RGP Cycle One Grantees and Projects

Basil Mahayni: Water for the Poor?: Understanding Formal and Informal Water Governance in Neoliberal Amman

This project proposes to examine household perceptions of and experiences with formal and informal water governance in an age of neoliberalism in Amman, Jordan. Specifically, this project will investigate the following two questions: 1) how have reforms shaped the dynamics of urban water governance in the formal and informal sectors? And 2) how do households perceive and experience these reforms? Scholarship about economic regulation, urban water governance, and informal water economies frame the study about how institutional and infrastructural water governance reforms affect choices and experiences of individual households vis-à-vis the formal and informal water sectors. Recent neoliberal reforms in Amman and Jordan are part and parcel of a widespread de-regulation and corporatization of public sector institutions, and reflect the broader trends of privatization and commercialization in water specific institutions, natural resources in cities and national economies in the global North and the global South. To date, most scholarship has focused on governance dynamics and reforms of formal water sector services while ignoring informal services. This project will broaden the scope of inquiry to account for how informal and formal provisions and institutions overlap, interact, are re-made and how they shape household experiences.

Basil Mahayni completed his BA (2005) and MA (2007) in Political Science, and a graduate certificate in Geographic Information Systems (2007) at Iowa State University. In fall 2008, he enrolled in the Department of Geography at the University of Minnesota to pursue his academic and teaching interests in state/society relationships and environment and development. He has experience in the classroom in a wide variety of courses, including Middle East Politics, Gender and Islam, Environment and Development, Principles of GIS, Numerical Spatial Analysis and Biogeography of the Global Garden. He also has research experience and has published on issues of social movements and development crises in Bolivia, environment and development in Syria and Somalia, and state/society crises in Syria. His dissertation research in Amman, Jordan, builds on his pre-dissertation research in Damascus in 2009 and 2010. Because of the war, he was compelled to switch his research site to Amman. He has spent approximately three months in Amman conducting preliminary interviews, reading about the history of the Jordanian state and Amman's urbanization, and volunteering as a University instructor for the Jesuit Commons: Higher Education at the Margins program, coordinated by Jesuit Refugee Services.

He combines qualitative and quantitative methods to research the dynamic interactions of the environment, governance institutions, and communities. He is particularly interested in using mixed-methods to examine how governance reforms shape state/society interactions and to explore the dynamic production of inequalities through studies of interactions of the formal and informal sectors and individual household experiences. He has presented his previous research about the production of water scarcity and reforms in Damascus at the University of Minnesota and conferences in Lexington, Kentucky, Seattle, Washington, New York City, and Istanbul, Turkey.