ARE Water Conflicts Changing The Modern State? Reflections On Informalization In Mexico City

In the past decades, the sociological literature on environmental issues and natural resources has attempted to characterize the demands, the actors, and the international channels used by environmental movements, and in environmental protests and struggles. This paper is located in this literature, focusing primarily on water conflicts in a large city of the Global South.

More specifically, using a political ecology framework, the paper explores how the notion of informality can shed a new light on hydropolitics through a discussion of the modern state’s relation to non-state actors. The paper compares traditional political mechanisms such as clientelism or electoral promotion, with emergent informal practices such as the multiplication of intermediaries and water provision through a network of water trucks ambiguously subsidized by public institutions.

Through an empirical analysis of the various means through which people face hydric stress in Mexico City, the paper offers a reflection on the transformation of the Mexican modern state.

The chronic insufficiencies of the modern state (or of governments with fragile legitimacies) articulated with clientelistic practices channelled through local intermediaries illustrate clearly how formalization and informalisation processes work in a country where formalization was never complete, but where the modern state has a long tradition of authoritarianism. The aim is to better understand the instrumentalization of the water crisis in current state restructuring processes, and its impacts on hydric precariousness.