Repairing urban water governance through informality: comparing governance capacities for reparation in Indian cities

Addressing water challenges in resource-constrained ‘Southern’ cities requires ‘reparation’, a transformative governance approach rooted in restorative justice. In India, formal governance often struggles to tackle social stratification and colonial legacies effectively, sometimes even reinforcing them. This study compares how informality can foster reparative transformation towards the water-sensitive city approach, further referred to as ‘water sensitivity’ in secondary cities like Bhuj and Bhopal. Our findings reveal that informal strategies foster consolidative and jugaadu (innovation within constraints) capacities, which help reveal the multifaceted nature of water problems, dismantle hierarchical power structures, promote care, and enable the improvisations crucial for reparation. However, informality also risks perpetuating existing inequalities and may overlook long-term environmental sustainability without a clear normative focus on reparation. To address this, combining informal approaches within formal regulatory frameworks mitigates the instability and lack of sustainability inherent in informality. While informal strategies provide flexibility and innovation, formal frameworks offer the necessary stability, legitimacy, and continuity, ensuring the embedding of reparative efforts in the socio-cultural fabric. In conclusion, informality is critical to reparative efforts as it facilitates the incorporation of transdisciplinary perspectives from non-experts and sustains necessary improvisations through fostering a sense of care, ultimately advancing water-sensitive governance.