Water, arroyos, and blackouts : exploring political ecologies of water and the state in Barranquilla

What does the study of local water reveal about the state? And what does the study of the state reveal about local water? This thesis explores these questions through an account of the recent history of Barranquilla, the main city of the Colombian Caribbean. The story starts in the 1980s, when major water reforms were undertaken at the local and national levels, and finishes in the start of the present decade. Today, frequent water cuts are common in underprivileged neighbourhoods and the population systematically complains about water’s high prices and frequent cuts.  I bring together scholarship from political ecology, infrastructure studies, and the anthropology of the state in order to focus on three issues: water policy reforms, water infrastructure (water supply, sanitation and drainage), and water contestations. As such, the organizing concepts of this thesis are power relations, infrastructure, and the state.  The first issue, policy reform in Barranquilla, expands on ideas about the production of water as a political process reflecting wider tensions in urban society. I contribute to literature on power relations by putting local party politics at the centre of the analysis. By electoral politics, I refer to the campaign and party dynamics that surround the elections by which people choose their representatives at regular intervals. Political ecology analyses focusing on the implementation of water policies (and the subsequent reproduction or reworking of power asymmetries), seldom portray the struggles and tensions that each policy reform entails within political parties and among professional politicians at the local level. Directives and recommendations from the World Bank and the Colombian central government converged with local electoral politics in the context of Barranquilla’s water governance reform. As such, party politics, temporary coalitions, dissidences, and electoral dynamics deeply influenced the outcome.   The second issue, water infrastructure, speaks to debates on non-human agency, materiality, and infrastructure. This thesis contributes to these debates in the following ways. I argue that it is important to recognize and analyse the entanglement between water and electricity infrastructure. In the context of southern cities, where many infrastructures are characterized by long term breakdown and poor maintenance, infrastructures tend to be deeply intertwined because if one breaks down the others will probably follow. In the case of Barranquilla, rain forms flash floods- in the absence of proper storm drains - and excess of water damages electricity’s poorly maintained infrastructure. Subsequently, electricity outages affect pumping stations causing water cuts. Being conscious of this interconnectedness, this thesis analyses the ways in which water and infrastructure’s materiality influence socio spatial developments and are a source of unpredictability.   The third issue, contestation, focuses specifically on the ways in which residents interact with local state agencies to contest existent water power asymmetries. It speaks to scholarship on anthropology, highlighting the importance of studying the state ethnographically: analysing everyday practices of local bureaucracies to see how the imaginaries of the state are forged. It also speaks to political ecological approaches that analyse the way in which, through everyday practices, the state is consolidated and constituted in relation to nature and infrastructure. The thesis contributes to these debates by studying the everyday practices of intermediaries between the state and marginalized communities. That is, of a group of people whose work is to build bridges between state bureaucracies and local neighbours, in the contestation of water and electricity allocation policies. With this the thesis aims to explore the regulatory ground in which everyday contestation stands.

Keyphrases: Eau, Flashfloods, Infrastructure, Water, Electricity, Power relations, State, Colombia