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Open research questions in Water Governance and Infrastructure

39 unresolved questions extracted from the limitations and future-work sections of 1,956 Water Governance and Infrastructure papers in our library. Each links back to the study that raised it.

What the literature leaves open

  • Future research could examine how sacred and feminised ecologies are co-opted across varied religious and cultural scenarios in other Himalayan regions such as Nepal, Bhutan, Ladakh, and how such communities negotiate and resist the spiritual green- washing in their ongoing struggles for land and livelihood.

    Between utopia and precarity: subsistence labour as embodied technology in Indian ecological documentaries · 2026 · DOI

  • As India is releasing its third National Water Policy in the last 20 years, this paper seeks to review the earlier policies relevant to a critical yet under-studied surface water ecosystem of rural community ponds.

    Commons, communities and commodification: a review of reforms in land, water and local democracy in Kerala, India · 2022 · DOI

  • Despite annual waterborne disease outbreaks in the nation's peri-urban (slum) settlements being linked to poor WASH, few studies have proactively analysed and conceptualised peri-urban WASH and its maintaining factors.

    Peri-urban water, sanitation and hygiene in Lusaka, Zambia: photovoice empowering local assessment via ecological theory · 2021 · DOI

  • Taking its departure in the story of a poverty-stricken woman long employed as a caretaker by a mysterious organization allegedly in charge of Power Plant #5, this article explores the peculiar dynamics by which lacking knowledge about this and other infrastructural projects in contemporary Mongolia feeds into dispossessed people’s dreams about and plans for the future.

    The Vanishing Power Plant · 2017 · DOI

  • Abstract While researchers in the growing field of urban political ecology have given significant attention to the fragmented hydroscape that characterizes access to drinking water in the global South, so far the (re)production of other urban waters and its related power relations have been underexplored.

    Ponds, Power and Institutions: The Everyday Governance of Accessing Urban Water Bodies in a Small Bengali City · 2016 · DOI

  • The global sanitation crisis is rapidly urbanizing, but how is sanitation produced and sustained in informal settlements? While there are data available on aggregate statistics, relatively little is known about how sanitation is created, maintained, threatened, and contested within informal settlements.

    Informal Urban Sanitation: Everyday Life, Poverty, and Comparison · 2014 · DOI

  • Additionally, my examination of alcohol calls attention to aspects of sociomateriality which are widely relevant but underexplored in the literature: the role of friction in shaping flows; the need to examine microscale impacts of sociomateriality on the body and community; and the conditional impacts of complex, unpredictable sociomaterial hybrids.

    Flows, Friction and the Sociomaterial Metabolization of Alcohol · 2012 · DOI

  • Much good work has already been carried out in this direction, but even more remains to be done. periods of several days in which it is insufficient to raise a useful quantity of water, thus Gausing great hardship to the people and stock dependent installations can on the supply; usually two hand-pump bore-hole be fitted for the cost of one windmill and tank installation, and they are generally preferable.

    Rural Water Supplies in Africa · 1946 · DOI

  • Women shoulder the majority of water collection labor globally, yet how their water collection and water-related work experiences may change over time or by water source type remains insufficiently understood.

    Seasonality, source type, and women's water labor: A longitudinal mixed-methods study in Kenya and Honduras · 2026 · DOI

  • Future research could examine how these broader structures intersect with the kinds of everyday experience described here, and whether similar spatial conditions produce different relationships in other parts of the city.

    Facing the Lake: Attention, Attachment and Everyday Life on Chicago's Lakefront · 2026 · DOI

  • The study concludes that legal instruments alone are insufficient without the strong institutions, technology-driven monitoring, public engagement, insulated enforcement, citizen participation as well as independent audits.

    THE LEGAL ARCHITECTURE FOR SAFEGUARDING WATERWAYS IN KPK: A CRITICAL APPRAISAL OF BUILDING CONTROL AND ANTI-ENCROACHMENT STATUTES · 2025 · DOI

  • Urban scholars have pushed back against modernist notions of the networked city as the teleological end of infrastructure, yet there remains uncertainty and debate over how to make sense of infrastructure’s temporality.

    Infrastructure in formation: the politics and practices of making progress with infrastructure · 2024 · DOI

  • Abstract A range of innovative off‐grid sanitation technologies have been developed and deployed to improve sanitation in cities where networked sanitation by publicly managed sewers is insufficient.

    Navigating heterogeneous sanitation configurations: How off‐grid technologies work and are reworked by urban residents · 2023 · DOI

  • Examining understudied municipal water projects in Jaffa and Nablus, two chief centers of light industry in the late Ottoman and Mandate eras, this paper provides an analysis of the historical relationship between urban governance and urban infrastructures in modern Palestine.

    “The Pit and the Pond”: Hydraulic Projects and Municipal Rights in Modern Palestine · 2022 · DOI

  • However, little is known about how these practices and governance arrangement shape water access in terms of distance of water sources, reliability, affordability and water quality.

    Between self-help and emerging water markets: self-governance, everyday practices and the spatiality of water access in Dar es Salaam · 2022 · DOI

  • This calculative management of the flows of waste—here termed the logistics of waste—is a critical yet understudied way engineering sustains the accumulation of capital and limits popular resistance to elite‐led projects of endless growth.

    The Logistics of Waste: Engineering, Capital Accumulation, and the Growth of Mexico City · 2022 · DOI

  • The paper finds that federal and state governments have worked to address the water problem with legislation and by establishing different water bodies; however, a permanent policy is lacking.

    Interstate Water Politics: An Analysis of Indian Case Water Governance in India · 2020 · DOI

  • Private water wells and municipal water supplies function as different systems of water provision, creating distinct—but understudied—patterns of water consumption.

    Hydrologic Habitus · 2020 · DOI

  • We argue that though water and sanitation infrastructure is a significant contributor to addressing inequities in the border region, much remains to be done to achieve water justice in this challenging region.

    Water Matters: Water Insecurity and Inadequate Sanitation in the U.S./Mexico Border Region · 2018 · DOI

  • These steps should be further investigated in action-oriented research programmes with local experts, and targeted to policy processes and human behaviour in the sinking deltas.

    Sinking deltas: trapped in a dual lock-in of technology and institutions · 2017 · DOI

  • Despite a proliferation of programs and policies aimed at promoting local resource management, we still have limited knowledge of the conditions under which state interventions can be a supportive force in everyday aspects of common pool resource governance.

    Harnessing the State: Social Transformation, Infrastructural Development, and the Changing Governance of Water Systems in the Kangra District of the Indian Himalayas · 2016 · DOI

  • In an island nation where freshwater resources are scarce, contaminated, and a significant political and social concern, I demonstrate that people still struggle with and contest the moral dimensions of water technologies.

    The Affects of Water—The Materialized Morality of Wells, Pipes, and Pumps in Tarawa, Kiribati · 2016 · DOI

  • While a continued robust civil society is promising, it remains a concern that despite the rise procedural forms of justice, recognitional justice remains elusive for the Kayapó.

    Water and life: hydroelectric development and indigenous pathways to justice in the Brazilian Amazon · 2015 · DOI

  • I show that these policies to ensure participation have had uneven impacts, and Kayapó strategies rooted in identity politics have had mixed results in achieving desired goals for justice.

    Water and life: hydroelectric development and indigenous pathways to justice in the Brazilian Amazon · 2015 · DOI

  • This period of shallow growth is characterized by phenomena that have gone largely understudied: direct negotiation between private firms and cities, the greater role of domestic firms, privatization by coproduction, and a new geography.

    Beyond the Strategic Retreat? Explaining Urban Water Privatization’s Shallow Expansion in Low- and Middle-income Countries · 2014 · DOI

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39 open questions have been extracted from the limitations and future-work passages of 1,956 Water Governance and Infrastructure papers in our library. Each one below links back to the study that raised it, so you can read the original claim in context.

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