The Lived Experiences of Water Insecurity: Spatial Narratives from the Kathmandu Valley, Nepal

Abstract

According to the United Nations, around 2.1 billion people lack access to safely managed drinking water services. In Nepal’s Kathmandu Valley, domestic water insecurity is persistent and widespread as households often struggle to access enough clean water. Without the ability to trust and rely on basic services, like piped water provision, urban residents take on heavy burdens to care for their households and larger communities. In addition to understanding these burdens, questions remain as to how people in their daily lives make sense of and respond to the insecurities of development. This dissertation examines the spatial narratives of water insecurity in the Kathmandu Valley’s city of Patan. By following water relations between households and institutions which shape everyday life in Patan, this dissertation reveals socio-spatial conditions which reproduce and transform experiences of (in)security. This dissertation makes four contributions to critical development geography.

First, I developed and piloted a story-mapping technique as a relational means of attending to ethnographies of water security and development. Story-mapping frames research as narrative-building and employs geovisual tools to craft spatial narratives. If political ecology is a form of narrative, then story-mapping supplies a means of attending to construction, representation, and analysis of narrative. Second, I advance a capabilities approach for political ecology to argue that the abilities of households to address water insecurities rests on spatial, technological, and social freedoms. I develop a framework around these freedoms to reveal the ways power relations within and between households negotiate water security. Third, while households are sites of exploitation in the larger urban political economy, I show how the social infrastructures of households work for life in ways which both sustain and transform the social and material fabric of the city. Fourth, I humanize political ecologies of security to find that regardless of a household’s ability to be water secure, the feeling of insecurity is pervasive because of moral imaginaries about water and development. By eliciting these socio-spatial relations of water and development, this dissertation innovates spatial narrative as a tool and heuristic for performing geographic research and building theory.

This dissertation includes previously published co-authored material.