Hybrid drinking water governance: Community participation and ongoing neoliberal reforms in rural Rajasthan,India

This paper examines a Rajasthan (India) drinking water supply project that relied on hybrid governance reforms in its original design. Decentralization and marketization, combined with a participatory approach, were intended to facilitate an empowering shift in state-citizen relationships. Paying citizens were expected to make quantity and quality demands of the state as consumers, not welfare beneficiaries. Research on the project 3 years after its completion revealed that although payment for water and community participation were intended to compel the state to provide clean water, they failed in this regard. The problem of an unreliable state supply was solved through small scale privatization, a decision ‘independently’ reached at the local scale, but one that served to further undermine the state’s ability to provide clean water.In this paper, we trace the shifts in regulation that evolved in the post-project phase at both the state and village scale that resulted in the delivery of contaminated water. Ethnographic research indicates that community participation was introduced as a set of institutions that would govern how villagers interacted with the state and its water supply, but villagers altered community participation by introducing reforms in water governance as a way of coping with an unresponsive state and increased work burden. Community participation evolved in contradictory ways as the impacts of neoliberal environmental governance were felt. The paper contributes to understandings of neoliberalization processes’ local impacts by analyzing their ongoing hybridization at multiple scales. It further calls into question foundational notions that community participation in resource governance is the appropriate solution to drinking water supply.