Abstract
This article analyzes political practices shaping water usage in the Mexico City region. Based on four different case studies, it reflects on the role of intermediaries in the state restructuring process. The cases explore political negotiation over the use of water in contexts of shortage or abundance, clean potable water, or waste water. The article illustrates how the use of natural resources affects the state’s role and how it reconfigures citizen participation. It compares traditional political mechanisms such as clientelism or electoral promotion, with emergent informal practices such as the multiplication of intermediaries who distribute water privately, but are ambiguously subsidized and organized by public institutions. It concludes that unequal water provision and intermediaries are key elements for the renewal of state legitimacy.
Introduction
A report by the Government of the Distrito Federal (Mexico City) claims that, in 2014, only 71% of water provision in Mexico City was of acceptable quality. Moreover, 15% of this water was provided through the overuse of aquifers. This reduced the level of ‘sustainable’ water provision to 50%. Policy-makers have been preoccupied with the need to satisfy a growing demand for water for a number of decades (Guevara et al., 2010; Soto, 2007; Soto and Bateman, 2006). This 2014 report however breaks from the idea that water provision in Mexico City can be efficient (SACMEX, 2014). Compared to the previous optimistic discourse, the government now acknowledges its inability to face citizen demand.
This article explores the restructuring of the modern state faced with such an increasingly evident urban failure. It develops micro-histories in order to highlight the state’s weakening and adaptive processes. How can governments adapt to a variety of conflicts over water? The aim is to initiate a reflection based on the premise that urban water management, and its political uses, reveal how ‘modern’ state forms are always intertwined with ‘differently’ modern practices. In other words, water conflicts in Mexico City are a problem of ‘water power relations’ that take on multiple forms across the region (from shortage to abundance). It is in this context that the influence of intermediaries becomes central.
Water intermediaries do not simply connect residents with water institutions. They connect needs with the institutions that satisfy them. Intermediaries facilitate access and by doing so, the user ‘feels’ the intermediary is doing him/her a favor. This is of course a relation of unequal power. As we will see in this article, the formal or informal character of intermediary work matters. When intermediaries come from formal institutions, political uses are frequent and respond to corporate interests, ideologies or government programs. When intermediaries work informally, use and favors are not exclusive; they are often shared. They do not respond to ideology, institutions, or programs.
Through four micro-histories from the Mexico City region, this article unpacks the role played by various types of intermediaries in the development of governmental adaptation strategies. 1 By using a typology of formal and informal ‘intermediary work’, I illustrate how it is increasingly difficult to draw a clear boundary between the state, the market, and civil society. This in turn leads to a rethinking of the state as the central interlocutor of the political process. The aim here is to discuss how the use of natural resources affects the role of the state and the multiple sociopolitical responses that result from state intervention. The lack, or abundance, of water generates conflict about ownership, sale, and the real or symbolic appropriation of this resource.
The historical context: From clientelism to geostrategic intermediaries
The right to water had been one of the main claims of urban movements in the 1960s and 1970s. With the metropolitan population rapidly growing, new formal and informal settlements lacked a connection to the formal public infrastructure, soon turning to the government for access. When this explosive population growth slowed at the end of the 1980s, the metropolis finally had achieved a better distribution of basic services. However, as of the 1990s, infrastructural coverage again reached its limits while demand continued to grow. Perhaps more importantly, the city was also experiencing successive economic crises while the Federal government lost political control over the City of Mexico because of institutional reforms and electoral losses (Dabat, 1995).
In this context, there was a progressive deterioration of the provision network and a relative decrease in the efficiency of water coverage. This is precisely when informal water provision practices intensified. The tandeo (suspension of service for long periods of time) and the pipas (trucks transporting potable water on-demand to precarious zones, highly marginalized areas with no service at all and to geographically inaccessible locations, a system known as pipeo) began to replace and complement formal state-provided water.
Before then, the government had measured overall water coverage as an indicator of the quality of life. This soon became a largely irrelevant metric, as a specific zone may have formal coverage but no real access due to the tandeos. In this context, it became imperative to study the varying degrees of shortage (low provision), the frequency and duration of cuts (irregularity of provision because suspensions may last for days), or coverage through a ‘dripping service’ (provision of water for only a few hours per week). A new political geography of water inequality thus materialized.
With the 1997 arrival of the Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD) in the Mexico City government, new opportunities arose for the political use of natural resources and public services. Many authors have discussed ‘left clientelism’, which differs from the traditional forms of clientelism during the authoritarian system dominated by the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) (Durand, 2007; Tosoni, 2007; Vizcarra, 2014). The idea of clientelism can nevertheless prevent us from seeing the complexity of these new relationships. Buying or exchanging favors has always depended on a collecting agent, that is, a ‘giving’ institution (political parties, unions, and the government). After 1997, however, the use of water to obtain political benefits did not depend as strongly on the ‘management of favors’ by the political parties or the unions. This was because the PRD is a party that originated from the fusion of former urban movement leaders whose main accomplishments were the negotiation of services with the government.
As they became elected officials and party workers under a new party banner, the PRD continued building on their history of negotiation on behalf of citizens. This in turn, forced these former movement leaders-cum-party-workers to change their clientelistic practices because of their ‘leftist’ beliefs. Instead of participating in clientelism as a means to negotiate gains for citizens against a government ideologically opposed to them, now that they had formed the government the exchange of favors with government intermediaries and former social movement comrades operated through the discursive ritual of ‘favoring the poor’. 2
The adaptive practices of tandeo and pipeo devised by the government were gradually converted into ‘replacement’ or ‘alleviating’ policies that could accommodate various types of water scarcity in the city-region, meaning that the pipeo and the tandeo gradually became ‘informal’ policies. The tandeo, through successive cuts on a fixed schedule, and the pipeo, through the development of an extensive network of water-truck routes, now function as ‘policies’ – in that they are organized directly by the state; but they are also ‘informal’ in that the government does not publicly recognize them, because they rely on a range of informal intermediaries.
These are more than administrative measures intended to ‘compensate’ for governmental incapacity. In fact, these measures progressively gained a political character through tacit governmental approval of their existence. That is, the state allowed and even encouraged these informal water provision measures once it was no longer the sole and exclusive interlocutor of citizens. The state became only one of many other agents. And because of this, it required new legitimization tactics.
It is in this sense that pipeo and tandeo can be seen as an informal means of adapting to a crisis of legitimacy. In prior periods, such informal tactics were wielded by marginal groups (for example, groups of intermediaries transporting water to faraway locations by foot). Yet in the present, given their efficiency, they have been incorporated into the state apparatus. Over the last three decades, Mexico City’s successive governments relied on these tactics to confront a more reactive citizenship. 3 Not only did such measures project the image of a government that is flexible and able to adapt to shortages in certain locations (be it because of a lack of resources, distance, or geographical conditions). They also allowed the government to retain a degree of legitimacy, particularly in areas with high levels of citizen participation.
One can witness the development of a governmental discourse on the inevitable need to deal with ‘victims’ (of disasters and water scarcity), in which institutional intermediaries treat these groups as ‘clients’ and ‘users of favors’. Informal water provision tactics thus transformed a number of lower civil servants into tandeo and pipeo intermediaries, allowing these individuals to simultaneously play the role of government employees, political operators, and service providers. They now have carved out what might be called a ‘geostrategic’ sensibility for identifying locations for role remedial servicing, be it for electoral use, supporting small local leaders, forging alliances with local governments, or creating support networks among lower civil servants. For all these reasons, informal water provision contributes to the construction of political careers, validates populist measures, and favors the image of a ‘sensible’ government that is responsive to vulnerable groups.
Case studies
Ecatepec: Informal water provision in response to the loss of legitimacy
According to the Consejo Nacional de Población (CONAPO, 2010), Ecatepec has a relatively high degree of marginalization because of rapid population growth, in which infrastructure arrived after people settled. This largely explains why the government has always been out of phase with the demand for services, and why the area is known for its plethora of intermediaries who are always available (both openly and not) to ‘fix’, ‘provide favors’, ‘manage’, or ‘help’ (Allen et al., 2006).
More specifically, there are two distinct types of intermediaries in Ecatepec: technical intermediaries and political intermediaries. Technical intermediaries decide on the temporalities regulating access to water. They manage the service and offer it to consumers (who live in their neighborhood) according to their preferences and loyalties. In interviews with these leaders in the CROC de Aragón neighborhood, we found that access to water depended on a house’s distance from an already established water-truck route. One of our respondents explained that the trucks would previously arrive at her house before the construction of new developments nearby. Now her block stands the furthest away from the truck routes, which explains her feeling of exclusion: When there are more of us, there is not enough water. Initially, … we were the last section and there were eight buildings. We were the last, but we didn’t have any problems because we had water three times a day, in the morning, at mid-day and at night and there was enough water and it even reached the third floor. Now, there is not enough water and we are off the route. (Doña Lorena, 23 April 2014, my translation)
Political intermediaries, on the other hand, also manage the temporalities regulating access to water, but in this instance it is done through political discourse more than simple preferences. They promise water abundance and offer hope (De Alba and Hernández, 2014: 132). Through these discourses, political intermediaries can increase pressure for improved access and therefore garner votes by gaining the trust of residents who need this essential resource: The person who drives the water truck is seen as an idol. People see him as ‘the good man, the one who will resolve the problem’. The person in control of the water has all the power, all the help, and has, not quite the support, but the acceptance by neighbors. (Señora María Luisa, 2014, my translation)
For its part, the government is adapting to water scarcity through its technical and political intermediaries (neighborhood leaders, truck drivers, technical operators). As actors of precariousness, these intermediaries have specific functions: to regulate water volume and access. The intermediary serves to ‘sew’ the social fabric that politically legitimates those who benefit from water access (consumers) as much as those who ‘provide’ water (the government).
Iztapalapa: The ideological uses of water scarcity
In Ecatepec, governmental intermediaries often displayed a derogatory attitude; yet in another neighborhood of the city, Iztapalapa, governmental intermediaries present themselves as willing to ‘serve’. This can be partly explained by the fact that Iztapalapa is governed by the PRD and its leftist ideas are often cited in justification of their actions. That is, the local government consciously sees the political usefulness of water. Water is used to mobilize people – mostly during electoral periods: ‘The difficulty in obtaining more water doesn’t only depend on the government, but also on all those who want to “win us over” for their events or elections. Often times, this enrages us’ (Don Camilo, Colonia Santa Catarina, interview 2012, my translation).
Yet because the PRD sought to bring benefits to the poor and marginalized, it had to develop new solutions, even if they proved counterproductive in the long run. For instance, the possibility of ‘suspending payment’ implemented by the PRD in 2001 for certain places where water only arrived once a week and even then, only for a few hours, had the effect of encouraging informal water provision. The areas identified saw the arrival of brigades who implemented a temporary program of informal provision, which then became permanent.
This is a politically strategic population, in terms of water scarcity at least. Close to 20% of Iztapalapa’s population does not have access to water in their houses (Reforma, 28 January 2009). In the 2009 elections, 77% of the population who participated resided in zones with no formal access to water, but with an informal provision system. In zones where there are no informal provision practices, electoral participation dropped to lower than 4%.
The case of Iztapalapa demonstrates how governmental intermediaries use water to respond to an ideological framework. In contrast to what we might expect, the PRD’s leftist ideology makes use of intermediaries to win votes more blatantly than other parties on the right. However, some of our interviewees specified that this ‘political work’ does not necessarily translate into direct votes for the PRD. The clear strategic political use of resources is what differentiates Iztapalapa from Ecatepec, where intermediaries present themselves as government ‘managers’ and not as ideological intermediaries.
Chalco: Intermediaries to face emergencies
Moving from areas of the metropolis struggling with water shortages to an area facing recurring flooding from waste water, the municipality of Valle de Chalco Solidaridad is seen as the epitome of a metropolitan political regime working without institutions. Here, as in Iztapalapa (and perhaps less so in Ecatepec), irregular urban development rose before the state arrived. Chalco is where water represents ‘everything the city rejects’ (Señora Rosa and her son Armando, 2014, my translation).
Intermediaries are necessary because of recurrent emergencies. As one of our interviewees said, ‘There are a lot of houses now. There are a lot of us living here now, so the sewage system is over-extended with so many people. The drain is often blocked’ (Señora Rosa and her son Armando, 2014, my translation). Yet, intermediaries are depicted in interviews as inefficient. The reason: disaster is inevitable and help is never sufficient. Señora Margarita explains: Weeeelll … (laughter) look, Mister Peña Nieto came but didn’t stop talking. The people around him did not let anyone get close. I just wanted to tell him that we needed a solution, because he doesn’t understand what it’s like here … (pause) It’s always like this. (Señora Margarita Domínguez, November 2014, personal communication, my translation)
The government, pressured by the media, ‘has’ to be there before, during and after the moment of disaster. Intermediaries play that role in response to residents’ ‘urging’ to rescue them and their lost belongings. Between 2000 and 2011, the municipality experienced 10 waste-water floods. The largest were caused by human negligence in the maintenance of the Canal La Compañía drainage channel. In response, governments either implied that residents were living in an irremediable situation, or they attributed the flooding to the fact that human errors are ‘natural’. In the meantime, residents suffered immense losses. 4
The situation is further aggravated by the fact that the area is sinking an average of 40 cm per year, which increases risks of flooding (SEDESOL, 2011: 64). The government’s informal and formal responses (avoiding explanations, accusing others, justifying human errors, but also designing compensation programs) remain fairly ‘successful’, however, in sustaining its legitimacy. Resident reaction and protests have declined or the reactions are delayed and residents do not take advantage of relief programs (De Alba, 2014: 67–68).
In brief, intermediaries in Chalco are necessary to face the emergencies and recurring disasters. On the one hand, governmental intermediaries arrive in Chalco to provide rescue services and speak to the media. On the other hand, Chalco residents, who constantly lose their belongings and goods in disasters, have a permanent mistrust of those who ‘do not respond’ to their demands. Perhaps it is because of this that Chalco is where the work of legitimating intermediaries is most questioned.
When we asked residents and neighborhood leaders what they feared, many responded with resignation: ‘what makes me anxious is that I have no choice but to stay here; even though I don’t feel fear. We have shed so many tears over past floods, we have been shaken too much … but, (resigned sigh) we are alive, God protect us’ (Doña Julia, 2014, my translation). Again, Señor Álvaro expresses that ‘from now on, we need to make a greater effort to survive. It makes you sad because it’s your life’s worth, your heritage. I got diabetes from the shock when the canal flooded in 2000. The waters not only caused material damage, they also damage health. A total life change’ (Señor Álvaro, 2014, my translation).
San Lorenzo Acopilco: Conflicts over the abundance of water
In Acopilco, conflicts arise because the water is abundant and could contribute to servicing the metropolis. 5 At the same time, water is at the very core of this indigenous community’s identity. The village of San Lorenzo Acopilco is located in the borough of Cuajimalpa, on the edge of the Mexico City metropolitan area. Water here is managed communally and is used to cement community traditions. 6
In San Lorenzo Acopilco, intermediaries act as ‘representatives’. They manage water independent of state institutions. Intermediaries here are not formal or institutional. This particular case is due to a series of negotiations between comuneros (community landholders) and the government. These negotiations produce intermediaries who enable water management. Señor Israel, from the neighborhood committee, explains how it works: The borough arrives to provide support services, but here, almost everything is managed through customs and traditions. Water coming from up there by the freeway is licensed to the borough for 50 years. They manage it and service the villages of La Pila, Chalma, Maroma, and parts of Acopilco and Santa Fe. The rest of the water, in La Lagunita and Las Maromas, all the water is managed by the community using resources provided by the people. This water serves the people. This is why we divide the borough and village water. This water is expensive; it is managed by a Water Committee. (Señor Israel, 2014, my translation)
This communal arrangement is threatened by the borough’s desire to use its water to service the neighboring mega development of Santa Fe or other settlements in the region. Here, informal governmental tactics of adaptation to water conflicts take the form of an open criticism of constitutionally-recognized community practices in order to favor private interest groups.
In Acopilco, water symbolically represents the community’s synchrony with nature. It is part of the natural richness of the community and used to sustain social cohesion. Representative intermediaries (members of the village Water Committee) have the power to decide how water will be used. The village asks them to defend water from its enemies, which is generally understood to be the government. 7 As Señora Susana (2013, my translation) puts it: ‘Many people come to the village to ask questions and investigate how it works, what we have, what we don’t have. There is much mistrust because of past situations and the village needs to unite in order to eradicate these people.’
Information is jealously guarded. Representative intermediaries are named by the communal assembly to guard their secret water management system. This person also defends the ‘precious liquid’ and maintain the village’s ‘conditions’. Water is the guarantee of life in San Lorenzo Acopilco. Señora Susana continues: So, for the sake of the village, nobody offers information and even less water from our spring is given away. … Now, everything is channeled using pipes and there are specific keys to open and close them. Only those responsible for the water can do this. Nobody else can because it is very well-guarded by the village. … It is forbidden [to give information] because everything about the spring water, as well as everything else, is wanted by the borough so they can use it. This is why it is not open to everyone. Nobody knows where it is, only the people who set the system up and they are now old. (Señora Susana, 2013, my translation)
In response to these community practices, the city government can either ‘abide’ by the community decisions because they control an important resource for the city, or try to convince community leaders to sell their constitutionally-recognized communal land and offer to move them to new developments. Representative intermediaries acknowledge the limit of their management system. They ‘use’ this communal organization to negotiate better terms with the government. They enjoy a sort of arbitrary ‘power’ to negotiate resources.
Señor Abel used to be member of the Water Committee. Then, he became village commissioner (Mayor of San Lorenzo Acopilco). He explains how this representative intermediary function works:
Here we see each other as neighbors. This is why the village came together.
There were times when there was a lack of unity?
Yes because of quarrels caused by newcomers who wanted to dominate the village. No! They’re crazy! [Eventually] we were able to have a dialogue. [But at first], there were youths who said: ‘we won’t listen, we will break those motherfuckers’. But we sent them to hell. Here, you do what we say. After, when we could talk, we said ‘if you want to stay here, you have to respect our conditions: pay for water and you can use the drainage and receive water. If this is what you want, fine, if not …
The sewage is from the borough?
The village constructed the sewage. We suffered a lot here with the arrival of the newcomers …
Is there a way to not service them with water?
We have valves. Water is controlled. ‘We give some here, there we don’t and they have to endure it.’ It has always been this way. We punished them so that they would obey and cooperate. (Señor Abel, 2014, my translation)
In contrast with the previous three cases, intermediaries in San Lorenzo Acopilco function ‘autonomously’. Here, intermediaries play an internal role within the village, while in the other cases discussed above, intermediaries almost always come from institutions. Although they manage without formal structures, village representative intermediaries are elected in assemblies and enjoy discretional power.
Conclusion
Many authors consider informality to be confined outside the state, as a testimonial to the survival of the poor. Following McFarlane (2013), in this article I argued that there is a multiplicity of ‘planned informalities’ in water management. The various types of intermediaries are summarized in Table 1.
Types of intermediaries.
Urban reorganization through informality weakens the modern state’s operative schemes (its modern administrative processes). Intermediary practices reinforce the state’s efficiency (from inside and out). The informalization of the state generates new legitimation mechanisms and stratifies society according to their access to water. The examination of these legitimizing mechanisms through the micro-histories of water conflicts demonstrates the importance of intermediaries in resignifying social stratification and state power. The use of water scarcity and adaptive governmental mechanisms can be understood as symptoms of the larger problem of a profound inequality between the central city and urban peripheries. Governments have long favored central city areas over their peripheries in the process of modern state formalization. Through their decisions, governments define priorities, hierarchies, and modalities of responsiveness, and, when resources are short or public action remains insufficient, they resort to informal provision.
While formal provision through public infrastructure creates citizen-consumers, informal provision produces useful-citizens. Accordingly, two spaces of strategic exclusion appear. The central city is characterized by formal and efficient water provision that is fully covered by the public infrastructure. In contrast, the periphery is characterized by the inefficient and informal tandeo and pipeo practices in response to water scarcity. The periphery is partially covered by the formal water network. However, the formal provision system has a high level of inefficiency that is related to its inability to provide regular service. There are many reasons for this including a functionally insufficient volume to be managed by the authorities, the altitude of the municipalities requiring service, and the fact that many of them are informal settlements. These informal practices were analyzed here as adaptive mechanisms by the state. Intermediaries, governmental or not, concretize and operationalize these adaptive mechanisms according to three modalities:
Temporal (truck schedules, schedules for service cuts)
Geographical (high altitude locations, outside of truck routes)
Utility (benefits from informal distribution, the arbitrariness of the possibility to suspend payment to entire neighborhoods).
It does not matter whether informal practices come from inside or outside the state, or who controls the intermediaries. What this article illustrates is that the formerly central actor (the state) no longer plays a monopolizing role. Its functions are shared, fragmented, and weakened. In a country marked by 70 years of corporatist party-state governance, the idea of a central state with a monopoly of legitimate violence is now diffuse and ambiguous. Informality gave the state a multiple and weakened face, thus cracking its modernist facade. We also saw how informal practices are ‘convenient’, whether they come from ‘inside’ or ‘outside’ the state. The informality of intermediate practices helps in ‘expanding’ the territory of state legitimacy through inclusion, recognition, or negotiation with versatile actors. Such developments call for new epistemological categories that can challenge the stability of modern rationality. Risk, vulnerability, and informality provoke anxiety, as is most explicit in the case of Chalco, but also to a lesser extent in Acopilco, Iztapalapa and Ecatepec. The response to this anxiety engages multiple intermediaries whose activities stretch our understanding of the state and its relationship to territory, justice, and sustainability.
Footnotes
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.