‘We are Part of Nature’: Caring for Wastewater in an Infrastructural Experiment in the Flevopolder

Abstract

In this article, we pursue a route for understanding the decentralisation of wastewater treatment that moves away from thinking in terms of individual responsibility and technical determinism and mobilises the analytical lens of care to articulate more-than-human relationality as an organising principle of governing environmental infrastructures. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the Dutch Flevopolder, we focus on the mundane practices of handling wastewater. We show how households are entangled in a multispecies infrastructure: they engage with wastewater as users of toilets, guardians of bacteria and reed beds, and technology-assisted monitors of pollution. We argue that these infrastructural relations are variously cared for in practice, but remain neglected as part of formalised wastewater management. Finally, we advocate a form of environmental governance that recognises and engages with the waste work undertaken by all stakeholders, as they configure an infrastructure in which unruly processes unfold, in a caring, rather than controlling, mode.

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