Despite pressure from international donors and the national government, neoliberal policies have not had a transformational impact on the way water is provided in Mumbai. Some modest reforms were introduced but these have not led to major change. Moreover, in 2022 the city introduced a policy of 'Water for All' to extend water access to slum areas. At first sight this system might seem to be a socially progressive approach to water management, which might be surprising given the right-wing orientation of Shiv Sena, the political party which has been in power since the 1990s. But this paper shows that policy has been shaped by an unlikely alignment of diverse interests. Campaigners have been resisting neoliberal policies and demanding fair water rights for slum dwellers for years. But these demands gained policy traction when they overlapped with the interests of the engineers who manage the complex water system, as well as the political regime. For decades, slum households have been scapegoated and water access was deemed illegal for millions of the city's poorest residents. But the political climate has recently shifted such that it now suits the ruling party to expand water access, although restrictions remain. This paper shows how global paradigms intersect with embedded structures, politics and institutions to create contextually specific outcomes. Drawing on Brenner and Theodore (2002), we argue that the same context that generated Mumbai's form of 'actually existing' neoliberalism has also created a distinctive, 'actually existing', interpretation of the human right to water.

In this comparative and collaborative collection of essays we work through contemporary and historical practices of governing urban waters in Philadelphia and Mumbai. Taken together, the essays in this collection argue that events of enduring harm visited upon racialized, marginalized citizens are produced through slow bureaucratic processes of aversion, ambiguation and ambivalence, perpetuated in and through regulatory regimes, water quality standards, legal discourses and everyday practices in the city. These practices entangle racialized and poorer populations in situations of durable and everyday harm and are central to the creation, maintenance and reproduction of vulnerable and disposable human and non-human life in the city.

Mumbai's informal settlements have a long history of being denied formal access to water. While previous research has shown how settlers barely manage to survive by extracting water in the blurred spaces between formal and informal provision and through complex socio-material relationships, here we narrate a story of the local struggle to claim formal access to municipal water connections using a fundamental human rights approach. By critically looking at the historical practices of the state in setting obscure standards that denied access to municipal water, we show how the local grassroots movement and its legal battle to establish a fundamental right to water also culminated in an ambiguous and differential standard being set by a court verdict. We argue that the precedence of creating multiple standards and their discretionary implementation is leveraged as a site for distributing and sustaining harm in which the social relations of domination influence not only everyday bureaucratic practices, but also the judicial process itself. While we critically investigate the instrumentality of a human rights approach in demanding new standards for access to water, borrowing from Koonan, we conclude by questioning the very process of legalizing differential understandings of such fundamental rights.

This article traces the emergence of social policy objectives (SPOs) and the role of state policies for Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) in the urban water sector of India. Reforms allowed the entry of the private sector and a new set of techno-economicfinancial imperatives that undermined the conventional state-centered policy instruments specifically designed to achieve SPOs. The article reveals how the failure of the PPPs to realise the socio-political imperatives not only compromised the SPOs, but also jeopardised the reforms in the urban water sector.

Governance is key to tackling water challenges and transforming water management under the increasing pressures of competing water uses and climate change. Diverse water governance regimes have evolved in different countries and regions to regulate the development and management of water resources and the provision of water services. Scholars and policy analysts have been comparing these water governance regimes to analyze elements and processes, to assess performance, or to draw lessons. Although the number of such studies has increased since the 1980s, no comprehensive synthesis exists. We present such a synthesis by conducting a systematic review of the emerging field of comparative water governance studies, and we critically reflect on how water governance is defined, conceptualized, and assessed in different contexts. Based on the resultant insights, we identify four areas for future research: (1) improving the balance between small-, medium-, and large-N studies that are used in comparative studies of water governance; (2) conducting longitudinal comparisons of water governance to identify temporal governance trends and patterns; (3) expanding the geographical coverage of the comparisons to include underrepresented countries and regions, focusing more broadly on the global South; and (4) addressing the issues of justice, equity, and power, which are becoming increasingly important in tackling the water governance challenges that are exacerbated by the effects of climate change, industrialization, and urbanization.