Repairing urban water governance: Capacities to enable reparation by leveraging informality to achieve water sensitive governance in India

Indian cities, particularly secondary cities, face persistent water governance challenges shaped by rapid urbanisation, infrastructural deficits, and socio-political inequities. These challenges manifest in water scarcity, contamination, and flooding, exacerbated by governance structures that favour top-down, technocratic, and compartmentalised approaches. Despite the proliferation of policy frameworks advocating integrated water management, urban governance remains largely entrenched in hierarchical structures that prioritise infrastructural solutions over systemic and inclusive transformation. Consequently, a persistent gap exists between policy aspirations and on-the-ground realities, particularly in cities with limited governance capacity and financial resources.

This thesis explores reparative governance as a transformative approach to addressing these governance challenges. Reparative governance is conceptualised as a form of transformative governance that explicitly engages with historical injustices and socio-political inequities embedded in colonial-era infrastructures and institutions. These injustices continue to shape access to water resources, reinforcing vulnerabilities that conventional governance approaches fail to address. By integrating principles of restorative justice, reparative governance seeks to rectify historical disparities while fostering more equitable, inclusive, and context-sensitive transformations in urban water governance. Without such an approach, efforts towards water-sensitive governance risk being superficial, perpetuating existing exclusionary structures rather than meaningfully addressing socio-political inequities.

A central focus of this research is the role of informality in shaping water governance in secondary Indian cities. Informal governance arrangements often emerge as pragmatic responses to formal governance deficits, facilitating service provision, resource mobilisation, and the negotiation of authority. Rather than existing in isolation, informality interacts with formal governance structures, forming hybrid governance systems that influence access to water and decision-making processes. This thesis examines how the capacities of reparative governance can be used to analyse the role of informality in shaping water governance in Indian secondary cities.

This research is guided by the question: To what extent, and in what ways, can informality contribute to the development of governance capacities that facilitate reparation towards water sensitivity in secondary Indian cities?

Findings reveal that informal strategies foster consolidative and jugaadu (innovation within constraints) capacities, which help expose the multifaceted nature of water governance challenges, dismantle hierarchical power structures, promote care, and enable the improvisations crucial for reparative governance. However, informality also carries the risk of reinforcing existing inequalities and may fail to ensure long-term environmental sustainability if it lacks a clear normative orientation towards reparation. To address these limitations, this study argues for an approach that integrates informal strategies within formal regulatory frameworks. While informal governance provides flexibility and innovation, formal structures offer stability, legitimacy, and continuity—ensuring that reparative efforts are synchronised within the socio-cultural fabric.

In conclusion, informality plays a critical role in advancing reparative water governance by incorporating transdisciplinary perspectives from non-experts, fostering a sense of care, and enabling necessary improvisations. By balancing informal and formal governance mechanisms, cities can progress towards more just and water-sensitive governance systems that address both historical injustices and contemporary urban water challenges.