Urban Inequalities, Water Management, and Climate Resilience: Insights from Dr. Maria Rusca

The following interview was recorded for the Poor Proles Almanac podcast with guest Dr. Maria Rusca from the University of Manchester. Dr. Rusca focuses on political ecologies of water and hydroclimatic extremes, critical disaster studies, climate urbanism, and experimental political ecologies and is committed to developing research at the nexus between social and natural sciences to further the fields of political ecology and development studies.

Andy:

Dr. Rusca, thank you for joining us. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your research?

Maria:

Absolutely, and thank you very much for having me here. My name is Maria Rusca, and I'm a senior lecturer in global development at the University of Manchester. My work focuses mostly on some pressing development issues we face today, things like climate change and urban inequalities Actually also within gendered access to basic services like water and sanitation, and then looking at the intersection between gender and environmental governance, and I mostly do so by focusing on urban areas.

My research has mostly focused on cities in sub-Saharan Africa. I started my journey over 10 years ago, actually in Lilongwe, a beautiful city that is the capital of Malawi. There, I went to study access to basic services like water and sanitation. I was interested in understanding how people, particularly those living in low-income areas of unserved or underserved neighborhoods, access basic services. I was also curious about the politics of urban water governance. So, who gets what and how?

Who gets good water quality and continuous water services, and how and what policies and what type of investments shape inequalities in cities? Over the past few years, I've actually then looked, realized that this is really related to climate change too, and then I started looking more at the intersection between access to basic services and climate change because, obviously, climate change is also very much water changes or changes in the hydrological side. I've also looked at how extreme events or climate events can affect access to basic services, and, in the end, it's about understanding how to. The final goal is to understand how to develop more resilient cities that are also more equitable and capable of providing services and resources for all, also in the face of climate change.

Andy:

Basically, solving all of our urban inequity problems, that's all.

I came across your work, thinking about urban planning and, generally speaking, planning around future water shortages, how climate change is exacerbating them, what researchers are finding, and what the future looks like.

I found your work discussing urban spaces and water. I wasn't really expecting you to dive right into this socioeconomic argument about water, equity access, and so on. You also discuss socio-political drivers in drought risk analysis. Can you explain a little bit about what that is and why you argue that it's been basically ignored until recently?

Maria:

I should have mentioned that I'm a social scientist, but perhaps it became clear from what I said. But I think when we look at analysis of climate change, particularly when we are looking at the events or extreme events, or climate or weather events like droughts, floods or precipitation, this research is usually driven by physical scientists. I think there is still very little interdisciplinary work around this topic, and that's what I'm interested in developing further and that's why I collaborate with hydrologists and climatologists to do so.

But what happens when you have primarily physical scientists working on this analysis is that they will focus primarily, of course, on the physical aspects of droughts. So, for example, they will look at things like meteorological events and how these may transform into hydrological droughts or agricultural droughts and how these phenomena unfold from a physical perspective. So, of course, this is crucial, but it also only tells a part of the story of what a drought is, how it intersects with human societies, and what you find in social sciences and activists. They have often tried to emphasize that it's not only about the physical dimension of climate change and of these events because this dimension doesn't explain the outcomes uneven outcomes of a drought or of a flood, and for this, we need to understand more the socioeconomic dimensions and drivers around these events. So let me give you an example.

You may be familiar it has been quite often on the news there has been a drought in Southern Africa, a severe drought between 2015 and 2017-18. One of the cities that was particularly affected was Cape Town, and it was quite significant because, at one point, there was this possibility that the city would run out of water, and so there was this widespread talk about Day Zero, which was indeed the day in which the city would have no more water for drinking for domestic uses.

So, to avoid this, the city implemented a number of measures to reduce water use across the city, but here's the interesting thing: everybody was exposed to drought. The water supply infrastructure serves the whole city, but if you look at the vulnerability to the drought of different socioeconomic groups, there are stark differences. There is a bit of paradox because Cape Town was often portrayed in the media as the drought that affected high and middle-income people, and that, in one sense, is true because these are the groups that had to reduce water consumption much more than others, but this, in fact, was because they were consuming so much before the drought. And if we look in particular at the elites in Cape Town, they will have quite big villas and homes with gardens and swimming pools and obviously dishwashers and laundry machines, and all of this increases the water use.

So, there was a stark inequality before the drought between high-income and low-income. High income did indeed reduce much more water consumption, but they also were able to cope much better with the restrictions. For example, they were easily able to pay fines if they were overconsuming. They were able to cope with price increments, but they also were able to develop a lot of coping strategies to increase their water availability. Basically, some of these are, for example, buying bottled water. But there are actually some infrastructural measures that we're taking, like drilling boreholes or installing rainwater facilities.

So, the beginning was really shocking, also for middle and high-income classes. But then they were much more able to cope with this drought through these infrastructures. Low-income groups, instead, were unable to do so. They were unable even to buy bottled water and less so to, of course, build infrastructure.

So they were much more affected in the longer term, and that's what social scientists like me and many others argue is that this crisis, we need to understand this social-political driver and this crisis are actually socially produced by the way society and economy of a city or of a country is organized, and understanding the pre-existing inequalities and addressing pre-existing inequalities is essential to build resilience cities and the adaptive capacity of all people living in a city.

Andy:

So I know it wasn't within the scope of the paper you're talking about, but I'm curious if you know whether or not there were any remaining impacts from that drought in the way that the rich were. You know, if they installed rainwater systems, are they still using them, or do you know anything about that? I'm just kind of interested to see if anything stuck.

Maria:

That's a good question.

They actually do, and if you look at the short-term response and the long-term resilience trajectory of different socioeconomic groups, I think you could argue that higher-income groups are better off and more resilient than they were before the drought because they're still connected to the water utility, and they can consume the water from the water utility, but they also have additional water sources.

That makes them more water-secure. And there is also, I mean, a discussion on groundwater. You know, they now have wells, and they can use these groundwater facilities, but in a way, they have privatized a resource that is for the long-term sustainability of the city. So, there have been some enclosures of resources for the cities that are now owned by higher-income groups. So definitely, the measures are still there in terms of infrastructures and they are also there in terms of how they affect pricing, have remained higher. That affects lower income groups obviously more than higher income groups. So, you may argue that some groups are more resilient and other groups are more water insecure than they were before entering the drought.

Andy:

Yeah, yeah. Reading your papers, you talk extensively about all these different examples across Africa of ways that communities informally and formally kind of build these networks to become more resilient in the face of, you know, increasingly extreme challenges around water access, water rights, and equity.

Maria:

Let me first focus on the example of Cape Town. So what we've seen in Cape Town in general, and this has been a big critique, is that the response has been quite reactive to the drought has been averted. There is a lot of talk and a lot of discussions on how to implement more proactive measures to protect and make the city more resilient. But what you see is a lot of the measures proposed in Cape Town focus on increasing the supply of water. So Cape Town already has six dams, and these dams provide water to a growing population, with an elite that consumes a high amount of water per capita per day. And there is this intention to build more infrastructures, more dams, to exploit more groundwater, for example.

But studies like this, what they highlight is that these measures are unlikely to be successful if we don't, if we or the government of the city and of the country also don't focus, also focus, do not focus, sorry, on these social inequalities, not focused, sorry on these social inequalities. What we see is that if increases, if there is more water available, it's not affordable for lower-income groups, or it's too easy for higher-income groups to overconsume water resources.

So if it's not accompanied by a demand management strategy that is actually flexible to also work with very significant socioeconomic inequalities, then you will still have some groups that will be under-consuming and very water insecure and groups that will continue to over-consume, and so these solutions will not address environmental and equity concerns, and so, basically, the idea is that we need measures that don't focus only on the supply of services, but also focus on reducing inequalities, to ensure that city and all citizens within the city are resilient to climate intensifying climate extremes.

A reservoir from the Cape Town drought.

Andy:

Yeah, one of the things that really kind of—I'm not sure how prevalent this is in the UK, but here in the United States, you write about issues of water quality in Africa as well, like the fact that the water lines that need to be replaced are less done in poorer areas.

Higher amounts of various chemicals and so on can be found in water supplies in poorer neighborhoods, and it's very common even here in the United States.

I don't know the number off the top of my head, but I want to say that 30 or 40 percent of the water lines here in the United States still contain lead, and I know that from my own personal experience, like seeing the water lines that have been replaced here and there and the reality of how bad our water infrastructure is and how ill-equipped we are, not just for climate change and the increasing droughts, but also for the downstream effects of, you know, the chemicals we've dumped into the ground, you know the recent concerns with like PFAS here in the United States I'm not sure how prevalent they are in the UK, but I'm sure you're familiar with them and the fact that we're just so unprepared to deal with these issues.

It's frightening, and it starts, you know, I started thinking about this idea of like we have all these politicians here who think that we can just, you know, allocate resources to fixing problems without ever really addressing to the point you're making, like supply and demand of you know, drinkable, safe water, and that we can't just increase output, like as if it doesn't have any effect on anything else, or that climate change isn't going to set a cap on how much water we can consume. It seems like we don't actually really have any long-term solutions to address these serious issues. You know, thinking generationally about water limitations, the way we're consuming it, and the quality of that water in any equitable sense.

Maria:

Yes, I think there is clearly a tendency; this is really a good point. I think it's not only the United States, actually. I think there is really a tendency to try and fix the climate challenges or crises with a technology fix or with a policy fix, without doing any structural changes. I mean, there might be many reasons for that, and, of course, one is that there are vested interests in maintaining the status quo. There are obviously groups that benefit, socioeconomic groups that benefit from the status quo. I think even those who have no interest in maintaining the status quo.

I noticed from my research that institutional change is very slow. Behavioral change is quite slow unless we find ourselves in an extreme emergency, and then it seems we are capable of changes more rapidly, like in the case of the pandemic. Any other changes seem to really face a lot of resistance. And so you find all these technocratic approaches that might involve things like incentives for solar panels or other green energies or regulating pollutants, and indeed these measures are important, they do play a role, but in a way it seems like they miss the bigger picture.

You could say that the climate change crisis gives us a chance to rethink our relationships within societies and with nature. Some issues and challenges related to climate change are intertwined with the way we think about development and the way we think about nature and our planet.

So things around how we consume and, particularly in the global north, the fact that our economic systems seem to continue to blindly prioritize growth over environmental and social sustainability and inclusion over environmental and social sustainability and inclusion. All these things obviously are more fundamental changes and fundamental questions that I think we are trying to set aside and instead should be central to addressing the climate crisis.

So it's not so much about finding a policy fix. It's more about rethinking these assumptions, what we want to prioritize as a society, and what type of consumption grows, or lack thereof, and equity we want to foster. This is why things like concepts ideas like climate justice are becoming more central, particularly with young activists like Vanessa Nakate from Uganda, Greta from Sweden, and many others who really emphasize the need to connect issues of climate adaptation and climate mitigation with concerns of justice and intersectional inequalities, climate mitigation with concerns of justice and intersectional inequalities. So thinking about gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, age, and so on are central elements that need to be considered as we develop policies around climate adaptation and mitigation of climate change.

Andy:

Water is so fundamental in our existence that increasing capacity definitely creates a bit of a Javons paradox, where when it becomes more accessible, people use more of it. Or if you become more efficient, you use more of it, like with the size of homes. We made electricity or, you know, energy cheaper, and we made our homes bigger, so we're still consuming the same amount of energy. We're not actually conserving; we're just building bigger houses, and I think that kind of plays out with our access to water, too.

And then you look at the, you know, these more marginalized communities that you've written extensively about, and they find ways to make it work. In some of your writing, you talk about this idea of practice theory and how communities can kind of learn new or form new informal ways to create access despite, like, the government trying to, you know, limit use or find different. You know, consciously or unconsciously, making it more difficult for poor communities to have things like access to drinking water. So can you talk a little bit about like practice theory and maybe how this might help us better understand what this kind of looks like?

Maria:

First of all, for me, practice theory is a way to look at everyday life. So look at the everyday life of people living in informal settlements and how they access basic services, which gives us a different perspective on water inequalities. So, I think there is a lot of work around the politics and the political economy of uneven distribution of infrastructural configurations in cities and heterogeneity in these infrastructural configurations. So we have seen, for example, different quality of the pipes or some neighborhoods not having any access to piped water and so on.

There is a lot of emphasis on understanding, at least when we are thinking about cities in the Global South, the legacies of colonial history in these cities, and how those legacies are still visible in the urban fabric and shape contemporary inequalities. But then, of course, also looking at the more recent neo-liberalization of services, which has also exacerbated these inequalities across urban spaces and not only cities, is what I have been focusing on. So this is more the, let's say, understanding the structural dynamic of the cities.

But then there is another wave of scholarship I'm interested in and working on, which is around looking at everyday life, which is shaped very much by these infrastructure inequalities. And so theory, looking at the everyday practices, really, of accessing water, can tell us much more about how these inequalities are experienced, first of all, and also to give voice to those who experience those inequalities. So what does it do?

It helps us not only to highlight the challenges but also the solutions that are bottom-up solutions or citizen-led development around water and many other topics. And the reason why this is important is that I think it is a first step to um to think about development more as co-produced, um rethink the idea of experts. The expert is not only the engineer who builds a network or the academic like me who studies something, but also the people, the people who have the knowledge, hold the knowledge of the contextual knowledge, and also are actually the ones to live in the areas in which they live, and they do that collectively.

For me, this is also a first step of rethinking development as co-produced, and expertise and knowledge not as belonging to a minority of so-called experts, but really being much more distributed and much more diverse and much more plural. Another reason why an everyday lens is important, I think, is that at the everyday scale, I think we are better able to understand the multiple dimensions of inequalities, looking at, for example, gendered inequalities or racial inequalities in access to basic services, and so it gives us a level of nuance that is needed to really develop more equitable and effective policies.

So, just to give an example, going to the case of the drought in Maputo, the capital of Mozambique, also, there you have this very clear uneven impacts of the droughts, and you have a couple of neighborhoods, or actually a good number of neighborhoods, that are more low-income and informal, that are experiencing much longer water shortages. So, the water utility has in place water rationing measures, and while some neighborhoods are without water for a few hours, others are without water for three to five days.

This also has significant gender consequences, and that is because women are generally responsible for household chores, such as keeping the house clean, bathing the children, preparing the food, and doing the laundry; that also means they are responsible for making sure that there is water in the household.

If there is no water for three to five days, women have to go elsewhere to try and get it, and this has very important implications for the physical fatigue that it can cause when going long distances. There are also risks of being attacked when women have to walk long distances outside their comfort area, and there is a lot of stress because women can be blamed for not bringing water to the house, and that can create a lot of stress.

A study done by medical anthropologists in different countries in Latin America measured blood pressure and showed that in cases of water shortages, women have much higher pressure due to stress. So, it's really a physical and psychological impact that women face, and these impacts are indeed gendered.

In Malawi, I was doing a documentary on the drought, and I remember filming one night a woman who was waking up at two o'clock at night because she only received water from two to four o'clock at night, had only two buckets, and so she had to wake up, fill the buckets, do the laundry and then fill the buckets again before the water was basically trickling and then there was no water anymore at 4, 4.30. And she was quite scared.

Apart from the physical fatigue of waking up at 2, she was quite scared because she didn't have a protective wall. She was alone at home, her husband was working as a bouncer in a club, and she had to basically implement this everyday practice of collecting water at night every day by herself and then going to work at six o'clock as a housekeeper elsewhere, so that, I think, explains how gendered water shortages can be as well. To understand these dimensions and develop policies that address this, you need to understand these everyday practices and experiences.

Andy:

Yeah, it's really difficult to wrap your head around the way things we take so for granted can be totally upended just by some government policy changes that can mostly be unseen if you're not intimately aware of them. Right, and I think one of the things that's really inspiring in this process is in some of your writing, you talk about these like informal collective work that communities do to take care of each other, which I think is really inspiring and hopeful that, especially given my own personal opinion about how this will play out over the next, you know multiple hundreds of years that you know communities will continue to be resilient.

Could you discuss any of those examples of this kind of community coming together when there are water shortages?

Maria:

Yes, well, I think water shortages and, more broadly, climate-related responses of communities, I think one of the most important that I can think of is Slum Dwellers International. Shack Dwellers International, which is a federation of slum dwellers that is active in 19 countries and actually has really worked as a collective to lobby governments in different countries to ensure that they invest in informal settlements and ensure that there are better services water and sanitation services and that these services are reasonably priced for communities to be able to afford them. This is actually a work that has been done on a regular basis, meaning over the past 20 years, not really reactively in response to a drought or a flood, but really proactively, seeking to upgrade and make informal settlements more resilient.

There are a number of strategies that they use. This also involves saving groups to make sure that they can bring some resources when they talk to government officials, and that's actually important because, yeah, money talks, let's say. So, the fact that these settlements are able to bring in some resources financial resources is valued, but they also do a lot of work on collecting data on the neighborhood, who has access to what service, and how many people share water kiosks.

How many people have to share sanitation facilities? People have to share sanitation facilities so they can really go with hard data to lobby the government for better sanitation and better access to basic water services. They also obviously collect data on the prices of water, and so they can also lobby to basically get more affordable water and sanitation services Because, paradoxically, and that is really a huge problem, residents in low-income areas often pay a higher price for water, for a service that is usually of poorer quality in terms of availability and in terms of quality of the water than residents in high-income areas.

It is a huge paradox because, for example, in Lille-Longue, the city I worked in first, low-income residents pay five times more than high-income residents to receive water for a few hours a day, and that is also, in many cases, water that has greater contamination than that higher-income residents drink. So, SDI is a really important example of citizen-led development and how citizens can strategize and work collectively to improve and upgrade their neighborhoods in ways that are more resilient to climate change.

Andy:

Now, thinking more towards the future. You know, we think of this as like, oh, this is a third-world problem. Right, it's on the periphery, but given the state of climate change, ecological devastation, and arguably faltering governments, as we're seeing just looking at the elections and the politicians that we've seen the last decade, is this something you're concerned about coming home to roost in places like the US and the UK, not necessarily in the next decade but within our lifetime or our kids' lifetime, as again, that pressure kind of kicks up.

And you know, I'm thinking more along the lines of, you know, the United States has been involved in all these wars overseas, and you're starting to see the infrastructure for those wars coming back here with. I'm not sure if you're familiar with Cop City in Atlanta, where they're building this massive or trying to build this massive training facility that's just basically preparing the US for urban warfare similar to what they've experienced in places like Baghdad and so on. Is that same idea of it, kind of coming home to roost, something we should be concerned about the idea of its kind of coming home to roost, something we should be concerned about?

Maria:

Absolutely. I think it's already home. I think climate change is already a major concern, not only in regions that we think are traditionally more are viewed as more vulnerable, like some parts of Africa, but it's already home in the United States, in the UK, and obviously, of course, also in Italy, where I originally am from.

It's interesting, this thing that you're saying that the US is preparing for this urban war. It's interesting because it seems like there's always money available, funding available to invest in, you know, oppressing protests, and no money available to reduce inequalities and prepare for climate change. We know what is coming. We can see it already. We can draw on very important climate projections, but also we have seen in many regions of the world how extreme events will impact different groups and what the consequences are that we need to focus on. So I think money is best invested in doing that.

If you think about, for example, recent events in the US. For example, hurricane Harvey in 2017 hit the Gulf Coast. Well, I don't need to explain that to you, but it was actually. You know, climatologists have explained that this is due to unprecedented rainfall, but this unprecedented rainfall is not really a surprise because the data they show of the past 50 years show that we can see extreme rainfall becoming more and more frequent in the US.

It's not something that we have to be surprised about, even if President Trump sent a lot of tweets about how surprising it was, wow, how big, how unexpected those were his tweets. And that's actually quite typical of the idea of deflecting attention and focusing on the unexpected nature of these events, and the magnitude of these events is obviously a way to deflect attention from the political responsibility of these events.

Even if, let's say, the political discourse was a discourse of surprise, we have the data that show that these events are increasing, that this is something the US needs to deal with and cope with, and that the impacts are differentiated by socioeconomic groups and that there are racial inequalities in the way these impacts are experienced.

This was clearly the case in Houston during Hurricane Harvey, where black and Hispanic communities were more affected, and they suffered nearly twice as much damage to their homes than higher income groups, had a much slower recovery, had more difficulties in accessing basic needs right after the events, like water, food, and shelter. So we know a lot already of what needs to be done and what is coming from a climatological perspective.

Climate change is a global crisis. It's already threatening countries in the global north, and we know quite clearly which type of unprecedented events or extremes different countries or regions might have to prepare for. More significantly, it would be important for everybody to work on adaptation plans in the global north, with climate justice at the center of the goals that they want to achieve.

Andy:

Despite the very dark nature of the idea of water shortages and inaccessibility, you do provide a lot of examples of resilience, and I think that's really important because we live in a time where I think people are so frightened of the future that all these different things; you know, growing food, water shortages, extreme temperatures, you know the Atlantic current, like all these different things people are so worried about to see that we as humans are so resilient in the face of challenges that we don't think we can survive, I find it really inspiring, and I think other people will too. So I definitely would recommend learning more about the stories that you're capturing and that the future may be difficult, but we've overcome quite a bit to date.

Maria:

Absolutely.

To listen to this interview, tune into episode #225 of the Poor Proles Almanac.