Kathleen O'Reilly

Introduction: Global perspectives on gender-water geographies

This introduction summarizes the work featured in the themed section of Gender, Place and Culture titled ‘Global geographies of gender and water’. It brings into dialogue scholars investigating a variety of gender–water relationships at different scales, including: poisoned waterscapes; fishing practices; and the implications of neoliberal water policies. The authors featured purposefully engage with the multi-faceted ways in which experiences, discourses and policies of water are gendered, and how gender is created through processes of access, use and control of water resources. In bringing these articles together, we have consciously aimed to support inclusive, feminist collaborative work and to prioritize diversity.

“We Are Not Contractors”: Professionalizing the Interactive Service Work of NGOs in Rajasthan, India

abstract Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have been much studied for the impacts of neoliberalization on their funding, procedures, and motivations. In this article, I use a case study from Rajasthan, India, to show how conflicts that have been generated by recent trends in development funding are taking a specific shape at the scale of NGO workplaces. A process of professionalization is occurring that is altering NGO-client interactions and the hiring priorities of NGOs. I use the framework of interactive service work to argue that previously close relationships between fieldworkers and clients have become shallow encounters, characterized by a relative interchangeability of provider and customer. The work of an NGO fieldworker has become deskilled and degraded. For the NGO I studied, deskilling brought about a rapid turnover of senior staff, who were replaced by low-paid, low-caste fieldworkers. The change in staff spurred the management of employees’ emotional labor as the NGO leaders attempted to generate the necessary emotional connections between fieldworkers and clients, so its contracted project could move forward successfully. Changes in the caste composition of staff, coupled with new labor processes in villages, also created tensions about the status of the NGO’s work as a social service. The research adds depth to previous studies of neoliberalism’s impact on service workers in the Global North and South and to the literature on the professionalization of development.

Advancing methods for research on household water insecurity: Studying entitlements and capabilities, socio-cultural dynamics, and political processes, institutions and governance

Household water insecurity has serious implications for the health, livelihoods and wellbeing of people around the world. Existing methods to assess the state of household water insecurity focus largely on water quality, quantity or adequacy, source or reliability, and affordability. These methods have significant advantages in terms of their simplicity and comparability, but are widely recognized to oversimplify and underestimate the global burden of household water insecurity. In contrast, a broader definition of household water insecurity should include entitlements and human capabilities, sociocultural dynamics, and political institutions and processes. This paper proposes a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods that can be widely adopted across cultural, geographic, and demographic contexts to assess hard-to-measure dimensions of household water insecurity. In doing so, it critically evaluates existing methods for assessing household water insecurity and suggests ways in which methodological innovations advance a broader definition of household water insecurity.

Reaching the unreached? Good governance and welfare reform politics in Delhi, India

Good governance scholarship has been preoccupied with the donor-driven conditionalities imposed on aid-receiving developing countries. Limited attention has been given to power struggles and resistance from government actors (bureaucrats and politicians) to embrace internally driven good governance programmes. To address this gap, this article ethnographically examines a good governance initiative of the Delhi government (India) to reform its welfare system in partnership with NGOs. The study indicates that the conflict between government and non-governmental actors over the authority to govern the poor eventually maintained the status quo of the welfare system while the poor remain marginalised.

Development Professionals in Northern Thailand: Hope, Politics and Practice

Art.’ The most effective chapters consider not only the practices and representations of all residents (even the forgotten) of the hood, but also the acts and possibilities of resistance that are always present. An early chapter sets the tone of the collection as Skott-Myrhe uses textual and discursive analysis to explore ‘resistance as lived practice’ (p. 36) and possibilities for change in Dead Prez’s video ‘It’s Bigger than Hip-Hop’. Indeed, Dead Prez’s work in total is instructive in understanding the day-to-day experience of the residents of the hood, discourse of black empowerment, and repeated call for revolutionary change. Thus, Skott-Myrhe argues that it is change through the recovery of the lived spaces of the hood that is necessary to ‘rebuild a healthy ecology in the face of ongoing assaults on its functional integrity’ (p. 35). Several other essays are of particular note: Muzzatti’s chapter ‘Si Siamo Italiani!’ in which he extends the hood to encompass his childhood Italian working-class immigrant neighborhood; Nicol and Yee’s chapter ‘The Girls from Compton Go to College’ and their use of ‘counter-stories’ in the classrooms to destabilize notions about who lives in the hood; and Richardson’s chapter ‘Making Changes’ use of the consciousness-raising lyrics of Tupac’s single ‘Changes’ and Nas’ ‘Black President’ to highlight the ‘structural conditions and personal histories that contribute to the problems of the hood’ (p. 204) and to point out the agency that contests and challenges ‘what is’. Collectively, these chapters encourage an exploration of matters of the everyday and hope that the sheer number of ordinary, mundane events can counter the sensational/exceptional events that seemingly characterize the hood. Clearly, Richardson and Myhre-Skott have accomplished what they set out to do—extend the current literature and correct misconceptions of the hood and its residents with more complex, nuanced understandings of the hood. To encourage an active engagement with space, the editors offer the concept of dwelling and the ‘geophilosphy’ of Deleuze and Guattari to give a sense of the complexity and fluidity of the relationship between the concept, in this case the hood, with the physical space. Certainly, the collection would have been strengthened by deeper engagement with the ideas of Deleuze and Guattari as well as the inclusion of a geographer’s perspective in a clearly spatial topic. That aside, this collection provides an opportunity for urban and social geographers to consider these urban spaces in a new framework.