Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Geoforum journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/geoforum A political ecology of water and small-town urbanisation across the lower Himalayas Eszter Krasznai Kovács a, ⁎ , Hemant Ojha b , Kaustuv R. Neupane c , Thomas Niven d , Chetan Agarwal e , Devendra Chauhan e , Ngamindra Dahal c , Kamal Devkota c , Vijay Guleria e , Tikeshwari Joshi c , Natasha K. Michael a , Anvita Pandey e , Nuvodita Singh f , Vishal Singh e , Rajesh Thadani e , Bhaskar Vira a,g a Department of Geography, University of Cambridge, CB23EN, UK b University of Canberra, Institute for Studies and Development Worldwide (IFSD), Australia c South Asia Institute of Advanced Studies (SIAS), Kathmandu, Nepal d BTS Consulting, London, UK e Center for Ecology Development and Research (CEDAR), Dehradun, India f International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), Kathmandu, Nepal g University of Cambridge Conservation Research Institute, Cambridge, UK ARTICLE INFO Keywords: Urbanisation Water Political ecology Himalayas India Nepal ABSTRACT This paper traces the logic, goals and changed socio-ecological relations and water norms introduced by donor- and state- led drinking water supply schemes to small urbanising settlements across the lower Himalayas of India and Nepal. While urban development and water planning tend to boundarise needs and interventions to city limits and city- dwellers, we adopt a hydro-social lens to trace the impacts and consequences of infrastructure and water as both travel through the landscape. Investments into water supply introduce new scales, spatialities and visions for urban development that actively peripheralise rural needs and interests, and introduce new dependencies for infrastructural maintenance that stretch the institutional and governance capacity of towns, such as around energy, finance, and expertise. We find that water supply projects give rise to new power dif- ferentials and development trajectories between more- powerful, typically urban and down-stream communities, and rural, up- stream source regions. Projects bring new potentials but also disrupt old relations and customs around water, resulting in the emergence of conflicts within and beyond towns as water availability and access opportunities change. Application of a hydro-social and urban metabolism focus to Himalayan waterscapes makes visible the environmental and societal trade-offs associated with resource provisioning to urban devel- opment centres. 1. Introduction Rural to urban migration in the lower hills of the Himalayas is proceeding at a rapid rate (Goodall, 2004; Tiwari and Joshi, 2015; Yamaguchi et al., 2016), leading to an unplanned, seasonally makeshift and informal urbanisation across a growing number of small towns. Greater densities of urban life are contributing to the exhaustion and pollution of natural surface or spring-based drinking water sources. This exhaustion is exacerbated by the enormous seasonal demands placed on these sources by tourists in many popularly visited towns in the lower Himalayan region, and made even worse by inadequately informed, reactive management decisions. Urbanisation can also degrade water ecosystems: in the case of Shimla, the capital of Hima- chal Pradesh, India, sewage water contaminated a stream and springs that fed into urban water supply, which led to hepatitis and jaundice outbreaks. In response, the government banned the use of spring water. In 2018, these bans cumulatively led to an outright water shortage that left the city’s 200 000 residents without water for weeks on end, with pleas made to tourists to stop visiting the area (Chatterji, 2018). Re- active management decisions without knowledge of underlying ecolo- gical or social interlinkages have the capacity to lead to disruptive and widespread consequences for the local economy and the environment. Periods of water scarcity are increasingly common throughout the lower Himalayas, attributed mainly to an under-investigated https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2019.10.008 Received 14 December 2017; Received in revised form 14 August 2019; Accepted 7 October 2019 ⁎ Corresponding author. E-mail address: eszter.kovacs@geog.cam.ac.uk (E.K. Kovács). Geoforum xxx (xxxx) xxx–xxx 0016-7185/ © 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Please cite this article as: Eszter Krasznai Kovács, et al., Geoforum, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2019.10.008