European Conference of Africa Studies

Beskrivelse

Disciplinary stream: Urban studies
Thematic stream: Sustainability

Title: Sustainable wastewater challenges in urban Africa: social and material entanglements and constructions

Short abstract: 300 characters:
This panel investigates how African government’s solutions are influenced by global North paradigms, and how, in the process, context specific struggles and opportunities are created that challenge and change local politics and social organization.


Long Abstract: max 250 words:
Urban Africa faces no shortage of challenges related to wastewater governance. Similarly, there is no shortage of developmental plans, typically influenced by Global north trajectories, of how to solve the critical infrastructural shortcomings. Such designs include ‘travelling models’, ‘developmental paradigms’ and ‘one size fits all’ processes. These endeavor to upend embedded and opposing political economies, improve ‘ineffective’ political organization, and subsequently affect local political contexts of opportunity, struggle, and power. For better and worse, the envisaged and implemented ‘solutions’ challenge and change power relations and produce and reshape discourses and understandings of progress. In this optic, both envisaged and implemented infrastructural projects with ideas of improved public service provision produce and reshape institutional developmental trajectories whilst cutting off others. Existing options are bartered as new opportunities are garnered and as new challenges arise. Accordingly, this panel welcomes critical perspectives from anthropology, political economy, urban geography, and political ecology on processes of wastewater governance in urban Africa, which explore ambiguities of increasing Global north and Global south interconnectedness, and the implications and consequences for government institutions and the urban citizenry. Conceptually, the panel seeks to address how such entanglements and ambiguities impinge on urban citizenship and sense of belonging, together with local experiences of recognition, representation, and accountability. Institutionally, the panel is interested in how the production of new knowledge, discourses of betterment, socio-tech transitions, and the making of global partnerships impact the legitimacy, effectiveness, politics, and governance of the urban local governments mandated to manage wastewater sustainably.

Periode	25 jun. 2025
Begivenhedstype	Konference
Placering	Prague, TjekkietVis på kort
Grad af anerkendelse	International