The Paradox of ‘Water Is Life' in a Water Rationed City During the COVID-19 Pandemic

In this chapter, we use the concept of everyday practice to highlight the plight of urban residents and what it means/takes to survive the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic in a water-insecure city. We use data from four Wards on differentiated locations relative to storage tanks supplying water and different water rationing zones. The data was collected from 2020 to 2021 (2 years). A stratified random sampling technique was used to select a study sample of 303 respondents. Of these, 200 household heads were interviewed at their place of residency, while the remaining 103 respondents gave interviews while waiting to draw water from boreholes dotted around the four residential areas. Our results suggest that the policies for managing the pandemic paid less attention to everyday practices of getting around the more than two-decade-old water challenges in the urban areas. The water challenges in the urban areas further exposed the residents to COVID-19 infection, and the pandemic widened the gendered and spatial inequalities to access to water. We conclude that the search for and concerted efforts to access water to manage and prevent COVID-19 infection were equally associated with high chances of being infected and/or spreading COVID-19. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is not the last water-demanding crisis we will experience. This calls for a paradigm shift in urban water and sanitation access planning to include alternative water sources - groundwater - at the initial stages of residential planning. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023.

Together Strong or Falling Apart? Coping with COVID-19 in Smallholder Irrigated Agriculture

Coping, surviving and living with different kinds of crisis is a recurrent challenge to those governing groundwater as a common resource. In this paper, we mobilise ideas about the functioning of the state and of processes of bricolage to explain the functioning of institutions governing groundwater during the Covid-19 pandemic. Drawing on empirical material from one irrigation scheme in Zimbabwe we argue that such institutions show signs both of transformation and degeneration over the course of the Covid-19 crisis. Our analysis shows the emergence of temporary and innovative ways of collectively organising around groundwater which ensure improved access to water during the pandemic. Such new ways of doing things draw on different sources of authority and legitimacy in shaping governance arrangements. However, as the pandemic situation becomes the ‘new normal', collective arrangements degenerate into a pre-Covid-19 state, or worse, further restricting access and representation for some people. © 2023 The Author(s).