In her PhD research at DRIFT (Erasmus University Rotterdam), Neha Mungekar introduces reparative governance as a framework to rethink urban water management in post-colonial contexts. Her study, set in the Indian cities of Bhuj and Bhopal, shows how everyday water problems—scarcity, pollution, flooding—are shaped by enduring legacies of inequality, rooted in colonial infrastructures and rigid, technocratic systems.
Mungekar argues that these challenges are not simply the result of resource shortages, but signs that dominant, formal models of governance are no longer adequate. In places where official systems fail, informal networks, improvisations, and solidarities emerge as vital alternatives. Rather than treating informality as a governance gap, her work reframes it as a form of care, innovation, and resistance.
Through visual ethnography and participatory workshops, she traces how communities navigate inadequate infrastructure and bureaucratic indifference. Two capacities stand out: consolidative capacity—the ability to rebuild trust and align interests—and ‘jugaadu’ capacity—the local ingenuity to repurpose, improvise, and subvert rigid systems.
These practices may be precarious, but they point to what becomes possible when justice, not just efficiency, guides governance. Mungekar’s research carries lessons far beyond India, reminding those working on sustainability transitions that without attention to history and lived experience, efforts risk reproducing the very inequalities they aim to address.
