Conclusion
In June 2019, Chennai gained global notoriety as its major reservoirs were depleted by an extended drought, and international media narratives fed on the spectacle of one of India’s major metropolitan cities going dry. Local opposition party politicians mobilized protests, and trains brought in emergency water. Inequalities embedded in access to water resources through private markets were brought to the surface, and more-nuanced stories of the crisis pointed to deeper problems with urban development and governance. The crisis even overwhelmed more-privileged water consumers, who had usually been able to maintain access to water through private markets. As businesses and industries struggled to deal with the crisis, they began to face the structural strains on water that have been intensified by urbanization and development in the postliberalization period.1
If the 2019 drought brought to the fore the strains on urban governance in periods of water scarcity and the deeper relations of extraction with rural areas (as the supply of groundwater to the city was intensified), the monsoon season of the preceding year laid bare a competing set of pressures on the governance of water in Tamil Nadu and its neighboring states in southern India. The generous rains in 2018 produced surplus water that filled the Cauvery’s catchment areas and Tamil Nadu’s Mettur Dam, which supplies water for the state’s agricultural areas. The bounty of surplus waters produced a season of relief from the tense standoff between Tamil Nadu and Karnataka over the sharing of the Cauvery waters. With the dam’s water level reaching its full capacity for the first time after five years, an “exultant” chief engineer of the PWD’s Water Resources Organisation indicated that all of the excess water was being let out for irrigation.2 Meanwhile, exuberant reports on the monsoon’s gift also noted that water from the Mettur Dam would reach Veeranam Lake, which had been harnessed to provide water supplies for Chennai.
Within a few weeks, the promise of the euphoric media narratives began to give way to the fissures of the political, economic, and institutional challenges that have constrained the governance of water. The lack of proper institutional maintenance of water bodies in the area (for instance through desilting, a responsibility of the PWD) meant that the water bodies had not been filled by the surplus Cauvery waters.3 Farmers argued that illegal sand mining was playing a significant role in preventing the replenishment of water bodies.4 While these institutional failures became mired in the politicization of water management, with charges and countercharges by the opposition and ruling political party, the heavy monsoons soon set into motion the too-familiar oscillation between the perils of scarcity and floods. While areas in the vicinity of the Cauvery were soon overwhelmed by flood warnings, unprecedented floods in neighboring Kerala overwhelmed the state and once again, reigniting the Mullaperiyar Dam conflict. Meanwhile, within days of simultaneous stories of flooded areas in various districts of Tamil Nadu, reports surfaced that Metrowater had begun plans to tap groundwater again to meet dwindling water supplies for Chennai. While scanty rains in the city were reported as the source of dwindling supplies, the oscillating stories of floods and drought highlight the deeper, systemic factors that have obstructed the effective management of water resources and that lie beneath media stories of reservoirs going dry. The workings of institutions, in both their mundane and weighty forms, do not have the glamor of stories of crisis or the poetic flavor of stories of subaltern communities. Yet they are the heart of democratic governance and are a crucial site for understanding how inequalities are produced and reproduced.
The governance of water both illuminates the nature of state power and has itself been shaped by the remaking of the state in postliberalization India. The nature of water is such that it crosses the borders of territorialized administrative structures, the categorical separation of various sectors of the economy (such as industry and agriculture), the distinctions between instrumentalist uses of a natural resource for the economy and the human needs for life and survival, the spatial distinctions between localities (such as cities and villages), and the temporal divisions of historical periods (of colonialism, twentieth-century developmentalism, and twenty-first-century reforms).
The significance of water for both specific economic uses and the universal needs of human life means that the governance of water brings to the fore the underlying contradictions, power relations, and contestations that are embedded in democratic institutions. The question of the governance of water is also both a distinctive and an archetypal case for a broader understanding of the liberalizing state. In contrast to the methodological biases that stem from analyses of particular sectors of the economy (for instance new economy sectors such as informational technology or pharmaceuticals), water cuts across all sectors of the economy. Policies of liberalization are transforming the governance of water, and the governance of water is fundamentally intertwined with and illustrates the nature of the remaking of the political economy of the liberalizing state.
While the era of economic liberalization is conventionally associated with the principles of decentralization and privatization, such principles are embedded in broader institutional and policy frameworks that consolidate and intensify centralized state power. This form of centralized state power has both built on earlier forms of centralized state authority associated with the colonial and developmental state and set into motion new forms of centralized authority that are distinctive to the postreform era. As we have seen, such forms of authority are concentrated within city-centric modes of urban governance. These forms of centralized authority both reproduce and intensify inequalities between and within metropolitan city centers on the one hand and small towns and rural areas on the other hand. This account of the city of Chennai is in fact an account of broader local, regional, and national socioeconomic relationships that are unfolding in the context of global ideational and policy approaches to water.
An adequate understanding of the nature of this centralized state authority necessitates a conceptual shift in conventional studies of reform policies in India. The two bedrock principles of reform that have broadly governed India’s project of liberalization since the 1990s are privatization and decentralization. Such principles, which have been entrenched in public rhetoric, institutional frameworks, and economic policies across various sectors, contain within them a presumption of a shift in the role of the state. In an idealized scenario, this shift would be encapsulated as one in which the Indian state transitions from the command-oriented developmental state to a regulatory state that facilitates rather than controls economic activities. The case of water reforms has instead shed light on a set of contradictory processes in which policies of reform have reoriented as well as continued and intensified long-standing practices and modes of centralized state power.
The point at hand is not that decentralization and privatization are not important or significant processes that have been taking root in contemporary India. However, the persistence and consolidation of centralized authority is not purely an aberrant legacy of the older model of India’s command state or a byproduct of a corrupt bureaucracy. Rather, the dynamics of state centralization are an inherent framework of the postliberalization model of development that has become dominant in the twenty-first century. Exceptionalist arguments that posit that reforms that are designed to decentralize state authority in India are obstructed purely by the conditions of India’s political or institutional fields do not account for the ways in which institutional and economic reforms in fact produce the very frameworks and configurations of concentrated state authority that such reforms purport to transform.
Institutional reforms designed to scale back the role of the state through processes of decentralization and the participation of private sector actors have in fact produced a redistribution of centralized institutional power rather than a shift from centralized to decentralized state governance. An adequate understanding of this kind of remaking of the postliberalization state through the redistribution of institutional power has necessitated an analytical framework that develops a more nuanced understanding of the workings of bureaucratic organizations. From such a perspective, processes of reform can be understood in the ways in which they redistribute power and resources both within the bureaucratic field and within civil society. At one level, such an approach provides the conceptual space to address the complex relationships between the state and civil society that shape the orientation and effects of bureaucratic institutions (Evans and Heller 2015). At another level, such an approach provides the analytical space for an understanding of the ways in which policies of reform can produce new forms of centralization within some arenas of the institutional field of the water bureaucracy, even as they weaken or curtail the authority of other institutional sites. Inequalities are both produced and intensified by such institutional reforms. The redistribution of institutional power, for instance, intensifies the power of wealthier communities in metropolitan cities while producing weaker governing bodies in rural locales and small towns. Regulatory reform, in the process, is transformed into a form of regulatory extraction. The resurgence of state authority in ways that are both familiar extensions of historical legacies and new attributes of a liberalizing state raises the question of where the role of private capital lies in this remaking of the state.
Governance and the Debate on Privatization
In recent years, critics of economic reforms have called attention to the problems of “neoliberalism” and the political and economic power of private capital. Indeed, the centrality of private capital is built into the focus on economic reforms. However, critics of neoliberalism have often underestimated the role of the state (Fernandes 2018a). The centrality of the state has been intensified by the shift from the 1980s Washington Consensus, which emphasized the retreat of the government, to the post–Washington Consensus, which has recentered the state in global models of institutional reform. The arguments of this book thus have crucial insights for comparative contexts. As we have seen, the state remains the central actor in shaping the distribution of resources, and processes of privatization have been woven into the remaking of the liberalizing state. Take, for example, the World Bank’s broader shift toward ensuring that its financial investments are carefully structured within clear frameworks of state governmental institutions and accountability.
Processes of privatization mirror the dynamics of centralization and decentralization—they have left sites of centralized state power intact while targeting weaker sites, such as ULBs, for programs of privatization. In the case of Chennai, for example, privatization has largely kept in place the centralized authority of bureaucratic organizations such as Metrowater and the Public Works Department. In keeping with national trends, the systemic processes of privatization that have taken place have focused primarily on institutional restructuring that has downsized workforces and increased the use of subcontracting. Furthermore, as the Chennai case illustrates, privatization does not necessarily weaken or displace centralized state authority. Such dynamics raise the question of what form privatization takes. For instance, as journalist Nagesh Prabhu has noted in the case of the controversy over the attempted privatization of the Delhi Jal [water] Board, “Assets, staff, revenues, and tariff-setting” would have remained under governmental control (2017, 267). The point of relevance for our purposes is not an ideological one on the pros and cons of privatization but a substantive and analytical one. State authority is reconsolidated by privatization.
We have seen that institutional and economic reforms have not undermined but have redistributed institutional power. This disaggregation of the state is necessary to adequately understand how the relationship between the state and private capital plays out within particular sites and sectors of the economy. Scholars have now long since been preoccupied with the contested nature of the boundary between the state and civil society. The questions of power and inequality that such scholars are contending with requires a deeper understanding of the boundaries within the state, which are codified through institutional structures. A relational perspective on institutions allows us to ask and understand the ways in which the ascendency and decline of particular institutions both reflect and produce inequalities and relationships of power. Modes of governance in this context become a central means for the systemic reproduction of inequalities within and between various locales.
Consider, for instance, one of the central ways in which privatization has taken root in Chennai. Privatization has often been a consequence of a retreat of the state due to incapacities or willful action rather than to conscious policies of privatization. The failure of the state to provide services and to develop effective regulatory frameworks of governance has in such cases provided a space that has subsequently been occupied by private actors, privatized practices, and illegal informal networks and organizations. As we have seen in the case of the emergence of private water markets in and around Chennai, such water markets are the product of both state incapacities (such as the expansion of the water tanker and water bottle industry in the face of inadequate water supplies) and state intervention (such as the state’s promotion of groundwater extraction to compensate for the absence of water resources in times of drought).
This does not of course mean that the direct impact of private companies on water resources is not significant. High-profile social movements have, for instance, successfully targeted private companies for the damage they have caused to both water resources and the livelihoods of poor communities. The high-profile case of local tribal and rural grassroots protests successfully pressuring Coca-Cola to close its factory in Kerala is a well-known example of such movements.5 The movement that sought to combat both the depletion of water resources through the extraction of groundwater and pollution caused by the company’s operations represents one of the most visible examples of the direct negative effects of private corporations. In Tamil Nadu, a major protest movement against Vedanta’s Sterlite Copper plant because of widespread pollution and health issues was successful in pressuring the Tamil Nadu government to close the plant.6 In these high-profile cases, the question of state authority remained a foundational element, as protestors and civil society organizations had to pressure governmental officials and work through the various levels of the court system. In the Vedanta case, the impact of centralized state authority was profoundly demonstrated in police shootings of protestors. Such severe examples underline the importance of understanding how the state is acting or not acting in its governance of water. These examples of securitized state action are not isolated excesses—they are on one end of a continuum of the range of centralized actions of the postliberalization state. The nature of centralized state authority is a topic that is rich with questions for future research about democratic accountability that are of relevance to the myriad issues, conflicts, and concerns that make up the field of water governance.
Governing Water and the Question of Bureaucrats
In the midst of these serious challenges for the governance of water, there is perhaps no more reviled and caricatured figure in contemporary India (and in comparative contexts) than the bureaucrat. The weight of corruption and the inability of local bureaucracies to maintain infrastructural services are very real and heavy burdens on citizens. Indeed, local water bureaucracies and utilities such as the PWD and Metrowater are themselves publicly distrusted institutions. Yet, as we have seen in this volume, a close reading of documents and interviews with bureaucrats yields a more nuanced picture of bureaucrats and the agency that they do—or do not—exert.
Historical and sociological dimensions of institutional practice reflect the broad patterns of institutional practice and the macro structures that condition and constrain such practices in the water bureaucracy. Within the contours of these bureaucratic fields, state employees must negotiate the formal institutional rules, informal cultures, and political dynamics of their organizations. A move away from a focus on a generalized, static form of corruption is needed not because corruption is not real and an often overwhelming part of both everyday and institutional life in India. However, a singular focus on corruption prevents us from gaining a deeper understanding of what is and is not working within state bureaucracies. Public institutions matter within the framework of a democratic polity, and it is as crucial to understand the spaces in which bureaucrats are trying to effectively perform their duties as it is to draw attention to dysfunctional or corrupt practices. This book has thus sought to create the analytical space for a more nuanced understanding of bureaucratic agency, which can delineate when bureaucrats and their organizations are constrained by the structural limitations of their political and economic environments, when they are engaging in corrupt practices and when they are attempting to navigate complex institutional fields in order to perform their regulatory duties.
What emerges is not an image of the bureaucracy that is free of corruption and inefficiency but one in which there are strong pressures from political, economic, and internal organizational constraints that deter or suppress the actions and insights of those bureaucrats who are indeed committed to their professional and institutional duties. A more complex conception of bureaucratic agency exceeds conventional accounts of corrupt, inefficient, or rational actor typologies. The more expansive discussion of bureaucratic agency has included examples of local bureaucratic agency that has enhanced interstate cooperation and attempted to carry out regulatory functions. A fuller understanding of bureaucrats also takes into account the question of ethical agency, which is often not associated with the figure of the bureaucrat.
The question of ethics does not of course in itself preclude deep-seated problems associated with the exercise of state power. The realm of ethics is a field that encodes relationships of power and ideological predispositions. Bureaucracies, as many scholars have shown, are enmeshed in the modernist ideologies that are associated with the dominant ideals of nation-states. Nevertheless, the case of Mohanakrishnan provides a more nuanced sense of the complex subjectivity of bureaucrats. Bureaucracies are, after all, still largely understood at best in Weberian terms of rationality or efficiency or at worst as institutions of organized indifference (Herzfeld 1992). Opening up the analytical space for an understanding of the affective dimensions that shape the subjectivity of bureaucrats and the potential for ethical agency is a crucial dimension of the question of governance.
Critics of development and, more recently, of neoliberalism often rightly point to the problematic reification of technical and professional “expertise” (Laurie and Bondi 2005). However, global challenges such as climate change and health pandemics remind us of the critical need for accountable and inclusive models of governance. The scale of such crises also means that responses also require a scale of governance that cannot simply be delegated to local, decentralized organizations.
In the case of the politics of water, the likely threat that floods and drought due to climate change are accelerated and that environmentally unsound urban development will intensify and expand in scale means that governmental responses will also need to operate in systemic ways. Such responses of course need to be shaped by the knowledge and needs of local communities. However, the romanticization of local grassroots approaches can itself operate as an offshoot of the neoliberal imaginary (Hall and Lamont 2013).
Governance, then, cannot effectively work without developing the means for reforming bureaucracies and opening up the institutional and political space for bureaucrats who do bring with them a sense of personal ethics. This space is foreclosed because of the ways in which graft and patronage become part of the internal reward structure of bureaucracies and the internal, informal punitive structure of organizations that marginalize or penalize those employees who do not consent to the patronage politics of institutional cultures. Not surprisingly, such structures produce ineffective governance. This is compounded by the very reform processes that have led to cutbacks on the bureaucratic workforces—cutbacks that are made as these workforces must manage the expanding consumer demands that strain water resources and infrastructure. As my research has noted, to revisit one small example, the water bureaucracies in Tamil Nadu do not have the labor power to consistently monitor water bodies and infrastructure in the state. The deteriorating state of water bodies then comes to the fore during crises of floods or droughts. If public institutions are to effectively work as public institutions that are not slanted toward networks of patronage or constituencies with political and socioeconomic power, debates on governance will need more-sustained analyses and approaches to public employees of such institutions.
The Comparative Implications of India’s Water Reforms
The remaking of state authority through reforms in India’s water institutions holds important implications for our understanding of global trends in the governance of water. One of the biggest challenges for water governance is the impact of urbanization. In the first global survey of water sources for large cities, McDonald et al. estimate that “one in four cities, containing $4.8 ± 0.7 trillion in economic activity, remain water stressed” (2014, 96). Given the economic and political power of cities, urban governance also remains a critical site for the concentration of state authority in comparative contexts. This nexus means that the governance of water will remain both a fraught site as urbanization places new stresses on water resources and a key arena for the exercise of state authority. Indeed, Tamil Nadu’s complex interstate water negotiations and disputes are illustrative of a broader comparative pattern of political contestations over shared river basins (Moore 2018). Understanding how states manage this nexus of urbanization and water stress is of broad import in a globalizing world that continues to advance economic policies that expand urbanization in the Global South and deepen the potential stresses on water resources.
Contemporary processes of urbanization and their corresponding stresses on water must be contextualized in an expansive temporal and spatial framework. Both the modes of governance and the challenges that states face are shaped in complex ways by the historically produced political-economic structures that shape and constrain water bureaucracies. In the case of postcolonial contexts, such historical processes are shaped in distinctive ways by the historical legacies of both the colonial state and the developmental agendas of the postcolonial state. Urban governance is fundamentally enmeshed in rural-urban, regional and national, and political and economic processes. The story of the city, from this perspective, must be understood as a reconfiguration of power across and within these spatial scales.
Most significantly, these temporal and spatialized complexities call for ongoing research agendas that address the underlying connections between institutions tasked with the management of water resources at various spatial sites and scales. One of the major global trends in recent years has been the shift to policies and principles of governance based on the model of integrated water management. Indeed, the promotion of ideals of water management through integrated approaches that address the complex configurations of land, resources, and environmental sustainability are worthy goals. However, as the case of India’s water institutions has illustrated, the governance of water is compartmentalized through discrete and often competing institutions, and these institutional silos mirror the presumed territorialized divisions between cities, towns, and villages and between local and central governmental institutions. Institutional reforms, in this context, are both shaped by and are the means for the production of underlying reconfigurations of power and inequality. Further work is needed to develop integrated institutional analyses in comparative contexts that can grapple with the relational power-laden dynamics of institutions tasked with the governance of water. Such a relational understanding is particularly crucial for scholars and practitioners who are concerned with questions of inequality and the water needs of poorer urban and rural communities. Such a perspective, for instance, asks how models of decentralized governance may inadvertently be part of a set of institutional mechanisms that are consolidating centralized state authority over water. An analysis of this relational institutional field does not seek to dismiss the value and significance of community-based models of governance. On the contrary, it is of particular import for advocates of decentralized or community-based governance to grapple with the implications of differential forms of institutional power.
At the broadest level, this unsettling of the institutional silos of governance also calls for an unsettling of the demarcation between state institutions tasked with economic reforms and development on the one hand and those tasked with the governance of water on the other. The current strains on water governance stem from a structural and institutional disjuncture within the policies of reform that nation-states such as India have been implementing. Institutional reforms of water governance have been treated as a closed system that is demarcated from policies of investment, land use, and urban development that are fundamentally intertwined with the governance of water. This kind of institutional segregation produces a profound contradiction for water bureaucracies that cannot be explained away by conventional accounts of corruption and inefficiency. In the Global South, where economic pressures drive competition for private investment and where urbanization is a natural corollary of economic growth, the underlying structural stresses on water will continue to place such strains on governance.
Water Governance and the Crises of Climate Change and Global Inequality
The governance of water is now facing major global crises of climate change and global inequality. The arguments and research of this book have important implications for these pressing global challenges. On the one hand, we have seen the ways in which institutions play a critical role in the reproduction of inequality and the creation of mechanisms of extraction that produce new inequities of access to water. On the other hand, climate change has already begun to intensify cycles of droughts and floods. These twin crises also, of course, intersect, as the impact of climate change has acute effects on marginalized communities and poorer countries. Governments and international organizations are focused on needed macro policy responses. Meanwhile, grassroots communities struggle to foreground critical questions of environmental justice.
This book illustrates that both the problems of and solutions for climate change require a deeper understanding of the mechanics of state bureaucracies. The mechanics of governance on the ground, as we have seen, are a long distance from idealized global policy models and norms. Global policy models (as with the case of models of institutional reform) are often developed in abstracted forms, without an understanding of the local and national political, social, and institutional contexts and constraints in particular places. Yet such policies are implemented by local bureaucrats within local institutions. Moreover, the scale of problems associated with climate change requires broader forms of effective and accountable governance.
Finally, one of the critical implications of this book is the need to recenter the role of global models of economic reform in the exacerbation of global challenges of climate change. As we have seen, the challenges of governing water in India are rooted in the long-term effects of successive models of development by the colonial, developmental, and postliberalization state. In global policy and public discourses, there is often a decoupling of the discussions of growth-oriented economic reforms on the one hand and climate change on the other. However, as we have seen, intense forms of water scarcity and problems of flooding have been intensified and often caused by unplanned urbanization, which is in turn directly produced by the dominant model of economic reforms. Responses to climate change and the environment will remain inadequate if they do not simultaneously rethink dominant global economic policies. As we have seen, local water bureaucrats struggle to manage resources because urban planning (shaped by private investment) is placed in a different institutional silo. Water bureaucrats are in effect tasked with managing a situation in which they have no authority over the causes of water scarcity. This is a microcosm of the institutional siloing of global economic policies of reform on the one hand and global institutions focused on climate change and the environment on the other.
Water compels us to confront the complex historically produced configurations of state power, politics, land, infrastructure, developmental and economic policies, and human life. Such complexities that shape the governance of water are particularly fraught in the context of climate change. This book cautions us that the scale and potentially catastrophic effects of climate change paradoxically require us to turn away from the spectacle of such effects to the everyday, mundane practices of organizations and institutions that implement policies on the ground. The book’s analysis of such institutional practices—steeped in the weight of historical, political, and social contexts of particular places—also caution us to move away from sanitized policy responses and modular social science approaches, which are too often dissociated from the everyday realities of governance. The challenges of governing water call on us to think about the kinds of located, effective institutional responses that are critical in these times of change and crisis.