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Much of the literature on gender dimensions of community-based water governance focuses on irrigation systems in rural areas. Largely overlooked is how gender dynamics influence participation in community-based urban water governance systems. To address this gap, we use insights from Feminist Political Ecology (FPE) to examine whether and how community-based governance of drinking water in an urban context leads to (in)equitable gender participation and decision making. Using household surveys (n = 415), key informant interviews (n = 19), focus-group discussions (n = 14), we explore gender dynamics and power relations underpinning participation, decision making processes, and employment and benefit sharing arrangements among Water User Associations (WUAs) in the urban informal settlements of Lilongwe, Malawi. We find that WUAs do not guarantee equitable gender participation. Rather, inequitable participation is simply reified through: (1) gendered representation in WUA structures; (2) socio-cultural practices and women’s self-exclusion; and (3) community micro-politics and power relations. Our findings contradict the notion that community-based governance of water leads to equitable participation and empowerment of women. The policy implications are that without systematic efforts to incorporate women’s needs, interests, and voices, so-called participatory approaches to water governance will only serve to suppress women’s agency and reinforce existing gender-based inequalities. Future work will explore the pathways to women’s leadership in the WUAs and interrogate how women on the board and executive committees navigate their way up the hierarchy, their experiences in a male-dominated water governance scheme and their recommendations for how WUAs can improve women’s participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Paris' successful bid for the 2024 Summer Olympics arises in the midst of a grand rethinking of the politics of regional and local development in the Île-de-France region. Paris 2024 also emerges at a time when the International Olympic Committee (IOC) is struggling to find cities willing to host the Olympics and has introduced a series of reforms to help recruit and motivate potential bid cities to consider how an Olympic project might be integrated into existing patterns of urban development. This exploratory research examines the blending of the Grand Paris regional development project and the 2024 Olympic ambition. Incorporating results from semi-structured interviews with seven key informants who possess specialized knowledge and are involved with governance mechanisms of the Île-de-France region and urban megaevent development, we explore how the Paris 2024 Olympic Games are being leveraged to facilitate metropolitan transformation. In the highly fragmented institutional setting of the Île-de-France region, negotiating site locations for Olympic facilities and establishing legacy or heritage objectives for the Olympic Games has important implications for the development of an institutional framework for metropolitan governance. • Project-based governance transformation • The use of mega-events to foster a vision of metropolitan consensus in a capitalist democratic context • The leveraging of the Olympic bidding and hosting process to produce institutional change • International Olympic Committee's Agenda 2020 and the potential to inform territorial dynamics [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]