The Spatial Politics of Urban Water in Cairo, Egypt

Water scarcity is a controversial issue in the Middle East and North Africa region (MENA). There are daily water shortages across the region and future scenarios depict water crises and riots reminiscent of the 2011 regional uprisings. My research focuses on how the management and spatial distribution of urban water has become an important site of politics and contestations in the region.

My doctoral dissertation studied the spatial politics of water in Egypt and questioned the ways in which traditional frames of water provision associated with the state is not the case in many countries. I explored the question of how water is provided and distributed on three levels.

The first is that of the global scale where donors in the MENA region traditionally promote solutions of privatising water as the answer to efficient and equitable distribution. In Egypt, for example, the World Bank and USAID were active in past decades to reform the water sector and only recently were they able to change the state's approach from water as a right, to water as a priced commodity. Some of these interventions include removing water subsidies, increasing the role of the private sector, and following a public discourse of a single official network ideal. These interventions, however, have not alleviated the systemic inequalities of water in the country.

My second scale of inquiry interrogates the state's policies and actions that unequally distribute water by prioritising some settlements for public service provision and neglecting others. I found arbitrary decision-making processes at the national scale also reflected locally by its street-level bureaucrats. For example, to implement new water tariffs, local water workers partake in governance regimes of 'guesstimating' what people's water bills should be based on wealth and legality. This arbitrary policymaking process is crucial to understand the disconnect between public policy frameworks and grounded local governance practices that do not adhere to formal regimes.

Due to an informalised top down approach, for my third level of water practices, I deconstructed how local communities mobilise and use different types of negotiations and contestations to secure water rights. I found that elites suffering from water shortages use their networks of privilege to secure free tankers from the local government. While marginalized communities, on the other hand, completely bypass the state by installing parallel pipe systems coproduced by members of the neighbourhood and in collusion with the local bureaucracy.

My doctoral research results have thus illuminated an under-explored terrain of informal water practices across scales, class and geography, and argues against local mainstream solutions for water privatisation. Building on this research in Egypt, I aim to develop my wider research program on the politics of water in the region. I will focus on questions of urban governance, water and contestation in Beirut, Lebanon. The case of water in Egypt operates in an autocratic environment, whereas Beirut represents a more fragmented and divided city, with a new set of spatial and political relations. For instance, Beirut's municipal managed infrastructure is fractured by sectarianism and state corruption, and only recently, inclusive solidarity movements have organised around water and service provision like the 'Beirut My City' movement.

This study is crucial in the MENA context because of the future shortage alerts relating to climate change and also to the fraught political situations in these countries. Global academic literature has remained disconnected and silent on the politics of water which contributed to the 2011 waves of uprising across the region and will continue to play a decisive role in the spatial politics of the region. The fellowship will allow the dissemination of my results from the Egyptian case study, as well as develop my future case study in Beirut.