Critical Reading Response Instructions

Water Governance and Marginalization: Examining State Power and Gender Exclusion in Informal Water Systems Student Name Institution Professor Name Course Date Water Governance and Marginalization: Examining State Power and Gender Exclusion in Informal Water Systems Meehan (2013) and Adams et al. (2018) focus on marginalized communities and specific forms of power and control over water resources, including social exclusion. Meehan looks at how the state controls the daily provision of water in informal systems as a ‘hydro-social order’ in low-income areas through either tolerance or persecution of water supplies’ piracy. On the other hand, Adams et al. (2018) focus on gender practices of exclusion in Water User Associations (WUAs) in urban Malawi to demonstrate how sociopolitical structures in community councils marginalize women’s participation in governance. Together, these two texts show that two vulnerable groups, people of low incomes and women, are locked out of a fair share and control of water resources. State Control through Informal Water Management In a “hydro-social order,” water theft in Tijuana is examined by Meehan (2013) as a social control mechanism deeply embedded in water distribution. Meehan uses a Foucauldian biopolitical lens to argue that the Mexican state permits or represses unauthorized water access strategically in order to enforce control over impoverished communities. However, as a result, marginalized residents live on the whims of what we might call ‘midnight plumbers.’ These people connect their homes to clandestine water lines that, though they are visible, are unregulated or regulated viscerally until the state chooses (Meehan, 2013). This system shows how the state’s selective enforcement of water rights keeps these communities dependent on the government, allowing the government to maintain a functional and suppressive order. The notion of biopolitical control is essential to Meehan’s (2013) argument. Meehan uses Foucault’s theories to describe how the state’s influence reaches into the bodies and daily routines of these water-dependent communities, not through the elimination of water theft but through policing it as necessary. For example, water connections in Divina Providencia are primarily unattended, while similarly, in the Tijuana River Canal, state power is strictly limited in its application (Meehan, 2013). This biopolitical view parallels other instances of the infrastructure as the mechanism of control, as in surveillance and toll systems that constitute urban transit networks that, by their being infrastructure, become another instrument of state authority, striking accommodation and usage according to social and political preferences. Meehan’s (2013) view challenges the assumption that informal water networks are simply responses to state neglect. Instead, the state’s involvement, sometimes overt and sometimes subtle, shows how informal systems can become governance instruments. This perspective raises important questions: How much of informal infrastructure is determined by the state’s interests rather than by the needs of a community? While a conventional understanding of governance focuses on the formal, Meehan’s concept of the hydro-social order expands to reveal the use of informal (but very powerful for social hierarchies) systems to govern. The state assures a social and geographical order through the above water management method, using the water as a means of social control and community management. Interestingly, Meehan’s (2013) method is more complex than mainstream f...