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2021 The Authors This paper provides some of the conceptual and methodological underpinnings being developed in the ongoing TAPESTRY project which is part of the Transformations to Sustainability (T2S) Programme. We debate how the notion of transformation may be conceptualized from ‘below’ in marginal environments that are especially marked by high levels of climate-related uncertainties. We propose the notion of transformation as praxis — where the focus is on bottom-up change, identities, wellbeing and the recovery of agency by marginalized people and explore how ‘patches’ and the ‘marginal’ offer critical conceptual templates to examine whether and how systemic transformative changes are being assembled and effected on the ground by hybrid and transformative alliances. The article concludes by discussing potential challenges of such engagements, alongside pursuing a normative and political approach to T2S.

This paper addresses COVID-19 in India, looking at how the interplay of inequality, vulnerability, and the pandemic has compounded uncertainties for poor and marginalised groups, leading to insecurity, stigma and a severe loss of livelihoods. A strict government lockdown destroyed the incomes of farmers and urban informal workers and triggered an exodus of migrant workers from Indian cities, a mass movement which placed additional pressures on the country's rural communities. Elsewhere in the country, lockdown restrictions and pandemic response have coincided with heatwaves, floods and cyclones, impeding disaster response and relief. At the same time, the pandemic has been politicised to target minority groups (such as Muslims, Dalits), suppress dissent, and undermine constitutional values. The paper focuses on how COVID-19 has intersected with and multiplied existing uncertainties faced by different vulnerable groups and communities in India who have remained largely invisible in India's development story. With the biggest challenge for government now being to mitigate the further fall of millions of people into extreme poverty, the brief also reflects on pathways for recovery and transformation, including opportunities for rural revival, inclusive welfare, and community response. This brief is based on a review of existing published and grey literature, and 23 interviews with experts and practitioners from 12 states in India, including representation from domestic and international NGOs, and local civil society organisations. It was developed for the Social Science in Humanitarian Action Platform (SSHAP) by Justin Pickard, Shilpi Srivastava, Lyla Mehta (IDS), and Mihir R. Bhatt. Some of the cases draw on ongoing research of the TAPESTRY project, which explores bottom-up transformations in marginal environments across India and Bangladesh.

The aim of this paper is to analyse the emergence of the concept of ‘urban resilience’ in the literature and to assess its potentials and limitations as an element of policy planning. Using a systematic literature review covering the period 2003–2013 and a combination of techniques derived from narrative analysis, we show that diverse views of what urban resilience means and how it is best used (as a goal or as a conceptual/analytical framework) compete in the literature. Underlying these views are various (and sometimes diverging) interpretations of what the main issues are and what forms of policies or interventions are needed to address these issues. Urban planners need to be better aware of these different interpretations if they want to be in a position to use resilience appropriately and spell out what resilience can bring to their work. The review also highlights that the notion of urban resilience often lacks adequate acknowledgement of the political economy of urbanization and consequently does not challenge the status quo which, some argue, is socially unjust and environmentally unsustainable. As such it runs the risk to be seen as simply making marginalized urban communities more resilient to the shocks and inequity created by the current dominant paradigm.

This article applies the global environmental justice (GEJ) approach to the problem of universal access to safe and potable water. Nowhere is the challenge more pressing than in peri-urban spaces where the lack of formal water provision and increasing environmental pollution lead to significant challenges for human wellbeing. We examine how and whether global discourses concerning the human right to water can be strengthened by resorting to GEJ, not least to allow for sustainable human–environmental interaction, in order to meet growing water needs in rapidly expanding urban areas. By drawing on local people’s experiences and mobilisations around water in peri-urban localities in Bolivia and India, the article examines the contradictions around the implementation of the right to water in charged peri-urban spaces. It demonstrates how environmental injustices and rights violations often go hand in hand and that struggles to access water are also struggles about environmental justice and sustainability. Still, while global frameworks provide moral imperatives, urban spaces in the global south offer certain challenges to realising rights and environmental justice. This is due to the contradictory nature of the state and its disregard for marginalised people, unequal experiences of citizenship, elite biases in policy making and planning, resource capture by powerful players as well as significant distributional, recognition and procedural problems. Thus, even though GEJ is a powerful tool to counter local injustices, its actual uptake will be shaped by diverse national and local political economies which may not be conducive to realising justice and rights.

This article argues that inequality in access to water and sanitation is largely caused and legitimised by different forms of invisible power that prevent universal access. It shows how invisible power combined with structural violence and experiences of unequal citizenship result in dismal access to water that cause systematic harm to poor and marginalised women and men. The article also argues that invisible power and other forms of power imbalance have ended up naturalising water inequalities around the world. While the inalienable universality of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and their focus on inequality must be celebrated, unless the power imbalances that perpetuate inequality are tackled head on by both policymakers and activists, the SDGs will not achieve social justice. It is thus important for both the sufferers of water injustices as well as water justice advocates to challenge structural violence and invisible power in the water domain.

This introduction reviews the experience of the water and sanitation sector since the 1990 New Delhi Statement – Some for All Rather than More for Some. It explores the policy pathways and contested politics that took place as a result of three key years in the early 1990s, from the issuing of the New Delhi Statement in 1990, through the Dublin Statement on Water and Sustainable Development in 1992, to the output of the Earth Summit held in Rio de Janeiro. These key events have shaped policy and practice over a period of two decades, including generating major contestation over the idea of water as an economic good. Past lessons suggest that the wider global water and sanitation community needs to rethink approaches and emphases, shifting from targets and global pronouncement to issues concerning sustainability, global/local mismatches, contested knowledges, equity, politics and power.

The major global crises of the past four years – financial, fuel, food, climate – have collectively had a dramatic impact on people's lives and livelihoods. Have they also had a large impact on core ideas underlying mainstream development? Drawing on a number of Reimagining Development case studies and on a much wider literature, this article examines the impacts of the crises on lives and livelihoods and also on core development ideas. First the article sets out why the current time is a good one for reimagining. Then it highlights some of the new ideas that are emerging and some of the older ones that are making a reappearance. Finally, the article reflects on the challenges of reimagining development and processes that are important if new ideas are to make a difference.

This article asks how the global financial crisis (GFC) affected rural communities in western India that have always lived with crises. A visit to Kutch, a border district in Gujarat, revisited after seven years, revealed that the GFC was not very present in the lives of the general population and there was very little radical reimagining of development. Despite impressive post‐earthquake reconstruction, massive improvements in infrastructure and a rapid growth rate, there appeared to be very few changes to age‐old, feudal, caste and gender inequalities. Economic development had not translated to human development and there remain several ecological unknowns and potential negative impacts in terms of long‐term environmental sustainability.

For displ ace d pe opl e , citize nsh ip (or th e l ack of it) is a crucial issue. D ispl ace d pe opl e are de nied form al citizensh ip and righ ts but are now cl aim ing th e m , subje ctive l y see ing th e ir de facto e xpe rie nce as l ive d citize nsh ip. Protests, cl aim asse rtions and transnational al l iance s are w ays in w h ich th e ir struggl e for righ ts is m anife ste d. M uch of th e existing l iterature te nds to focus on a top- dow n understanding of displ aced peopl e as citize ns/non- citize ns and th e form al proce sse s avail abl e (or not avail abl e) to th e m , ignoring th e im portance of inform al proce sse s as w e l l as l ocal age ncy and practice , w h ich th is articl e expl ore s th rough case study e xam pl es. Th e articl e al so e xam ine s displ ace m e nt in th e l igh t of diffe ring th eore tical m e anings of citize nsh ip, and ask s to w h at e xte nt th e force d m igrant is a gl obal or transnational citizen. Mobility, displacement and emplacement have become defi ning features of our times. As long as there are wars, large-scale development projects and the more recent land grabs, people will be forced to move. This paper examines the implications for citizenship of various forms of displacement. While there is a large literature on displacement and citizenship, it tends to focus on top-down understandings of both. Few people are asking how displaced people are viewing their own citizenship and struggling for rights that they see as theirs. This paper aims to move away from normative government and inter-government perspectives which tend to have a ‘sedentarist’ (Malkki, 1992) lens. Instead, it focuses on how displaced people themselves understand their predicament and how they develop ways of coping with their problematic or non-citizenship status. We investigate formal and informal processes of rights claiming and expressions of local agency exercised by a range of displaced people. These responses can be seen as a form of ‘lived citizenship’. We also attempt to understand how globalization is accelerating displacement processes and whether displaced people can be seen to embody new forms of global or transnational citizenship. We thus investigate the limits and possibilities of new forms of ‘postnational’ and denationalized or deterritorialized citizenship. We intentionally take a broad view of displacement, focusing on refugees, Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) and those affected by development-induced displacement

Summary Crucial for displaced people is citizenship (or the lack of it). In conventional terms, citizenship is seen as political membership in a given nation-state through which citizens possess civil, political, economic and social rights. Most states, however, have groups within them who do not belong and are denied citizenship rights, even though they may have formal citizenship. In particular, displaced people (both within and crossing borders) are denied formal citizenship and rights but are claiming them, subjectively seeing their de facto experience as lived citizenship. Protest, claim assertion and transnational alliances are manifest ways of struggling for those rights. Much of the existing literature tends to focus top-down understandings of displaced people as citizens/non-citizens and the formal processes available (or not available) to them, ignoring the importance of informal processes as well as local agency and practice. This paper explores the informal processes and feelings of belonging through case study examples, linking them to changing dynamics in different displacement regimes (e.g. refugee, IDP – internally displaced people – and DID – (development-induced displacement). We look at impacts of globalisation and changing international and national legal structures to bottom-up and lived notions of citizenship. The paper also examines displacement in light of differing theoretical meanings of citizenship, asking to what extent the forced migrant is a global or transnational citizen.

The notion of the waterscape has been proposed to capture the interconnectedness of economic, political, cultural and social processes embedded in water. More recently recognised, yet still relatively under-theorised are waterscapes that are ‘in-between’ the city and the periphery. This article focuses on peri-urban Delhi, specifically the area around Ghaziabad. We show that peri-urban waterscapes do not fit into existing urban or rural planning models because these same models largely fail to recognise the peri-urban interface as a distinct form of territorial development. As a result a diverse range of mobilisations around water relevant to the peri-urban poor are systematically undermined while power asymmetries that shape access to water remain unrecognised. Peri-urban spaces thus continue to be planned as if in a transition towards urban modernity despite the complex social, political, technological and cultural realities these spaces represent. The failure to address current limits of policy and planning in peri-urban waterscapes has long term implications for the resilience, sustainability and transformative adaptation of both city and periphery.

Divisions between communities, disciplinary and practice, impede understanding of how complex interventions in health and other sectors actually work and slow the development and spread of more effective ones. We test this hypothesis by re-reviewing a Cochrane-standard systematic review (SR) of water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) interventions' impact on child diarrhoea morbidity: can greater understanding of impacts and how they are achieved be gained when the same papers are reviewed jointly from health and development perspectives? Using realist review methods, researchers examined the 27 papers for evidence of other impact pathways operating than assumed in the papers and SR. Evidence relating to four questions was judged on a scale of likelihood. At the 'more than possible' or 'likely' level, 22% of interventions were judged to involve substantially more actions than the SR's label indicated; 37% resulted in substantial additional impacts, beyond reduced diarrhoea morbidity; and unforeseen actions by individuals, households or communities substantially contributed to the impacts in 48% of studies. In 44%, it was judged that these additional impacts and actions would have substantially affected the intervention's effect on diarrhoea morbidity. The prevalence of these impacts and actions might well be found greater in studies not so narrowly selected. We identify six impact pathways suggested by these studies that were not considered by the SR: these are tentative, given the limitations of the literature we reviewed, but may help stimulate wider review and primary evaluation efforts. This re-review offers a fuller understanding of the impacts of these interventions and how they are produced, pointing to several ways in which investments might enhance health and wellbeing. It suggests that some conclusions of the SR and earlier reviews should be reconsidered. Moreover, it contributes important experience to the continuing debate on appropriate methods to evaluate and synthesize evidence on complex interventions.

This paper critically examines the emerging knowledge agenda at the World Bank. From the publication of the World Development Report 1998-99 on "Knowledge for Development" to present discussions around the Global Development Gateway, the World Bank is attempting to carve a niche for itself as the "Knowledge Bank." In doing so it appears to have shifted from merely focusing on the transfer of capital. Instead, it seeks to be a leader in development expertise and knowledge transfers in international development. The paper examines the Bank's conception of knowledge, the rise of knowledge enterprises at the Bank, and the various tensions in its knowledge discourses. It argues that the Bank's knowledge agenda often tends to be centralized and absolutist and draws on economistic and technocratic models. These trends contribute to the emergence of a narrow knowledge agenda that both neglects sociocultural issues and those concerning a wider political economy. Thus, the plural nature of knowledge is denied and t...

Summary The article focuses on the interface between water resources management and social and power relations. It shows that the propagators of both macro and micro‐level water interventions have flawed notions of local institutions and the ‘community’. As a result, new water interventions could often end up perpetuating existing skewed power relations. The case study from Kutch, India, highlights how the process of resources management is often one of competing claims and inequality. Hence, the study argues that for issues such as equity and social justice to be addressed in water schemes, there is a need for implementing agencies to be aggressively partisan in targeting the marginalised and socially excluded groups.