2023/05/02 by Fenna Smits, Mandy de Wilde
Social Sciences · #Geographies of human-animal interactions #Posthumanist Ethics and Activism #Water Governance and Infrastructure
paper · pdf · doi:10.1080/00141844.2023.2206979
crossref issued 2023/05/02 · crossref published 2023/05/02 · crossref published-online 2023/05/02 · openalex publication_date 2023/05/02 · crossref created 2023/05/03 · crossref published-print 2025/01/01 · crossref deposited 2025/02/28 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · crossref indexed 2026/07/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
In this article, we pursue a route for understanding the decentralisation of wastewater treatment that moves away from thinking in terms of individual responsibility and technical determinism and mobilises the analytical lens of care to articulate more-than-human relationality as an organising principle of governing environmental infrastructures. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the Dutch Flevopolder, we focus on the mundane practices of handling wastewater. We show how households are entangled in a multispecies infrastructure: they engage with wastewater as users of toilets, guardians of bacteria and reed beds, and technology-assisted monitors of pollution. We argue that these infrastructural relations are variously cared for in practice, but remain neglected as part of formalised wastewater management. Finally, we advocate a form of environmental governance that recognises and engages with the waste work undertaken by all stakeholders, as they configure an infrastructure in which unruly processes unfold, in a caring, rather than controlling, mode.