crabtree, 2005; Mamani and Er- win, 2006; Perrault, 2006; Crespo and Laurie, 2007; Schultz and Draper, 2009). All these movements contributed to the election of a socialist coca grower-union leader to president (Crabtree, 2005). President Morales and the MAS (Movement for Socialism) government brought water management back into public sector; and the notion of the ‘Right to Water for Life’ was enshrined in the constitution. Social movements lobbied for the creation of the Ministry of Environment and Water (MMAyA) and the Right to Water (see Campanini, 2007 for a full discussion of this process). The Plurinational Constitution of the State (PCS) highlights both the human right to water and the need to protect water sources and supplies against contamination as well as prohibiting the pri- vatisation of water services.

Even though the Morales government has seemingly been at the forefront of international campaigns for climate justice and ecosys- tem integrity through declarations such as buen vivir, domestically the state has been criticised for pursuing economic development policies based on industrialisation and expanding their extractive industries. There are also contradictions that exist between the constitutional commitment to achieving more equal access to basic services, and the government’s plan for industrialisation as part of ‘The Great Industrial Leap’ that continues to contaminate, over-ex- ploit and pollute water supplies (Bustamante et al., 2011). Increas- ingly, there are inconsistencies between state rhetoric and practice highlighting elite biases and a failure to recognise and uphold the recently enshrined rights of indigenous communities.8 The con- tradictions outlined above make some commentators see the pat- terns of development and a failure to invest sufficiently into public sector as ‘reconstituted neoliberalism’ (Webber, 2011).

Historically there have been state endeavours to expand ser- vices into poorer neighbourhoods most notably during the mid- 1950s following the Agrarian revolution (see van Lindert, 1986). However, the state has been unable to meet the needs of the grow- ing urban populations. Bolivian cities grew rapidly during the 1990s and 2000s as a result of rapid and on-going economic rur- al–urban migration. Urban poverty has manifested on the periph- eries of cities, as observed in El Alto-La Paz and the Zona Sur of Cochabamba. The failure of municipal governments to meet the basic needs of the urban poor in these areas has meant that small scale private businesses, community providers, and NGO have of- ten had to step in to fill the gap.

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Bolivia has adopted a human rights based approach to build a new model for public water provision and management, which also incorporates social participation and customary uses. In an at- tempt to improve access to safe water for rural and peri-urban indigenous communities, the state is attempting to license and register communitarian systems, so that they can regulate, support and build capacity of smaller service providers, which have existed autonomously until now. The case study to follow in the southern zone draws on doctoral research undertaken between September 2009 and December 2010 exploring the reforms underway in Boli- via under the concept of The Right to Water for Life. It draws on some 40 semi-structured interviews undertaken with policy mak- ers, government officials, activists, water committee leaders and local people. Further interviews and observations were undertaken at general workshops and meetings. Ethnographic fieldwork was conducted in Villa 18 de Febrero9 with the help of two research assistants over a 7 month period using a mixture of ethnographic, participatory and quantitative methods. This included participant observation, 100 randomly selected household surveys relating to water use within the barrio, 25 semi-structured interviews with lo- cal women and men and water committee leaders.

4.1. Accessing water in the southern zone

The last two decades has seen a rapid growth in the population of Cochabamba. The southern zone, home to migrants and poor residents who commute to the centre, has over 40% of the city’s population. Unlike peri-urban Delhi, where the rich and poor live side by side, the elites of Cochabamba live in the north and centre of the city, and the poorer communities are found to the south of the city. The region is, however, characterised by its diversity be- tween and within settlements. On the same street adobe houses with pigs tied outside stand next to two story houses displaying gleaming Toyota Landcruisers, often paid for by the remittances sent home from female family members who moved to Spain to work as housekeepers (Cielo and Cespedes, 2008).

The communities of the southern zone have and continue to be socially, economically and politically marginalised (Duran, 2007). In common with peri-urban Delhi, the state has failed to compre- hensively provide access to basic services. Thus, as Chattejee de- scribed earlier, communities have had to mobilise to lobby or self-organise in order to bring in essential services such as refuse collection, roads, schools, gas, electricity and water and sanitation. As the city of Cochabamba has grown it has increasingly been af- fected by hydrological and technical challenges, including decreas- ing aquifer levels and groundwater contamination (Laurie and Marvin, 1999). This exacerbates the inequity in water service pro- vision in the city (Wutich, 2009). The public provider SEMAPA, which has been plagued by corruption and inefficiency (Driessen, 2008; Crespo, 2003), has failed to extend provision beyond the affluent north and old centre to the south and the Misicuni dam does not yet guarantee water for the southern zone (see Laurie and Marvin, 1999; Hans, 2009). Consequently, water in the south- ern zone continues to come from water committees that have emerged to serve the community, and are run by a directive board. They are based loosely on communitarian principles of mutual aid, which exploit subterranean water sources through systems of wells, pumps, tanks and pipelines pipelines that deliver to a tap in each household. Some committees have collectively organised and have lobbied the municipal water provider to sell water to the communities in bulk, and more recently have lobbied the min- istry for water and the environment for funding to upgrade their water systems, mirroring Chatterjee’s idea of the political society

9 Barrio name has been anonymised at the request of residents.

outlined earlier. Water is also supplied by private water tankers. These vehicles deliver water regularly throughout the southern zone but at a higher price, and residents regularly complain that they tend not to use this water for consumption if it appears, smells or tastes ‘dirty’.

The notion of the Right to Water for Life comes directly from the constitution, but it is not something that peri-urban communities and communitarian providers directly identify with. As discussed in Section 3, there is a gap between formal and abstract under- standings of the Right to Water by state and NGOs, and the under- standings of the (peri-urban) social organisations, whose claims are primarily focused on collective problems related to water re- source access, supply and protection. As described by a small-scale provide:

‘‘We are concerned that the right to water approach may also involve exclusions. The concept of the right is in some way a contrast to the concept of common good. We fear that a right to water advocates a certain individualistic rights.’’ (Provider at a meeting of small scale water providers operating in the southern zone) – June 2011).

Furthermore there is widespread mistrust of the state amongst peri-urban residents who do not believe that the state will deliver: ‘The government claims that it has complete control over the coun- try’s water resources, but we can’t trust a state that has let us down on every occasion, and which continues to give special privileges to industry.’ (Contribution from a water committee leader to a work- shop about the Right to Water, November 2010). Even though com- mittees are generally aware of the right to water within the constitution, most residents of Villa 18 de Febrero were unaware of their constitutional right to water. Of the 91 respondents to the household survey, only 8 were aware of the right to water, and there was a lot of confusion surrounding what the right en- tailed. For instance, some residents responded that the right to water entailed that water should be free for everyone. When probed whether they thought the government could provide water efficiently in the barrio, within the community there was still a strong belief that the community should play a role in managing resources and basic services, because so often they have been let down by the state. There remains deep mistrust of the state and lo- cal people prefer to draw on their own communitarian notions of rights rather than national or global discourses.

4.2. Environmental injustice and struggles for rights

Committees and their representatives are not solely focused on improving access to water. There is also a struggle to protect and defend water sources to avoid the spread of environmental bads described earlier in this paper. One of the most serious causes of water contamination in the southern zone is the K’ara K’ara refuse dump leading to water contaminated by seepage and heavy metals, for several community members. Communities have been organ- ising against the dump since 1999 and taking direct action by blockading the dump and asking for it to be closed and sealed (Mamani, 2010). Still, the dump continues to receive rubbish from the city centre, and communities continue to mobilise and block- ade the dump in protest. The experiences of the communities around K’ara K’ara highlight how environmental injustices are implicitly rights violations.

The history of the water committee at barrio of 18 de Febrero demonstrates how one community has struggled for water over two decades. The first settlers arrived in the region around 20 years ago, when there was plenty of water. When the initial wells ran dry, the community contributed $20 each and with the help of a lo- cal priest sunk a well that would meet the needs of two communi-

L. Mehta et al. / Geoforum 54 (2014) 158–166 163

ties. As more people migrated into the area, more wells were dug and subterranean water sources were depleted to the extent there was only water for a few hours every 2 or 3 days a week. Today, households have come to rely on the water tankers that bring green, yellow, cloudy or pungent water, which is also the most expensive option in Cochabamba. After over 10 years of coopera- tion, the community is starting to lose faith and many residents have chosen not to reconnect to the system but to continue buying water from the water tankers. The committee, like many others, operates with limited resources in a challenging environment, par- ticularly as the population grows. It is clear that ensuring access to safe water is implicitly tied to the struggle for environmental jus- tice for informal, communitarian water providers. This stands in contrast to international rights-based approaches, which neglect to integrate concerns around environmental justice and sustain- ability – and are based on notions of individual human rights, rather than more collective notions.

The language of rights has been mobilised by the government and also by communitarian peri-urban water providers as a dis- course that frames water policy. The concept of rights has not, however, translated to the community level. Struggles on the ground in peri-urban areas continue to be about accessing water and ensuring the water they use is clean. Efforts by the government to improve access to safe water in peri-urban areas have been underfunded and insufficient, to date and water committees are facing growing challenges to deliver safe and sufficient water sup- plies. The majority of peri urban dwellers are unaware that they have the right to water as part of the new constitution. We now turn to the Delhi case which lacks such dynamic protest and organ- ised water committees, but provides complementary insights on struggles over water and environmental justice in rapidly expand- ing urban contexts.

5. Water injustices in peri-urban Delhi

Unlike Bolivia, the Indian Constitution does not specifically rec- ognise a fundamental right to water. Still, several court decisions deem such a right to be implied in Article 21 which stresses the right to life (see Muralidhar, 2006). The right to water can be read as being implied in the recognition of the right to a clean environ- ment. For example, in Subhash Kumar v. State of Bihar, the Supreme Court recognised that the right to life ‘includes the right of enjoy- ment of pollution free water and air for full enjoyment of life’ (Muralidhar, 2006). While the recognition of a fundamental right to water in several judgements is unequivocal, its implementation through policies and acts is not as advanced. Key water law and policies are drafted by the central government, but water is a state subject and the centre plays a minimal role in implementation. There is also very little interaction between the range of govern- ments handling water issues. Thus multiplicity of principles, poli- cies and players abound, resulting in the lack of an overall framework to govern water (Cullet, 2009). Furthermore, even though the Indian Constitution recognises the equality of all citi- zens, the Indian state is Janus-faced and both the arbiter and viola- tor of rights and resources (Mehta, 2005). As Williams and Mawdsley argue (2006), the Indian state is dominated by elite biases which exclude the poor and make experiences of citizenship very ambiguous and contradictory. This will be evident in the dis- cussion of access to safe water and environmental pollution in Ghaziabad on Delhi’s fringe.

With a population of over 16 million people Delhi is one of the fastest growing metropolises in the world, spatially as well as demographically. It is now spilling out over to three adjoining states (Uttar Pradesh, Haryana and Rajasthan, all comprising the National Capital Region of Delhi). Beautification drives in the city, middle class environmentalism and international events such as

the Asian and Commonwealth Games have legitimised both the relocation of polluting industries and the forced displacements of poor citizens to the periphery (STEPS and Sarai, 2010). Those who were forced to relocate have had their basic rights and right to livelihood seriously compromised and have largely had to fend for themselves in an increasingly degraded and hostile environ- ment. We now focus on one such area which has grown as a result of the movement of both people from different social groups as well as polluting industries, namely the Transhindon region around Ghaziabad in the eastern fringe of Delhi. The river Yamuna, one of India’s largest water bodies, flows on the eastern side of Del- hi. The river Hindon flanks the western border of the adjoining state of Uttar Pradesh. Both are very polluted (Jain, 2004) and the Hindon in particular is referred to as a drain, rarely as a river.

Ghaziabad, an industrial town in Uttar Pradesh on the outskirts of Delhi, has witnessed many rapid commercial developments over the last decade. This is accompanied by the migration of many small-scale industrial units from Delhi in the wake of the judg- ments of the Supreme Court of India regarding the relocation of polluting and non-conforming units from Delhi leading to tremen- dous environmental pollution (see Sharan and Prasad, 2010). Agri- culture has been shrinking over the years but is still practised in the region, in addition to commercial, industrial and service sector activities. In conjunction with the growth of industries, there has also been a construction boom in Ghaziabad with new middle class colonies emerging close to the Delhi border in the Trans-Hindon region (e.g. Vaishali, Vasundhara, Indrapuram). They are often sur- rounded by many formal and informal colonies inhabited by mi- grant communities from all over North India who came to take advantage of the increasing livelihood opportunities in the region. The STEPS/Sarai team conducted 120 interviews with local women and men in several villages (both authorised and unauthorised), teachers, journalists, scientists, engineers, government officials, farmers, dairy owners, property dealers, activists, doctors, manu- facturers of private water supply and purification devices and res- idents of middle class colonies, as well as a range of government officials from different departments in Ghaziabad and Delhi. The team also consulted a wide range of secondary data sources includ- ing government and planning reports. The research took place be- tween 2008 and 2010.

5.1. Governing and accessing water

Official water sources include government-supplied taps, wells and pipes which largely cater to people who live in residential quarters or comprise the old rich in old villages. Large parts of the region are dependent on groundwater sources which are rap- idly depleted (Rodell et al., 2009). Rich and middle class people and their housing colonies enjoy piped water from a canal bringing distant Ganga water. Supply is largely regular and additional stor- age tanks and pumps help to ensure supply 24/7. These people ‘count’. Hidden and unofficial pathways to accessing water are de- ployed by the migrants, the poor, the so called squatters and ‘invis- ible’ citizens. These range from stealing water from official pipelines to digging one’s own borewell. In Ambedkar bastee, an informal colony, residents managed to get a small informal pipe- line connected to the main pipeline taking water to middle class localities. They did this by approaching officials and political lead- ers in keeping with Chatterjee’s (2004) analysis. However, unlike the strict distinction put forward by Chatterjee between the strat- egies pursued by political society and the so called ‘bourgeois civil society, it is also not uncommon for the latter to resort to informal and ‘illegal’ means to gain more water (i.e. bribes and drawing political contacts).

In the villages and informal settlements in the Trans-Hindon, water is accessed through a mix of formal supply and informal

164 L. Mehta et al. / Geoforum 54 (2014) 158–166

coping mechanisms including tapping from the formal piped sup- ply to formal localities, extracting groundwater through submersi- ble pumps or ‘borrowing’ drinking water from the middle class colonies. Informal access is created through patronage, stealing and installing one’s own submersible pump. Residents in so-called unauthorised colonies completely lack any official provision, putt- ing themselves at great risk to meet basic needs including crossing high-speed railway lines to access water, sometimes paying for water with their lives (STEPS and Sarai, 2010). Informal and often illegal service providers abound, both because state provision is so poor and because both the rich and the poor are mistrustful of the quality of state-supplied water. Thus, they use the services of informal providers who provide water in tankers, packages and bottles. There are also many small privately-operated water qual- ity treatment plants throughout the area.

There is a strong elite bias in the implementation of govern- ment policies. Most of the treated water is supplied to the largely elite and middle class housing colonies leaving poor residents in the villages and informal colonies completely ignored and by- passed. This is due to the power of categorisation that the state uses to classify people and their settlements as either ‘informal’ or ‘illegal’ or both. As Kailashben, a resident of an unauthorised col- ony told the research team:

We could get evicted anytime. We don’t have titles to our land and live in constant insecurity. This is why we are not getting any services. They are getting Ganga water and we are getting Yamuna water. Ganga went to the rich and the dirty, Yamuna water went to the poor (Interview, January 2009).

Even though poor and informal neighbourhoods exist alongside the elite and middle class colonies in the region, no provision has been made to improve their situation. For example, the Ghaziabad Master Plan of 2021 henceforth GMP (Ghaziabad Development Authority, 2006,) discusses the issue of increasing availability of water but does not discuss how this increased availability would be distributed between the different formal and informal settle- ments, and social groups. There is also no provision to improve ser- vices around sewerage provision in the informal colonies and it is quite common for houses to be surrounded by pools of stagnant wastewater that are breeding grounds of disease. In fact, there is evidence of ‘organised irresponsibility’ amongst officials and the system is full of contradictions regarding its treatment of the poor (see Box 1).

Box 1 Contradictions within the system. Source: STEPS and Sarai (2010)

Ghaziabad Master Plan (GMP) 2021 mentions, ‘there are

about 33 percent of informal colonies in Ghaziabad, which

would be regularised and also provided public utility

services’.

The Chief Engineer of Ghaziabad Development Authority

(GDA), the agency which prepares Ghaziabad Master Plan

states, ‘we don’t do any planning for slums and unauthor-

ised colonies. . . they are the responsibility of GNN’.

The Town Engineer (water) of GNN opines, ‘GNN does not

have mandate to regularise the unauthorised colonies.

GNN is merely a service provider organisation. It is the

GDA, who develops colonies and hand it over to us’.

10 Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB), 2009. Comprehensive Environmental Assessment of Industrial Clusters, pp. 24. http://www.cpcb.nic.in/upload/NewItems/ NewItem_152_Final-Book_2.pdf.

Little wonder then that the poor residents in the colonies are so mistrustful of the state and its willingness or ability to improve their lives as manifest in the following quote: ‘The government

has formulated policies regarding the National Capital Region and the National Capital Territory and we don’t benefit from or understand them. The government does nothing for the poor and leaves us to get on with our lives’ (Resident of Unauthorised Col- ony, Interview January 2009).

5.2. Environmental injustice and struggles for rights

In an area characterised by increasing air and water pollution due to the relocation of polluting industries from Delhi, water quality has emerged as a major issue. Due to the strong presence of highly pol- luting industries, Ghaziabad is the third most polluted city in India10

and there is very little action taken against the polluting industries. De- spite chlorination and water treatment, poor water quality is a major concern even for the rich and most of them resort to treating water via Reverse Osmosis (RO). In this way the middle classes draw on mod- ern technologies to escape an increasingly polluted environment through private consumption rather than through public action (Chap- lin, 1999). Unlike the environmental justice notion that environmental bads only affect the poor, in many peri-urban areas the rich and poor are affected due to poor waste management and environmental pollu- tion as the following quote by a rich property dealer reveals: ‘See these houses of the rich and middle class. They too have open drains outside. So nobody is immune from malaria, dengue and so on (Interview Jan- uary 2009)’. The difference being that the richer households are more able to cope with the consequences of environmental bads, through purchasing technologies, health services and, if necessary, moving themselves elsewhere.

Water quality is described by villagers and slum-dwellers by its colour and taste. Drinking water provided by state hand pump is said to turn yellow overnight. Buckets and taps tend to leak and lose shape due to bad water. No wonder both the rich and poor opt out completely of the formal system and need to fend for themselves. A poor resident highlights issues concerning poor water quality and how it affects the poor:

The water is acid here. We can’t drink it. We have to cross the railway line and go over to Vasundhra and beg for a pot of water. At times, the water is so yellow that it leads to premature falling of the hair and rashes on the skin. Our kids have fallen into the drains and got rashes, allergies. Doctors ask us, what water have you drunk? (Interview January 2009).

Like Bolivia, there is very little formal mobilisation around the right to water and most poor people are not aware that they have the right to water as Indian citizens. When pushed, residents said that if there were organised protests they would join in though they felt restricted by their vulnerable status as residents of so called unauthorised colonies. Unlike Bolivia, however, there is no long tradition of water committees. Instead, action (individual and collective) is sporadic. A local journalist, Sushil Raghav and col- leagues are using legal means and drawing on the Right to Infor- mation on two related issues. The first concerns information on compensation for villagers who lost land when land was acquired for industrial development. The second concerns information on industries that have been allowed to function illegally without effluent treatment plants. While such mobilisations around the right to information have allowed certain people to access official information, they have not been successful in mobilising local vil- lagers to take direct action. Apart from many residents lacking for- mal status and an official presence, many residents, especially migrant workers, are employed by the industries. They also often receive gifts from the industries (here again Chatterjee’s (2004)

11 In addition to the problems outlined in this paper in applying GEJ in developing contexts, there is a more generic problem of ideas developed in western and northern contexts travelling across scales and times.

L. Mehta et al. / Geoforum 54 (2014) 158–166 165

idea of political subjects is important) and, as discussed, the indus- tries are not controlled by the authorities. Thus, once again struc- tural issues concerning politics and power relations come to the fore. Moreover, as in other parts of India, such judicial activism may not necessarily address the concerns of the poor (Ramana- than, 2006). Overall, peri-urban Delhi is thus an ambitious and incomplete vision of a so-called world class city which both lacks basic services and experiences structural inequalities around dis- tribution and recognition. Like in Cochabamba, environmental injustices and rights violations are often linked at the local level and that there are limits to the application of global environmental justice and rights frameworks, issues to which we now turn.

6. Discussion and conclusion

In both peri-urban Cochabamba and Delhi, one can agree with Chatterjee that most inhabitants ‘‘are only tenuously, and even then ambiguously and contextually, rights-bearing citizens in the sense imagined by the constitution’’ (2004: 38). Despite national and con- stitutional commitments to the right to water, access to safe water is very poor and in both localities water is seriously contaminated hav- ing implications for wider environmental sustainability and human survival. Thus, there are compelling reasons to link environmental and human rights problems (Adeola, 2000). Still, as both cases reveal, there is tremendous variation in the commitments and pathways to realising the right to water and environmental rights. In both our cases, despite constitutional recognition, both governments are inca- pable and apparently unwilling to extend services to poor peri-urban localities resulting in both violations of environmental and human rights. In part, this is due to sins of omission and commission where rights fail to be realised due to poor capacity and institutional con- straints, or when rights are knowingly put at risk (cf. Mehta, 2005). Elite biases and democratic deficits (and distortions) also play a key role in these processes. In both cases, peri-urban dwellers experience citizenship (or even non-citizenship) in very contradictory terms which results in them often mistrusting the state or completely opt- ing out. Still, the state matters. It remains the final authority that allo- cates rights and resources through exercises of governmentality that categorise poor people and their lives in ways that both include and exclude them from benefits and access to basic resources and rights in very arbitrary ways.

In Cochabamba, despite the famous water wars of 2000, most peri-urban dwellers are not concerned about globally articulated concerns over the right to water. Instead, local organisations are primarily concerned with problems related to water resource ac- cess, supply and protection. There is also concern that the individ- ualised human right to water could involve exclusions. Thus, even though at the national level, the human right to water has become the guiding principle for the water sector, it has proven difficult to realise in peri-urban areas. Policies to date have failed to address the specific needs of particular localities and at times are also seek- ing to appropriate communal systems. As a result, the federated committees are galvanised by the rhetoric of communitarian water rights that draw on notions of defending and claiming access to safe water supplies. There is also increasing concern about issues concerning sustainability and environmental justice.

In peri-urban Delhi, both rich and poor live side by side and both, in principle, are exposed to the same toxic emissions, air pol- lution and poor waste disposal. Still, it is the poor who largely bear the brunt of environmental degradation and pollution. Their inter- ests are both ignored and by-passed due to elite biases, powerless- ness, political economy and jurisdictional ambiguities. They lack both distributive as well as procedural justice. While there is a lot of collective mobilisation to access water and gain water rights (largely through informal means), there is very little recourse to the legal human right to water. Struggles drawing on the right to

information are not concerned with the right to water. Rights and environmental violations often go hand in hand. The peri-ur- ban interface in Delhi is characterised by a continuum between legality and illegality and epitomises how the urban vision is marked by structural inequalities and unsustainable resource use.

Within the water sector, there has been a tendency to frame rights and environmental justice as siloed discourses (Mehta et al., 2007). This stands in contrast to the experience of peri-urban communities who often do not distinguish between access/supply and quality is- sues. International frameworks on the human right to water are not only difficult to implement by the state and authorities but they are also inaccessible to peri-urban communities.11 They also often fail to speak to their specific water needs, namely by failing to address is- sues of environmental justice and sustainability. In short, they fail to connect the complexity of wider resource management and protection, to the essential delivery of the resource to people.

Both cases highlight that there is some truth in the perception that rights-based approaches are often apolitical and essentially dominated by global actors (Schlosberg, 2007). Furthermore, dis- tinctions between social justice, environmental sustainability and environmental justice in the Global South do not make sense in comparison with the US and Europe where historical timelines and periods between access, provision, environmental degradation and protection have been markedly different, particularly in terms of relative scale of the challenge. As emphasised previously, prob- lems of environmental degradation cannot overlook issues over ac- cess in the peri-urban interface.

Even though environmental concerns are a global phenomenon, the link between the environment and water as a resource and capacity to deliver secure and safe supplies has yet to be strongly af- firmed in global rights discourse. Thus, there is much that GEJ can of- fer to local struggles to access safe water. However, this article has also highlighted that in many developing country contexts, the appli- cation of GEJ and human rights is complex, not least due to embedd- edness in wider power struggles, political economies and socio- cultural contexts. Thus, local people do not often resort to these dis- courses which are also often blind to their realities. Even though mar- ginalised groups continue to create their own vocabularies and strategies of resistance to survive as quasi non-citizens in difficult peri urban spaces, there is a still a long way before environmental justice and the right to water can be realised for the poorest people in the peripheries of many of the world’s major cities.

Acknowledgements

We thank the anonymous reviewers and the editors for their very helpful comments and suggestions. The empirical sections of this paper draw on research undertaken at the ESRC funded STEPS Centre, an interdisciplinary global research and policy engagement hub (see http://www.steps-centre.org). The Bolivia component draws on doctoral research by Anna Walnycki at the STEPS Centre. The India section draws on research carried out by a large number of scholars based at Sarai, CSDS New Delhi and the STEPS Centre, IDS, Sussex which was co-convened by Lyla Meh- ta. We thank Awadhendra Sharan, Fiona Marshall, Pritpal Randha- wa, Alankar, Tim Karpouzoglou and Shilpi Srivastava for their important contributions. The usual disclaimers apply.

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