Relations, territories, and politics of infrastructural regionalism

ABSTRACT In this afterword to the special issue on ‘Water, Governance, and the Dynamics of Infrastructural Regionalism’, I reflect on three achievements of regional infrastructures that are common to all the articles. First, I discuss the relational ontologies and epistemologies that the authors use to characterise the multifaceted connections between humans and non-humans, as well as the imaginaries that inform the framings of regional infrastructure. I then discuss the territorialising achievements of infrastructuring and regionalising processes that involve the aligning of hydrological and jurisdictional boundaries, the hybridisation of ways of knowing, and the establishing of formal and informal relationships to address fragmented conditions. Finally, I summarise the varying forms of contested and consensual politics that are rife with power dynamics and social inequalities. I conclude by suggesting some future directions for infrastructural regionalism scholarship.


INTRODUCTION
The contributions to this special issue provide new theoretical insights and empirical findings about the burgeoning discourse of infrastructural regionalism (Addie et al., 2020;Carroli, 2020;De Laurentis & Cowell, 2022;Glass et al., 2019Glass et al., , 2023;;Horan, 2023).This involves a double move of examining what the regional perspective brings to the study of infrastructure as well as what the infrastructural perspective brings to the study of regions (Addie et al., 2020).The authors draw upon a common set of theories and methods from regional studies and infrastructure studies as well as political ecology, policy studies and related fields to examine water infrastructures at varying scales.Their empirical findings from the United States, Singapore, Peru, Germany and Central Africa comprise a rich and varied scholarship on the co-constitution of regions and water infrastructures.
In this afterword, I reflect on three achievements of regional infrastructure and summarise some of the commonalities and differences of the contributions to the special issue.First, I discuss the relational ontologies and epistemologies that the authors use to characterise the multifaceted connections between humans and non-humans as well as the imaginaries that inform the framings of regional infrastructure.I then discuss the territorialising achievements of infrastructuring and regionalising processes that involve aligning hydrological and jurisdictional boundaries, combining different ways of knowing, and forwarding formal and informal relationships to address fragmented conditions.Finally, I summarise the varying forms of contested and consensual politics that are rife with power dynamics and social inequalities.I conclude by proposing a few future directions for infrastructural regionalism that introduce other forms of collective services and complement analytic scholarship with engaged forms of research.

RELATIONS
It is commonplace to define regions based on their socio-economic potential and to emphasise how they contribute to national and international forms of global capitalism.The contributors to this special issue take an alternative approach and argue that regions are much more than convenient geographies of economic activity and, instead, are the outcomes of multiple material, discursive and situated processes.They employ a relational lens to examine these processes and interrogate the multiple durable and tenuous connections that produce specific historical, cultural and political conditions (Karvonen, 2011;Meilinger & Monstadt, 2022).Such a relational perspective produces complex framings of regional infrastructures while also providing deeper insights on how they are constituted and how they change over time.
Attending to the relations that produce regions involves the tracing of networks of humans and non-humans to understand how regions are constituted and the effects that they produce (Walsh et al., 2021).This is emphasised by Taufen et al.'s (2022, in this issue) case study of Puget Sound waterfronts in the Pacific Northwest of the US.They use a landscape perspective to go beyond the socio-economic characterisation of the region by highlighting the alliances between human and non-human actors that involve messy, transitory assemblages.Similarly, Usher (2022, in this issue) describes the importance of materiality in his study of the Singaporean rainwater-harvesting agenda with a particular focus on the geological characteristics of the regional landscape.Land-use and water services are leveraged to address national water security concerns.Meanwhile, Gansauer and Haggerty (2021, in this issue) challenge conventional framings of regions as comprised of a core and periphery.Their analysis of a water supply system in central Montana disrupts the urban bias of regional studies by starting from a rural perspective to forward a networked perspective on regions.
And beyond the observable material characteristics, several authors argue that imaginaries are central to the formulation and continuous development of regions (Davoudi, 2018;Enright, 2022;Levenda et al., 2019).Regional imaginaries do important conceptual and material work by promoting visions of a water-secure, eco-modern state in Singapore (Usher, 2022, in this issue), a green and sustainable Ruhr region in Germany (Zimmermann, 2023, in this issue), a climate-resilient and water-secure urbanised watershed in Lima, Peru (Hoefsloot et al., 2022, in this issue), and an ambitious transnational economic development strategy in Central Africa (Sayan & Nagabhatla, 2022, in this issue).This combination of discursive and tangible processes of infrastructuring enriches our understanding of the multiple junctions, overlaps and connections that produce regions, and how these evolve over time.

TERRITORIALISATION
Regions are much more than spatial containers that reside between the local and national.Instead, they exhibit distinctive characteristics that are produced through the territorialisation of space.The contributors to this special issue illustrate how infrastructuring processes contribute to territorialisation dynamics.With respect to collective water services, this often starts with a commonsense goal of aligning hydrological flows with jurisdictional responsibilities (Zimmermann, 2023, in this issue).There is often a misalignment between watershed extents and the administrative boundaries of government agencies, resulting in a 'no man's land' with little or no governing capacity (Winter & Karvonen, 2022).The territorialisation processes of infrastructural regionalism attempt to harmonise ecological, technological and governing metabolisms to provide collective services and socio-economic benefits through processes of alignment and coconstitution (Taufen et al., 2022, in this issue).
The case studies in this special issue illustrate that territorialisation involves a diverse array of drivers, actions and outcomes.In the case of water security in the watershed catchment that supplies metropolitan Lima, Hoefsloot et al. (2022, in this issue) describe how modern scientific knowledge systems are supplemented with Indigenous knowledge systems informed by tacit, experiential, and context-specific techniques and strategies.The shared threat of future climate uncertainties inspires hybrid ways of knowing that draw upon markedly different cultural traditions to inform infrastructural design, construction and management.And Sayan and Nagabhatla's (2022, in this issue) study of the Transaqua interbasin water-transfer project in Central Africa illustrates how territorialisation extends far beyond regional boundaries to enrol national and international stakeholders (see also Walling, 2022, in this issue).
These territorialisation processes do not produce smooth and equalised regions with comprehensive water services.Instead, regional infrastructures are patchy and their rollout and management results in hotspots and coldspots, ruptures and intensities.This is highlighted in Walling's (2022, in this issue) case studies of two cities in the Midwestern and Northeastern US that are highly fragmented due to deindustrialisation and decentralisation, overlapping and conflicting jurisdictions, and public and private ownership of infrastructure networks.Similarly, Gansauer and Haggerty's (2021, in this issue) case study of central Montana involves a highly variegated landscape of geographical inequality due to the uneven distribution of costs and benefits of collective services in an agricultural region of low-population density.Meanwhile, Milligan et al. (2022, in this issue) emphasise how the racial diversity of metropolitan Atlanta is absent in the regional imaginary of the tri-state catchment area and result in a narrow and selective infrastructure agenda.A key contribution of infrastructural regionalism is to identify and describe these uneven territorialisation processes and provide a nuanced perspective on how regional infrastructures come into being.

POLITICS
The relational and territorial achievements of infrastructural regionalism are saturated with political machinations that play out in a range of public and private venues.This is clearly evident in Milligan et al.'s (2022, in this issue) social justice analysis of the vast tri-state drainage basin that supplies water to metropolitan Atlanta.They show how powerful stakeholders forward a monolithic regional framing of water flows to reinforce and amplify longstanding racial inequalities.Meanwhile, Usher's (2022, in this issue) case study of the water catchment agenda in Singapore provides a stark counterexample of how infrastructural regionalism involves the consolidation and centralisation of state power through techno-rationalist management and the forced integration of the rural landscape into the urban water supply strategy.The regional infrastructure politics of Singapore also exhibits multiple social inequalities, but there is a lack of dissent due to the totalitarian governance approach.
Meanwhile, several articles in this special issue describe various forms of consensus politics that involve the brokering and intermediation of stakeholder goals to realise co-benefits.Coalitions and partnerships of public, private and non-governmental organisations are used to knit together fragmented jurisdictions through ad hoc, temporary alliances that can be characterised as politics beyond the state (Taufen et al., 2022, in this issue).Walling (2022, in this issue) describes the fragmented governance capacity of two deindustrialising regions in the US and the attempts by state actors to support regional partnerships that align stakeholder interests (see also Gansauer & Haggerty, 2021, in this issue).Zimmermann's (2023, in this issue) case study of the Ruhr region highlights two pathways of institution-building, one that follows a conventional elected governmental body and another that champions a voluntary membership association.These forms of consensus politics are informed by an ethos of collectivism and shared ownership, but continue to embody strong power dynamics and varying degrees of democratic participation.This is clearly illustrated in Sayan and Nagabhatla's (2022, in this issue) description of the public-private partnerships that are driving the interbasin water-transfer scheme in Central Africa.They argue that these strategic and opportunistic partnerships support a new form of colonialism where national and international actors are exerting their influence to realise economic gains by exploiting the fear of water scarcity.
The emphasis on the politics of regional infrastructuring opens up the diffuse and opaque processes of territorialisation to scrutiny and critique.There is a potential to develop pluralist and agonistic forms of governance that can champion dissenting voices and diverging goals that embody a sustainable and just regional imaginary.However, there are significant challenges in providing effective leadership, attracting sufficient finances and enrolling stakeholders in the pursuit of a common regional vision.

FUTURE TRAJECTORIES OF INFRASTRUCTURAL REGIONALISM
The relational, territorial and political achievements of regional water infrastructures as described by the contributors to this special issue provide significant inspiration for future study.The articles here focus on water infrastructures, while the conceptual frameworks and analytic approaches could be readily applied to other collective services such as energy, mobility, healthcare, housing, climate resilience and digitalisation.Comparing and contrasting these different types of regional infrastructures would provide additional insights into how technologies, ecologies and humans are interconnected.It would also be fruitful to employ a nexus lens (Ghodsvali et al., 2019) to study the conjunctions of water and other collective services such as energy and food to reveal the frictions and synergies among multiple systems of provision.
In addition, the strong analytic focus of the contributions to this special issue could be complemented with normative scholarship that supports the realisation of alternative configurations of regions and infrastructures.This would involve transdisciplinary scholarship that engages academics and non-academics in collaborative research activities to influence how regions and infrastructures are performed (Dickey et al., 2022;Karvonen et al., 2021;Webb et al., 2018).Participatory action research, citizen science, responsible research and innovation, and related approaches provide opportunities for scholars to jump into the fray of regional politics to influence relational framings and territorial dynamics.Academics can work alongside politicians, policymakers, businesses, non-profit organisations, community groups and residents to connect theoretical frameworks and empirical findings with on-the-ground processes of policy development, activist engagement and democratic deliberation.This would serve as a direct avenue for infrastructural regionalism scholarship to contribute to urban and regional transformations (Torrens et al., 2021).
To conclude, regional water infrastructures provide essential collective services in the Global North and South, but they tend to be understudied when compared with local water infrastructures.The contributions to this special issue help to fill this knowledge gap by analysing the relational, territorial and political implications of regional water infrastructures.The authors engage with the formal and informal, the local and global, the banal and spectacular, and the real and discursive ways that regions and infrastructures are co-constitutive while creating a 'red thread' to connect the past, present and future of regional infrastructures.These insights and approaches will serve as a strong foundation for understanding and steering regional infrastructural dynamics in the coming decades.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.