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This chapter sets the context for the analysis of water security in peri-urban South Asia. Urbanization has been a key demographic trend globally as well as in South Asia, in the recent past and increasingly also in the future. While cities are often seen as engines of economic growth and development, and are associated with economies of scale, efficiency and sustainability, much urban growth occurs through the appropriation and reallocation of land and water from their peripheries. This creates patterns of deprivation for resource-dependent peri-urban and rural communities, as well as increasingly severe environmental problems, such as the over-extraction of groundwater and water pollution. This chapter first introduces the various perspectives, themes and cases presented in the book chapters. It then discusses urbanization and the peri-urban more specifically, introducing two contrasting views — ecological modernization and political ecology — and introduces the concept of water security. Referring to the examples from the book, the chapter then gives an overview of some of its key themes: the role of material infrastructure; property transformations and the declining commons; socially differentiated access to water; intervening in the peri-urban; and the role of conflict and cooperation.

In this publication, we share our experiences with combining transdisciplinary research with the Negotiated Approached to address the challenges in groundwater management in peri-urban villages near Khulna, Bangladesh and near Kolkata, India. From 2014 – 2019, our team of researchers and civil society organizations has been executing the Shifting Grounds project. The project was developed as a transdisciplinary research project under the Urbanising Deltas of the World programme of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). The Negotiated Approach, an approach for community empowerment, was used to combine research with capacity development within peri-urban communities. In this report, we capture our experiences as an interdisciplinary and international team, covering successes as well as challenges we faced in the process.

This paper describes how urbanization and the policies and institutions shaping it affects the health and well-being of periurban residents in South Asia with regard to the access to and consumption of water. In much of South Asia, sewage-based irrigation is emerging as an important source of irrigation for periurban agriculture, with severe implications for the health of the consumers and producers of the crops. Many periurban settlements lack formal tenurial status, and have no access to organized sources of drinking water, causing the residents to consume contaminated groundwater. This often explains the incidence of various skin diseases. Periruban residents also lose access to water of a sufficient quality and quantity as land is increasingly acquired for urban purposes. Factories relocated from the city in response to judicial orders to keep the city clean, contaminate local aquifers, and construction of highways disrupts water collection routes. The paper describes the policy and institutional factors provoking these problems., Internationales Asienforum, Bd. 43 Nr. 1-2 (2012): Internationales Asienforum