ABSTRACT
Describing how governance coevolved with European liberalism and neoliberalism, Michel Foucault made the influential point that liberal states practice what he dubbed governmentality, through 'government at a distance'. Under neoliberalism, market principles have emerged as inner regulators of the state, of individuals and of community participation. In Egypt, Barnes portrays a struggle between outsiders who wish to empower local women, against those who articulate an alternative, in some sense Muslim, view of women's roles. The chapters reconfirms the many studies revealing the failures of participation tout court, from therapy to placation, to external constraints on participation, to the marginalization of subgroups within always already heterogeneous communities. The Southern precariat participation is enrolled into neoliberalizing capitalism, too often this reproduces the processes of socio-spatial uneven development and inequalities that long have accompanied globalizing capitalism. Trans-local activism will be vital if participatory water governance is to escape the localist trap set by its advocates, disrupting its top-down capitalist framing.
