Michelle Kooy

• PhD Geography, University of British Columbia
• Professor (Associate) at IHE Delft Institute for Water Education

Sinking cities populate imaginaries of the future in ways that resign entire populations of humans and non-humans to erasure. In this article, we take issue with the narrative of sinking as ‘losing ground to the sea’ through ethnographic research in the periphery of Semarang, Indonesia. Drawing on recent scholarship that calls for de-essentializin...

In the absence of well-maintained public sanitation infrastructures and adequate service delivery, negotiating sanitation forms an important component of urban life. In Maputo, Mozambique, the responsibility for keeping bodies, houses, toilets and spaces clean falls on the residents. We document these responsibilities and the material and social wo...

This article brings degrowth into conversation with urbanisation through our analysis of environmental transformations in the coastal Southern city of Semarang, Indonesia. We analyse two collective activisms to build a theoretical dialogue between degrowth and provincialised urban political ecology (UPE). The first activism contests the ongoing dev...

In this article, we explore how land subsidence is scientifically known in the coastal city of Semarang, Indonesia. We do so to ask questions about how the authority of this scientific knowledge is or not effective to help slow down land subsidence? We examine the scientific methods used to measure where, and at what rate, subsidence occurs, and we...

Jakarta is sinking dramatically because of land subsidence, which in turn increases its vulnerability to tidal flooding. The explanation of land subsidence's causes and the design of solutions is led by geoscientists and engineers, who tend to treat it as largely a technical problem. This paper takes issue with this. It sets out to contribute to po...

This article explores the relationship between the uneven outcomes of development in Indonesian cities with exclusionary outcomes of capitalist development in rural areas. Combining concepts of planetary urbanization with critical agrarian studies, we show how sociospatial and socionatural differentiations in (post-) New Order Java result in the em...

Water scholarship has advanced considerably in recent decades. Despite this remarkable progress, water challenges may be growing more quickly than our capacity to solve them. While much progress has been made toward achieving Sustainable Development Goal 6 — water and sanitation for all — new stressors have emerged to threaten this progress. Far fr...

Maputo, Mozambique’s capital city, is marked by clear socio-spatial divisions in access to sanitation services and distributions of environmental risks. Current development plans tend to reproduce these inequalities and suggest that some residents’ sanitary needs are more important than others. We contest this logic of differentiation underpinning...

In this paper, we analyse the heterogeneity of water supply infrastructure in Accra, Ghana, to understand the politics of water in cities where infrastructural diversity has always been the norm. We do this by extending the use of heterogeneous infrastructure configurations as a heuristic device, shifting the focus and scale of urban political ecol...

Co-management is advocated as a means to improve human equity and the ecological sustainability of common-pool resources. The promotion of co-management of fisheries often assumes the participation of resource users in decision-making ensures more ecologically sustainable outcomes than top–down management approaches while improving livelihoods and...

Accra, the capital city of Ghana, is characterized by limited networked supply, heterogeneous water providers, and various forms of provision. In this paper, we explore how the people delivering water through water tankers shape the distribution of water across the city. Drawing on empirical descriptions of water sourcing and distribution by truck...

The inclusion of packaged drinking water (PDW) as a potentially improved source of safe drinking water under Goal 6.1 of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) reflects its growing significance in cities where piped water has never been universal or safe for drinking. Using the case of PDW in Jakarta, Indonesia, we call for theorizing the politics...

The decentralisation of resource management through co-management assumes that the devolution of power benefits resource users. This assumption is often premised on the democratic election of leaders within resource user organisations. In this article, we investigate the validity of co-management assumptions about who benefits from a devolution of...

This chapter examines the emergence and problems of current dominant policy narratives which naturalize 'climate migration'. By this we mean the portrayal of migration from (largely) rural to urban areas as a direct effect of increased flood risk induced by climate change. Instead, we argue that migration is one of the possible-potentially positive...

There has been widespread recognition in the Global South of the role of participatory governance approaches to urban development in responding to citizens’ immediate concerns. However, critiques note that participatory initiatives are often avenues for the political and economic elite to ensure their interests and profits, rather than improving th...

en This article analyses processes of uneven urbanisation by looking at flood infrastructure. Combining the conceptual frameworks of uneven development with the political ecology of urbanisation, we use flood infrastructure as a methodological device to trace the processes through which unevenness occurs within, but also far beyond, the city of Jak...

Introduction The launch of the Water and Sanitation Decade (1980-90) marked the first attempt to place urban sanitation within national governments and international organizations’ development agendas. Since then, inclusion of sanitation within the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and global campaigns s...

This article draws on scholarship in Southern theory to ‘world’ the study of water’s urbanization. This means complicating scholarship by widening the focus beyond the application of Northern norms to engage with complex and diverse practices in Southern cities. For water’s urbanization, this means focusing on what water supply is for the majority:...

The goal of the study is to strengthen the analytical purchase of the term water governance and improve the utility of the concept for describing and analyzing actual water distribution processes. We argue this is necessary as most writing on water governance is more concerned with promoting particular politically inspired agendas of what water gov...

Bottled water serves an increasingly large percentage of urban poor populations in lower-income countries, yet receives little attention within international development research and policy. This study investigates the impact of packaged drinking water (refill water) on affordability and equity of drinking water access by the urban poor under SDG 6...

Co-management of natural resources has developed within the premise that sustainable management is more likely achieved through decentralized and participatory governance. For Lake Victoria (Kenya), the introduction of co-management through the establishment of beach management units (BMUs) coincided with apparent increases in unsustainable fishing...

In this article, we analyze the production of inequalities within the centralized water supply network of Lilongwe. We use a process-based analysis to understand how urban infrastructure is made to work and explain the disparity in levels of service by tracing the everyday practices of those who operate the infrastructure. This extends existing ana...

In this study, we review the ways in which water has recently been conceptualized by both natural and social scientists as either hydro‐social or socio‐hydrological. We do this in order to discuss whether and how they can be compatible, in order to enable dialogue across disciplines that seek to address the ecological and social challenges related...

This paper applies the perspective of inclusive development to the development goals – past and present – for increasing access to urban water supply. We do so in order to call attention to the importance of ecological sustainability in meeting targets related to equity of access in cities of the global south. We argue that in cities where the majo...

The Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) approach is said to have radically revolutionized a poorly performing sanitation sector. The claims of CLTS programmes successfully stopping practices of open defecation have only recently begun to be critically reviewed: scholars and practitioners are questioning the sustainability and scrutinizing the par...

Interventions across all sectors in fragile states are called to contribute to tackling conflict and fragility despite the lack of evidence on how/if this is possible. This article reviews the existing literature to identify five entry points through which water supply and sanitation service delivery might interact, both positively and negatively,...

This opinion article posits that the current lack of understanding of the dynamic interactions among the different components of risk (e.g., hazard, exposure, vulnerability, or resilience) is one of the main obstacles for the implementation of effective risk prevention measures. In state‐of‐the‐art methods for risk assessment, natural and social sy...

This paper argues the need for new conceptualisations of the relationship between water and development to better reflect the reality of cities in the Global South. Using a case study of Jakarta, Indonesia, it traces how the development narrative for urban water supply contributed to the understanding of informality as a binary opposite of the urba...

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This paper offers a conceptual approach to explore the complex dynamics of floodplains as fully coupled human-water systems. A number of hydrologists have recently investigated the impact of human activities (such as flood control measures, land-use changes, and settlement patterns) on the frequency and severity of floods. Meanwhile, social scienti...

This paper offers a conceptual approach to explore the complex dynamics of floodplains as fully coupled human-water systems. A number of hydrologists have recently investigated the impact of human activities (such as flood control measures, land-use changes, and settlement patterns) on the frequency and severity of floods. Meanwhile, social scienti...

This paper queries the relevance of the ‘splintering urbanism’ thesis to postcolonial cities of the South, and responds to calls for the production of a decentered theory of urbanization through a case study of Jakarta. Drawing on archival and interview data, the paper demonstrates that Jakarta has, since its inception, been characterized by a high...

Summary This paper applies a conceptual framework of "governance failure" to an analysis of the institutional dimensions of urban water supply provision to poor households, focusing on the case of Jakarta. Data from a household survey, archives, GIS-based mapping, and interviews are used to document governance failures that create disincentives for...

This article seeks to extend recent debates on urban infrastructure access by exploring the interrelationship between subjectivity, urban space and infrastructure. Specifically, it presents a case study of the development and differentiation of the urban water supply in Jakarta, Indonesia. Drawing on concepts of governmentality and materiality, it...

This thesis documents the genealogy of the development of Jakarta’s urban water supply infrastructure from 1873 (the inception of the first colonial water supply network) to the present. Using an analytical framework of governmentality, supplemented by insights from postcolonial studies and political ecology, the thesis explains the highly unequal...