ABSTRACT
Introduction While some residents of Indian cities have access to a clean drinking water supply, this service is often only available to a small minority – a scenario common in cities across the developing world, usually arising from poor or absent infrastructure. McGranahan and others have characterized this and other localized environmental sustainability concerns as the brown agenda of sustainability (McGranahan et al. 2001). Seen in this light, efforts to increase water supply and sanitation coverage are of crucial importance, not only to improve local environmental conditions in Indian cities, but also to create settings conducive to healthier lives for their inhabitants. Infrastructure partnerships have recently become a common policy instrument for achieving urban environmental improvement. In this chapter, I will investigate some detailed instances of infrastructure partnerships within the urban water supply regimes described in Chapter 4. This chapter aims to inquire into the constitution of partnerships as they become embedded within the complex but dynamic calculus of political and institutional processes that comprise the regime. “Skilled actors” (Fligstein 1997, 2001) or “forerunners” (Loorbach and Rotmans 2006) in the partnership possess an appreciation for this contextual complexity, and develop the skill to accomplish their regime-level objectives through these partnerships. This chapter will analyze and assess the pathways of regime transformation that are laid down by infrastructure partnerships.
