Abstract

Susanna Ghosh Mitra looks into the ways power is negotiated and resisted within cities in India in the context of piped drinking water supply. Taking a World Bank-funded water privatization project in Hubli–Dharwar as a case study, she critically examines the regional- and local-level power dynamics underlying urban water management. The study uses the methodology of a discursive approach to policy processes and identifies the specific contexts in which power and politics is operating, together with the related discourses and representations of the environment through which people communicate. By seeing policy as a discourse, analytical attention is turned to the webs of power underlying the practices of different actors in the policy process.