ABSTRACT
Introduction: access to ‘WASH’ and related services in the Global South This chapter concentrates primarily on water, sanitation and hygiene (commonly referred to as ‘WASH’ services), which are central to the well-being of populations everywhere, particularly in terms of individual and public health gains (see Allen et al., 2006; Jones et al., 2014:12; see also Chapter 5, this volume), but also in respect of human and financial capital. The typical lack or inadequacy of these services in several slums in the Global South can, accordingly, pose serious problems to occupants. Recalling the ‘gender-urban-slum interface’, WASH services incorporate a key set of physical and natural assets, and, where weak, can undermine livelihoods in several ways. Moreover, in a context in which access to water and sanitation is a basic human right, deprivation of such services constitutes a violation. Here slum-dwelling women and girls are particularly implicated given their major responsibility for providing household members with vital domestic needs (Bapat and Agarwal, 2003; Jarvis et al., 2009). Yet, despite the importance of WASH, there is very little research on the everyday experiences of infrastructural and service provision (or lack thereof), which brings to bear the point that this issue must be conceptualised beyond the frame of technocratic interventions to address specific problems, how it becomes imbued with wider power relations, and how, in turn, provision can become a tool for subjugating or empowering certain groups within cities (see Anand, 2012; Jones et al., 2014; Larkin, 2013:338; Robinson, 2006; Zeiderman, 2013). As summarised by Stephen Graham and Colin McFarlane (2015:2), for example: ‘While infrastructure debates have made important contributions to how we understand the “supply-side” dimensions of infrastructure, there has been surprisingly little about how people produce, live with, contest, and are subjugated to or facilitated by infrastructure.’
