| dc.description.abstract | Small-scale decentralized facilities and technologies are rapidly becoming a
dominant technological fix to deliver water to underserved populations in developing
nations. This project examines the case of a university partnership with government
agencies seeking to roll out new POU (point-of-use) and POE (point-of-entry) devices in
colonias – low-income, rural and peri-urban subdivisions commonly defined by their
proximity to the US-Mexico border. This study critically evaluates the role of POU and
POE devices as a substitute for community-based water governance, leading to self-managed
systems. I measure whether these technologies will advance overall household
water security, evaluate the program’s overall costs and benefits, and analyze the process
by which the implementation of POU devices is institutionalized as a water governance
strategy in El Paso colonias.
The study uses data collected from household surveys with colonia residents in
order to measure household water security using a novel Guttman scalogram method.
The household water security assessment is compared with interviews and other data on
the technology to assess whether POU and POE devices can improve residents’ current
water security status. In addition, I used data from semi-structured interviews in order to
analyze the process by which POU technologies have been decontextualized from
emergency response uses and repurposed as a technological fix to poor water services in
the colonias.
Findings indicate that the technological fix for the socio-environmental problem
of acceptable drinking water will likely add more financial and labor burdens on already
vulnerable populations. Consequently, the rollout of these technologies shifts the costs of
acceptable and secure drinking water from collective efforts to low-income individual
households. I argue that the driver of this governance shift is the formation of a
neoliberal discourse coalition which mobilizes and legitimizes soft-technologies as a
solution to water insecurity, thus resulting in EPAs support of an epistemic community
of technical and behavioral experts determined to disseminate the technologies in the
US. As the state and experts roll out these technologies as cost-saving devices they exert
incredible power to re-enroll people in mediating water-society relations and reproduce
hierarchies of power in water management systems. | en |
