ABSTRACT
The new Bolivian constitution, enacted in 2009, establishes water as a human right and bans its privatisation. This progressive constitutional reform has been combined with increased levels of capital investment in water infrastructure. Despite these developments, however, much of the population in a city like Cochabamba continues to lack access to basic water services. Challenging the idea that the right to water is guaranteed solely by the Bolivian state is the ongoing presence of self-organised, collective forms of water provisioning, which have historically asserted themselves against both state-provided and privatised water services. This chapter focuses on these collective urban water infrastructures, specifically the ways they foreground the labour involved in making, maintaining and defending the conditions required to provision water services, in what I describe as ‘infrastructural care’. Challenging familiar political-economic narratives of state versus private water services, this chapter reads these collective urban water infrastructures as fragile political projects that emerge within and against situations of injustice and inequality. This is infrastructural politics as infrastructuring: not demanding access to existing infrastructure but building collective capacities with and through people, materials, water, land, animals, and plants.
