Consuming more than just water a discourse analysis of urban water management in singapore from 1960 2009

Acknowledgments
The process of writing this thesis has been an invaluable journey. This is thus a brief
attempt to thank all those who have helped me along the way and made this experience
an unforgettable and precious one.
Dear Papa and Mummy, thank you so much for believing in me and providing me with
your enduring love and concern. This would not have been possible without the support
of my dearest family members.
A/P Maribeth Erb, thank you for your supervision and for taking the effort to read
through my countless drafts.
Many thanks to the wonderful people I have met in the graduate programme, and who
have make the experience a bearable one with all your laughter, smile, kind words,
encouragement and support.
Pam, thanks for the encouragement and insightful help along the way, and of course, the
panic sessions we had towards the end were wonderful.
Daniel Tham, you have been a great help, allowing me to go to your room and offering
your little red chair for consultations and brainstorming.
Eugene Liow, thank you for all the books off your overloaded shelves and the bouncing
off of ideas for my thesis.
Thomas Charles Alexandra Barker, cheers to the squash sessions and the random talks.
Seuty, Audrey, Chand, Mel, Mamta, Johan and Fiona, thanks for the countless laughter
we have shared and for the constant support and encouragement.
Sahoo, for the insights about state and society.
Manuel and Trin, thank you for being such wonderful friends and classmates.
Allan, Chris, Fadzli, you have been a great company to have in school.
Jialing, GeYun, HuiHsien, QiongYuan, LiHui, ZhenYi, MingHua, for the nice chat
sessions and allowing me to patrol the other room as my break.
Vincent, my tutor for SC2101, though we met again only after so long and for such a
short while, you had been a great help in listening to my thesis ideas and helping me
make sense of it.
And of course, many many thanks to any others who I might have left out.

i


Table of Contents
Acknowledgments --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- i
Table of Contents --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ii
Abstract --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- iv
List of Tables --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- v
List of Diagrams and Pictures------------------------------------------------------------------- v
List of Abbreviations------------------------------------------------------------------------------ v
Chapter 1 – Urban Water and Power Relations -------------------------------------------- 1
1.1 Introduction ------------------------------------------------------------------- 1
1.2 The Relationship between Society and Urban Water Resources ------ 3
1.2.1 Understanding Power Dynamics within Water Politics ---- 3
1.2.2 The Flow of Urban Water as a Politicized Process ---------- 5
1.3 The Research Framework --------------------------------------------------- 7
1.3.1 Contextualizing the Research Problem: Discourses
Surrounding Water Management for a ‘Small Island with
Limited Water Resources’ --------------------------------------- 7
1.3.2 Theoretical Framework: The Flow of Urban Water and
Power Relations ------------------------------------------------- 12
1.4 Methodology: Discourse Analysis of Urban Water Management ---- 16
1.4.1 Studying Discourses and Making Sense of Them ----------- 16
1.4.2 Methods: Making Sense of the Managing of Water
Resources in Singapore ----------------------------------------- 18
1.5 Outline of Chapters -------------------------------------------------------- 21
Chapter 2 – Urbanizing Water and Sanitation in Colonial Singapore ---------------- 24
2.1 Developing Urban Water for a Colonial Municipal Town------------- 24
2.2 Constructing and Contesting the Urban Water System ---------------- 26
2.3 Dealing with Water and Sanitation for an Expanding Population ---- 27

2.4 The Beginning of Singapore’s Water Relationship with Malaysia---- 29
2.5 Making Sense of the Colonial Implication ----------------------------- 31
Chapter 3 – Water as a Precious Commodity: Development and Growth in the
1960s-1970s ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 34
3.1 Industrialization and Urbanization: Constructing Public Utilities as
Resources -------------------------------------------------------------------- 34
3.2 Interpreting Demand and Supply: Developing Singapore’s Urban
Water Management System ----------------------------------------------- 38
3.3 Managing an Independent Singapore: Urban Renewal and
Reorganization -------------------------------------------------------------- 42
3.4 Constructing a Boundary of Social Responsibility in a ‘Clean’
Singapore -------------------------------------------------------------------- 47
3.5 Anti-Pollution Campaign: Dominating Urban Water and Urban
Environment ----------------------------------------------------------------- 49
3.6 Debating Wastage: The Subjectivities of Water Scarcity-------------- 54
ii


3.7 Controlling Domestic Consumption: Water as a Limited Resource—58
Chapter 4 – “Don’t Use Water Like There’s No Tomorrow”: Changing Ideas
About Water in the 1980s-1990s ---------------------------------------------- 62
4.1 Increasing Affluence and Economic Restructuring in the 1980s ----- 62
4.2 Water Conservation Campaigns in the Early-1980s ------------------- 66
4.3 Promoting Efficiency in the Non-Domestic Sectors-------------------- 71
4.4 Engaging the Ideology of Possibilism------------------------------------ 73
4.5 Engaging Ideals of Sustainable Development: Conserving Water
for the Future ---------------------------------------------------------------- 76
4.6 The Asian Financial Crisis ------------------------------------------------ 84
4.7 Overcoming Crisis: Embedding a Discourse of Ecological
Modernization --------------------------------------------------------------- 87

Chapter 5 – Developing Water Technologies and Creating a ‘City of Gardens
and Water’ in the 2000s -------------------------------------------------------- 90
5.1 Constructing Singapore’s ‘Four National Taps’: Technological ----- 90
Development as National Development
5.2 ‘Mind Over Matter’: Legitimizing NEWater as a National Tap------ 95
5.3 Closing the Water-Loop: Totalizing Control over Urban Water---- 101
5.4 Developing Singapore’s Water Industry-------------------------------- 107
5.5 Managing Urban Water, Managing People ---------------------------- 112
5.6 Consuming a ‘City of Gardens and Water’ Lifestyle ---------------- 116
Chapter 6 – Conclusion ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 126
6.1 Urban Water and Governance ------------------------------------------- 126
6.2 Making Sense of Discourses Surrounding Urban Water Management
in Singapore -----------------------------------------------------------------129
6.2.1 Developmentalism ----------------------------------------------- 129
6.2.2 Pragmatism ------------------------------------------------------- 130
6.2.3 Environmental Possibilism ------------------------------------- 131
6.2.4 Ecological Modernization -------------------------------------- 132
6.3 Urban Water Politics: Policies Implications and Further
Development --------------------------------------------------------------- 134
Bibliography ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 136

iii


Abstract
Water as a resource is crucial for the survival of human beings and the subsequent
formative development of human civilizations. Such an attestation of the importance of
water however is not to suggest that there is any intrinsic value of water per se. Instead, it
is more appropriate to argue that the relevance of water facilitates its politicization, and it
is in fact such processes of politicization that shape and affect the relationship between

the society and water resources. Hence, within the urban context, urban water is
inevitably even more complicated, as it is further subjected to the dynamism of the
society, polity and economy of the urban context. Accordingly, urban water is invariably
bounded with the power relations of the urban context, and comes to be affected by as
well as is influential to the flow of everyday life within the urban condition. In the case of
Singapore, the state has often brought up the claim that Singapore is a small country with
limited water resources. Such a claim however is not a fixed one, and has been
discursively engaged in different ways during different periods. From more overt
punishment to discipline the population and to ensure sufficient water for development in
the earlier years of independence, the focus has been shifting towards that of regularizing
the relevance of an integrated urban water management system where the population
have come to identify strongly with the consumption of a ‘City of Gardens and Water’
lifestyle. This thesis adopts a discourse analysis of urban water management in Singapore
from the 1960s to the 2000s. In order to facilitate such a study, this thesis adopts Michel
Foucault’s conceptualization of power and knowledge alongside Zygmunt Bauman’s
postmodern engagement of the aesthetic of consumption to explain the power relations
related with urban water. This thesis argues that the discursive shift in urban water
management in Singapore has been characterized by an increasing softening of the state’s
rhetoric of control over the years which allows for the developmental state to continue its
interventionist style of governance within everyday life.

iv


List of Tables
Table 3.1: Water Consumption and Population Patterns from 1965-1980 ---------------- 44
Table 3.2: Singapore’s Reservoirs and Storage Capacity ----------------------------------- 61
Table 4.1: Water Consumption and Population Patterns from 1980-1989 ---------------- 64
Table 4.3: Water Consumption and Population Patterns from 1990-1999 ---------------- 76
Table 4.4: Water Tariff and Water Conservation Tax in 1997 ----------------------------- 86

Table 4.5: Water Price Restructuring 1998-2000 -------------------------------------------- 87
Table 5.1: NEWater and Industrial Water Sales, 2004-2009 -------------------------------- 98
Table 5.2: Non-Domestic Water Consumption in Singapore, 2000-2009 ----------------- 98
Table 5.3: Domestic Water Consumption and Population Patterns from 2000-2009 -- 106

List of Figures and Pictures
Figure 3.1: Poster for Singapore’s Anti-Pollution Campaign in 1973 -------------------- 51
Figure 5.1: Singapore’s Water-Loop ---------------------------------------------------------- 102
Figure 5.2: Artist Impression of Waterfront living at Punggol Town ------------------ 119
Picture 5.1: Water Sports at Marina Basin --------------------------------------------------- 121
Picture 5.2: Water Sports at Marina Basin (2) ---------------------------------------------- 121
Picture 5.3: Family Outing at the Marina Barrage ------------------------------------------ 122
Picture 5.4: Picnicking and Outdoor Activities for the Family at the Marina Barrage - 122
Picture 5.5: Firework Celebrations around the Marina Barrage Area -------------------- 122
Figure 5.3: Marina Barrage: Sustainable Singapore Gallery ------------------------------- 124

List of Abbreviations
ABC Waters Program--------------- Active, Beautiful and Clean Waters Programme
DTSS ---------------------------------- Deep Tunnel Sewerage System
EDB ----------------------------------- Economic Development Board
ENV ----------------------------------- Ministry of Environment
GDP ----------------------------------- Gross Domestic Product
HDB ----------------------------------- Housing and Development Board of Singapore
ENV ----------------------------------- Ministry of Environment
MEWR -------------------------------- Ministry of Environment and Water Resources
MTI ------------------------------------ Ministry of Trade and Industry
NRF ------------------------------------ National Research Foundation
NSS ------------------------------------ Nature Society (Singapore)
NWC ----------------------------------- National Wage Council of Singapore
PAP ------------------------------------ People’s Action Party

PUB ------------------------------------ Public Utilities Board of Singapore
SIWW---------------------------------- Singapore International Water Week
WEH Program------------------------ Water Efficient Homes program
WELS---------------------------------- Water Efficiency Labeling Scheme
WHO ---------------------------------- World Health Organization
WCT ----------------------------------- Water Conservation Tax

v


Chapter One
Urban Water and Power Relations
Often major water innovations leveraged the economic, population, and territorial
expansion that animated world history. Those unable to overcome the challenge of being
farthest removed from access to the best water resources, by contrast, were invariably
among history’s poor.
Steven Solomon
Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power and Civilization
1.1 Introduction
Water, as a resource, has been critical to not just the survival, but also the
formative development of society (Wittfogel 1957; Leach 1959; Adams 1966; Price
1994; Frug 1999; Dolatyar and Gray 2000; Boomgaard 2007). On the most fundamental
level, adequate access to sufficiently clean water is needed to keep a population alive and
healthy. At the next level, water is crucial for the cultivation of agriculture and livestock
to feed the human population. At the third level, water has often been engaged as a
crucial resource for various further developments within the globalised capitalist system,
such as using it within the process of mass production and manufacturing, the subsequent
processes of storage and transportation, and also increasingly for consumption purposes
in the service and tourism sectors. Hence, water resources are of high importance to all
societies, and have always been a key concern for management, with this tending to be

even more so for those with limited or constrained access to a sufficient supply of water
(Swyngedouw 2004; Varis 2006; Lemos 2008; Whiteley et al. 2008; Miller 2009). Such
attribution of the importance of water, however, does not mean that subsequent process
of water management is merely an issue of supply and demand, as the relevance lies more
within the process of accessing, engaging and mobilizing water in tandem with the larger
social, economic and political dynamics.
As Staddon (2010:6) identifies, “water has long been elemental not only to the
human imagination, but also to survival, [and] beyond that, social order and spatial
organization”, where much of the history of successful civilizations has often been
organized around their abilities to secure sufficient access to water resources. With water
1


being an important resource for developmental purposes, its subsequent management,
especially within the urban context, tends to be highly politicized, and is often affected
by, as well as influential towards, existing power relations (Swyngedouw 2004; Ekers
and Loftus 2008). The complexities of politics surrounding urban water thus take place
on various levels, including that of securing water sources, managing and distributing of
water supply, and the ideological engagement of discourses surrounding the management
process. The processes involved in water politics are not mere technical issues, nor are
they neutral objectivities. Instead, the relationships that have come to exist between
societies and water are and always will be embedded within the complexities of the
society, polity and economy. As Luke (1997:xi) argues, “nothing in nature is simply
given within society, environmental terms must be assigned significance by every social
group that mobilize them as meaningful constructs”.

This thesis seeks to shed light on the complexities surrounding the formation of
urban water, and shows how it is a politicized process within a dialectical relationship
with society, polity and economy. Through a discourse analysis of Singapore’s water
management system, this thesis attempts to explore how discourses surrounding urban

water management in Singapore have been constructed and represented over the years
since the country’s independence, and studies how the discourses have been affected by,
and have themselves affected the country’s political economy. Subsequently, this thesis
seeks to further deliberate on the power relations associated with urban water. This thesis
plans to show how social control has been enacted by the developmental state as it
developed its urban water management system, alongside the consequent formation of an
increasingly consumerist and anthropocentric relationship between society and urban
water in Singapore. It is the argument of this thesis that the discursive shift in urban water
management in Singapore has been depicted within an increasing softening of the state’s
rhetoric of control over the years, and it is precisely because of such engagement that the
state is able to continue its interventionist style of governance within everyday life.

2


1.2 The Relationship between Society and Water Resources
1.2.1 Understanding Power Dynamics within Water Politics
The significance of the relationship between water and governance has been
discussed by Wittfogel (1957) in his historical study of the ‘hydraulic society’, where he
hypothesized that power relations of the early Chinese civilization largely existed through
an intricate system of water management that adopted a complex irrigation scheme. He
argued that the Chinese state was a despotic one, where control over the population was
maintained through the state’s overt centralized system of handling the civilization’s
water supply amidst arid conditions. Wittfogel places a strong emphasis on the
centralized management dimension, and it is arguably correct to acknowledge the
relevance given to the power of the state in terms of control over the flow of water.
However, Wittfogel’s claim that the Chinese state was despotic overly emphasizes the
authority of a centralized management system to control water resources, while
neglecting much of the varying nuances of other variables of the polity, society and
economy.

The social and political relevance of water was also highlighted by Staddon
(2010), who argues that much of the development of human civilizations was organized
around access to waterways for water supply, transport and trade. Historically, it has been
widely acknowledged that much of the capacity to gain access to adequate water supply
was important to the development and expansion of human conquests, and much
contestation and struggle has been centred on issues related to water (Lowi 1993;
Greaves 1998; Dolatyar and Gray 2000; Whitely et al. 2008). Staddon notes that water
resources were increasingly crucial to social and economic dimensions of nations, and
argues for the need to manage water resources appropriately as this would be important to
ensuring a continuing development of the European countries that he was addressing.
Staddon managed to acknowledge the complexities involved in water resource
management, but stopped short at actually developing the intricacies of the processes
involved within the water management system.

3


More often than not, the very process of securing water further involves
interactions between different parties with various vested interests, including those from
local, regional, and international arenas. With the increasing global concern towards
environmental problems, there have been many debates and policies surrounding
environmental issues that have led to an increasing politicization of the environment
(Hajer 1995; Yearly 1996; Weller 2006; Sassen 2006). With the impacts and
complications of globalization, water issues, alongside the focus on environmental
concerns have also been further complicated by the intricacies of the global political
economy. Despite such global development, Dolatyar and Gray (2000), in their study on
water politics in the Middle East, argue that it is impossible to have any universal
explanation for water conflicts, and there is a need to engage and understand the
contextual conditions surrounding water politics. As Dolatyar and Gray (2000:207)

further suggest, water scarcity issues have increasingly been globalized, but the global
conflict over water is inevitably embedded within the context of other ongoing “political,
legal, economic and cultural factors”. The focus of environmentally and ecologically
charged new policies that have gained popularity is not only about resolving the
environmental problems; they are often means of contesting political control of the
environment and/or legitimacy of a state in regulating the environment and
environmentally related concerns (Rutherford 1999; Forsyth 2003).

Urban water politics is often complicated by complexities of access, ownership,
distribution and management of water resources which cannot be resolved by mere
engagement of demand and supply. Even the idea of scarcity cannot be divorced from the
social context, and as Johnston and Donahue (1998:2) relate, “water scarcity is more than
a matter of decreased supply or increased demand. Water scarcity is influenced by a
variety of factors, including topography, climate, economic activities, population growth,
cultural beliefs, perceptions and traditions and power relations”. Much debate
surrounding water issues is often premised upon controlling the flow of water, where
various political, economic and social actors contest over the ownership and distribution
of the water supply (Barlow 2007). Notably, the idea of scarcity is often an inter-

4


subjective one where the concern tends to be shaped by the perceived significance of
relative scarcity and subsequent engagement with that issue.
1.2.2 The Flow of Urban Water as a Politicized Process
The complexities surrounding water resources are significantly complicated by
the effects of the rapidly expanding urban context; as Harvey (1973:22) notes, “the city is
manifestly a complicated thing”, where the effects of the urban condition cannot be
comprehended in a universal or unilateral manner. The significance of water in the urban
context is highlighted by Swyngedouw (2004:37) who argues that “the urbanization

process is predicated upon the mastering and engineering of nature’s water, with the
ecological conquest of water as a necessary prerequisite for the expansion and growth of
the city”. Despite the tendency to take water for granted within the process of urban
development, it is undeniable that water plays a critical role in the dynamics of the urban
context, and is often a key part of the existing power relations of the city. It is therefore
necessary to approach urban water as a socially constituted concept; how it is used,
perceived and understood are invariably affected by and influential towards the
dynamism of power relations existing within the city. These power relations affect the
management of urban water (Bennett 1995; Buttel 1997).

The political economy of water is crucial to the further development of the city.
No matter how naturalized water may seem, it is always politicized within the urbanized
context. Furthermore, Swyngedouw (2004:1) argues that “urban water is necessarily
transformed, ‘metabolized’ water, not only in terms of its physico-chemical
characteristics, but also in terms of its social characteristics and its symbolic and cultural
meaning”. Therefore, the meanings attributed to water consumption within the urban
context can differ accordingly, and as Shove (2003a:198) suggests, “the vast majority of
environmentally significant consumption is not just a matter of individual choice... It is
instead bound up with, and constitutive of, irredeemably social practices ‘governed by
norms like respectability, appropriateness, competence and excellence’”. Apart from
water being a physical product, the consumption of urban water is also about consuming
the meanings associated with urban water (Featherstone 2000; Bauman 2005).
5


The complexities of urban water in the contemporary context is also further
engaged by Gandy (2004), who argues that with the evolving engagement of water
networks within cities, there exists an emerging dynamic of ‘fragmentation’ and
‘differentiation’ in relation to which urban spaces are being constantly shaped and
reshaped. The idea of fragmentation and differentiation, as Gandy argues, is based upon

how water management has increasingly become more complicated and diversified, with
different private and non-governmental agencies entering the picture as water shifts from
being a public good towards a marketable commodity. It is arguable that regulating the
flow of urban water is a crucial component for further development of urban conditions.
However, an understanding of such developments is not as simple as attempting to
improve any sort of water infrastructure; it is also about engaging the discursive
dimensions of a water management system to understand the formation and impacts of
urban water.

The formation and implementation of policies surrounding urban water
management are dependent on the socio-political and historical context of the urban
condition (Asthana 2009). Even though policies with regards to the management of water
for the urban context are most commonly seen as mere technical solutions to water
issues, the reality is often much more complex. Existing policies surrounding waterrelated concerns are largely the result of the dynamic interactions between various actors
and vested interests, and are often depicted within the discursive representation of the
management of urban water as a naturalized process. Yet, such naturalized
representations are inter-subjectively constituted, and as Christoff (2000:210) argues,
environmental policies are not simply reactions to solve environmental issues but are
reactions to the constantly “evolving international discourse in response to commonly
perceived environmental problems [and] …reflect an increasingly sophisticated political
response by government and industry to[wards] popular mobilization such as nuclear
power, acid rain, biodiversity preservation, ozone depletion and induced climate change”.
Often, urban water is handled by a centralized system of sorts in which water supply is
managed for the urban city. Accordingly, the concern is largely about controlling and

6


dominating the flow of water, and subsequently controlling the flow of everyday life
(Swyngedouw 2004).

This thesis suggests there is thus a need to move beyond the apparent benevolent
perceptions of environmental policies, especially the taken-for-granted aspect of urban
water management, and to go deeper to examine the significance of associated discourses
to better understand the complex relationship between society and environment. Within
the larger political economy of the environment, that “the new environmental conflict is
not just [an] environmental problem but one which is a complex and continuous struggle
over the definition and the meaning of the environmental problem itself” (Hajer
1995:14). The very idea of urban water management is not simply about a reaction
towards any objective concerns about water issues, but it is also a process that has been
problematized and politicized within the larger dynamics of the urban context. Hence,
this thesis suggests, there is a need for a more critical review of discourses surrounding
urban water management to understand how water has been constructed and valued, and
how this is related to how water is managed in the context of the city.
1.3 The Research Framework
1.3.1 Contextualizing the Research Problem: Discourses Surrounding Water
Management for a ‘Small Island with Limited Water Resource’
During the British colonization in the 1800s and with the rapid industrialization
and urbanization adopted by the post-colonial developmental state after independence,
the management of urban water in Singapore has long been an important component of
the country’s administration (Yeoh 2003; Tortajada 2006). Even though rainfall tends to
be plentiful and consistent, there exists a physical limitation in terms of capturing,
retaining and storing much of this rainwater; without intervention much of this potential
water supply is easily lost (Lee 2003).1 With a land area of only 710.2 square kilometers,
Singapore’s geographical limitation has historically constrained the local water supply as
1

Historically, Singapore has had limited local water supply as local means of water catchment have been
largely constrained by land space concerns; it is only more recently that technological breakthroughs have
allowed Singapore to overcome this concern. In 2008, Singapore captured a total rainfall of 2,325mm and

this is representative of figures over the past five years. The highest annual figure in the past five years was
2,886 mm in 2007 and the lowest at 1,931mm in 2005 (Singapore Yearbook of Statistics. 2009).

7


the country could only retain minimal water supplies through the island’s few natural
sites of water catchment (Lee 2005).2 Recently these limitations have been compounded
by a heavy population density, which reached 6,814 per square kilometer in 2008.3 The
already limited land spaces and the ensuing development thus further constrained the
island’s capacity for creating more water catchment areas. Dense population in Singapore
also means water demand far exceeds what the country can locally supply. 4

In order to accommodate the population’s demand for water, Singapore‘s urban
water management system has been shaped and affected by its geopolitics. Much focus
has been invested in the negotiations of buying water from neighboring countries such as
Malaysia and Indonesia. The contentious debates over the pricing of water with Malaysia,
the end of the first of two water agreements with Malaysia in 2011, and the unfulfilled
talks of buying water from the Riau Islands in Indonesia have had considerable impact on
Singapore’s water supply and its ensuing water management system. Such issues of
limited local water resources, alongside the contentious international relationships over
water concerns, have not stopped the small city-state from developing, however, and
increasing its consumption of water (Tortajada 2006). On the contrary, Singapore has
managed to adopt various strategies to develop rapidly while expanding the country’s
consumption of water over the years, and has even turned water resources into one of its
strategic investments towards the twenty-first century through its successful
technological developments. The discursive component in

constructing the varying

capacities of the state as being able to overcome the supposed problem of potential water
shortages over the years, and to push for the idealized notion of growth and development,
is therefore a significant one worth examining.

Over the years, the developmental state has managed to create an urban water
management system which has adopted various measures to deal with the shortage of
water during different periods. The policies surrounding urban water management have
been successful in dealing with the various concerns surrounding Singapore’s water
2

Singapore Yearbook of Statistics. 2009.
Ibid.
4
Ibid.
3

8


resources, alongside the developmental state’s striving for growth and development. As
Hajer (1995:15) argues, “policies are not devised to solve problems; problems also have
to be devised to be able to create policies”. The management of urban water is not a mere
outcome of water management policies, but the policies are also in turn part of the
interactive process embedded within the discursive formation of urban water. Amidst the
developmental state’s urban water management system, the claim that Singapore is a
‘small island with limited water resources’ has consistently been adopted over the years,
and has significantly affected and shaped much of the flow of urban water in the citystate. The persistence of such a claim, however, does not mean that the position of the
state has remained unchanged over the years. Instead, considerable relevance lies in how
the developmental state has successfully manipulated varying understandings and
interpretations of a discourse of “smallness” and “limited resources”, and managed them

with other concordant discourses to construct and validate a continual legitimacy of its
governance over the years.

Such reflections about urban water as being discursive are not to suggest that the
issues surrounding water-related concerns have not really existed in Singapore, and/or
were simply constructed by the developmental state for overt purposes of dominating the
population. Instead, I am suggesting a more nuanced understanding with reference to
Goh’s (2001:23) conceptualization of nature as one which is “inalienable from the intersubjective realm”. It would be problematic to simply see nature as being intrinsically
meaningful, as it is largely subjected to normative forces; this idea is aptly highlighted by
Turner (2008:196) who argues that “nature exists as an external, objective reality, but is it
also transformed by labor and socially appropriated, becoming an internal reality of
human development”. How water as a resource is being engaged and experienced is what
matters to a society.

How water is integrated within everyday life in Singapore has changed over the
years. Water has shifted from being seen as a limited resource threatening Singapore’s
survival in early independence to a strategic resource for economic investment and the
realization of a sustainable and livable city. In contrast to most authoritarian governments
9


in developing countries, governance by the developmental state in Singapore has not
been a mere case of outright or coercive authoritarianism, but has been largely discursive
(Castells 1988). Most of the state’s actions have been based upon hegemonic governance
through strategic management of social and political apparatuses, and not overtly
oppressive or violent acts (Chua 1995). Amidst the underlying developmentalist rhetoric
adopted since independence, the focus on developing the environment for the progression
of Singapore has persisted with the engagement of the logic of pragmatism that the state
has adopted and has convinced the society to adhere to. Chua (1995:58) identifies, such
adherence to pragmatism adopted in Singapore as “a conscious formulation of its leaders

as an explicit ideology”, which allows the developmental state to push for much action in
the name of pragmatic developments for Singapore.5 “Pragmatism” focuses not only
what is being done, but on what can be done. In such a context, Kong and Yeoh
(1996:402) also reflect on the logic of pragmatism amidst the conceptualization of
‘nature’ in Singapore; they argue that nature has in fact been socially constructed “to
satisfy human needs and purposes by colonial and post-colonial state agencies”.

The ideological relevance of the capacity to deal with pragmatic concerns was
further reinforced as Singapore became increasingly affluent from the 1980s onward.
With this the political rhetoric began to shift towards ideas of “possibilism”, where the
focus was on the possibility of overcoming limitations and achieving development.
Savage (1997), who discusses the ideological dominance of ‘environmental possibilism’,
acknowledges that ‘anthropocentrism’ is a determining factor for environment-related
actions. Savage defines ‘anthropocentrism’, as an awareness of the inevitable
consequences of human interactions on the environment because of development, which
eventually leads to the necessity of mitigation. The ideological significance of
environmental possibilism is that a need is constructed for the state to overcome natural
environmental constraints for the economic and social betterment of Singapore. The
developmental state thus manages to retain relevance by reifying the capacities of it’s
environmental policies to provide for the continual development of Singapore. In this
5

Such development has been prevalent since the early years of independence, and has also been reflected
by Ooi (1995), who talks about the relevance of pragmatism to the environmental planning process of
Singapore, albeit in a more condescending manner.

10


context, “environmental possibilism” becomes a passive and reactionary ‘fact’ that is

inevitable, and supports a conviction of the state’s capacity to react to the country’s
adverse conditions.

However, as a post-industrial economy began to develop in Singapore, the
reactionary account of possibilism was enhanced by a discourse of ecological
modernization. According to Hajer (1995:32), “ecological modernization is basically a
modernist and technocratic approach to the environment that suggests that there is a
techno-institutional fix for present problems … [and is often premised upon concepts of]
efficiency,

technological

innovation,

techno-scientific

management,

procedural

integration and coordinated management”. The significance of the discourse of ecological
modernization is that it departs from possibilism’s reactionary mode, and is in itself, an
active component. Under the discourse of ecological modernization, the ecology is
defined and construed as a significant realm of its own within the context of progress
under the ideals of modernization (Christoff 2000; Spaargaren and Vilet 2000; Pello et al.
2000; Mol and Sonnerfeld 2000). The state has constructed its position as one that not
only ensures Singapore’s progress amidst environmental constraints, but also embeds
Singapore, through its management system, within the ideals of modernization. The
discursive relevance lies in how Singapore not only negotiates environmental constraints,
but actively engages in defining a mutually reinforcing relationship between the society

and the surrounding ecology.

In attempting to make sense of the subsequent development of the urban
environment, there is the need to be critical of taking normalized nature for granted, and
“challenging [a view] which simply objectif[ies] nature as the Other outside of [the]
social/ human” (Vogel 1996:9). In order to better understand the developments of
Singapore’s urban water management system in with the context of the broader political
economy, it is necessary to critically explore and make sense of the intricacies of the
discourses surrounding the management of the urban water system, where changes are
being closely tied with the development of both the nation and the state.

11


1.3.2 Theoretical Framework: The Flow of Urban Water and Power Relations
In this thesis, I suggest that urban water resource management in Singapore has
been discursively shaped by the developmental state to help legitimize its position of
power. As Swyngedouw (2006:118-119) argues, “environmental and social changes codetermine each other”; there is a need to understand that “questions of socioenvironment(al) sustainability are therefore fundamentally political questions”. In order
to better address the complexities of power relations existing within the management of
urban water, there is a need to further engage the intricacies of power formation. I utilize
Foucault (1995:194) who highlights that “power produces, it produces reality; it produces
domains of objects and rituals of truth” to understand how urban water is embedded in
everyday life and is not a straightforward object, but is interdependent with the power
relations existing within the city.

In order to make sense of the capacity of urban water management to legitimate
not just development, but also power relations in the urban context, it is necessary to
move beyond the technicalities of water management to engage the discursive shifts and
discursive structures embedded within urban water management. To further an
understanding of discourses surrounding urban water, I engage with the idea that the

relation between power and knowledge is a fluid one; Foucault (1995:265) elaborated
“we should be trying to study power not on the basis of primitive terms of the
relationship, but on the basis of the relationship itself, to the extent that it is the
relationship itself that determines the elements on which it bears”. My concern in this
thesis is to study how power relations have been created and maintained during different
time periods of Singapore’s history, within the framework of a governance that has been
legitimated to control and manage the flow of urban water.

One way of gaining an insight into governance in Singapore is to examine the
way the state has discursively engaged the population within the narration of a successful
water management system. Through attempts at controlling and manipulating the flow of
urban water, the state has also been constantly renegotiating its hegemonic position
through an active process of discursive engagement within the society. Over the years,
12


the legitimacy of the Singapore state has been discursively enacted through varying forms
of control. In the early years after independence, more overt moralizing as a justification
for punishment was associated with concerns for survival; this gradually shifted towards
more internalized disciplining premised upon an ideological engagement of efficiency
and possibilism. This shift therefore imitates the type of change documented by Foucault
in early modern Europe; where control shifted from a system buttressed by punishment to
one managed by surveillance and internalized self discipline (Foucault 1995). More
recently there has been a further shift towards naturalizing a form of control by engaging
the society in its capacity as consumers. This mirrors the argument of Zygmunt Bauman
who suggests that the ‘post-modern’ condition is one where persons as citizens are
engaged by the state no longer as workers and producers, but instead as consumers
(Bauman 2005). An “ethic” of work and discipline was gradually replaced by an aesthetic
of consumption; people are encouraged to cultivate “life-styles” and fulfill themselves
through a constant pursuit of consumer desires.

In newly independent Singapore the task of the state was to shape a Singapore
population that embraced the notion of a ‘work ethic’ and hence embedded a moralistic
understanding of work, so they would take pride in their capacity to work and partake in
productive labor. Bauman (2005:7-8) argues in regards to the creation of a workforce in
industrial England during the 18th-19th centuries that, “the work ethic was, basically,
about the surrender of freedom”, where “it was a power struggle in everything but name,
a battle to force the working people to accept, in the name of the ethical nobility of
working life, a life neither noble nor responding to their own standards of moral
decency”. Much of the concern was about getting people to accept work as a moral
responsibility, where they would feel compelled to place work before anything else. The
focus was on controlling the working population through constructing a paradigm where
work was upheld as “the main factor of one’s social placement as well as of self
assessment” (Bauman 2005:17). Control was enacted through overt means of engaging
the public to accept a moralistic interpretation of what was supposed to be good for the
self and for the larger society. I argue that similar processes were apparent in postcolonial Singapore. Additionally there was a moralistic engagement of the notion of
13


“cleanliness”, where the idea was propagated Singapore could only survive and progress
if the ‘brown’ issues of Singapore were dealt with through authoritarian measures.

However, as pragmatism became more entrenched as the means of economic
development within the popular imagination, increasingly the more punitive dimension of
urban water management began to lose hold. As illustrated by Foucault (1995:187),
disciplinary power is largely “exercised through its invisibility; at the same time it
imposes on those whom it subjects a principle of compulsory visibility. In discipline, it is
the subjects who have to be seen. Their visibility assures the hold of the power that is
exercised over them.” Complexities of power relations move beyond overt punishment
towards making the population aware of their position within a larger framework. This

compels them to internalize control and discipline themselves. Alongside the adoption of
pragmatism and environmental possibilism, the political ecology in Singapore came to be
focused on how water shortage could be overcome, and how the state’s urban water
management system has could provide a clean, convenient and comfortable lifestyle.
With an increasing internalization of the developmentalist rhetoric, accepting the state’s
management and long term integrated planning then appeared to be inevitable.

This, however, does not provide adequate explanation of the continuing
authoritarian governance of the Singapore state, albeit by softer means, in the twenty-first
century. With a shift towards a post-industrial economy, the focus has increasingly
moved from industrial concerns towards a service dimension and knowledge formation in
the global economy. Accordingly, meanings of nature have also transformed, as urban
water is also further entangled within the shifting complexities of the larger political
economy, and has increasingly become more significantly consumed as lifestyle
amenities; at the same time there have been technological developments to deal with
various water related concerns. The focus has shifted to getting people to regularize
control as part and parcel of everyday life through engaging them as consumers who can
aspire to an increasing quality of life. Subsequently, a discourse of ecological
modernization focussed on the successes of technological development within
Singapore’s urban water management system towards the twenty-first century, and
14


became a key rhetoric of an increasingly technocratic state as part of legitimating its
continual totalizing dominance over the flow of urban water within everyday life. The
emphasis has shifted towards a focus on the capacity to identify and construct the
environment in a consumer-able form to satisfy the population as consumers. The
hegemony of the state has been further renewed, as lifestyle and ecological concerns
came to be integrated and seen as inseparable from the planning of a strong and stable
government.

As Chua (1998:986) attests, “national economic growth becomes meaningful in
the everyday life of its people when it translates into expansions and improvements of
people’s material lives”; in this way there has been a shift to an inculcation of the values
of consumer culture, which has been supported by technological developments and has
allowed the continued legitimacy of the state. Parallel to Bauman’s (2005:22) argument,
such development “has also shifted human motivation, and the craving for freedom,
firmly and thus irretrievably into the sphere of consumption”. Control is focussed on
engaging the population as consumers, and getting them to internalize a belief in the
state’s capacity to push for and allow continuous consumption. Bauman (2005:26) further
discusses the notion of desire and satisfaction in a ‘consumer society’, and he argues that
“to increase their capacity for consumption, consumers must never be given rest. They
need to be constantly exposed to new temptations in order to be kept in a state of a
constantly seething, never wilting excitation and, indeed, in a state of suspicion and
disaffection”. The significance of consumption lies not in any end achieved by the
process of consumption, but is in fact one that is significant within the very process itself,
where meaningful engagements are being produced and reproduced within the
perceptions of what can be attained.

In this thesis, I argue that to gain an understanding of the contemporary flow of
urban water, it has to be done in the context of consumer society. As identified by Sutton
(2004), there is a need to understand that consumption has also been ecologized.
However, this understanding needs to be further complemented by a broader
understanding of the context of managing such consumption. In the case of Singapore,
15


water management is predicated upon not just satisfying consumers but also shaping and
aligning their desires with the state’s discourse. Hence, there has been a softening
rhetoric of the authoritarian state in the shift towards focusing on the aesthetic demands
of consumers; more importantly, there has been an emphasis on the ability of the

technocratic state to construct water as a lifestyle (Bauman 2005). The significance of the
controlling of urban water is construed in relation to the knowledge surrounding
perceived scarcity instead of any absolute engagement of scarcity; thus it is important to
understand how water scarcity has been constructed, engaged and manifested and how
this matters to the power relations and controlling the flow of urban water. Hence, a
discourse analysis of urban water management is about studying why urban water has
been managed as it is and the accorded implications of how it comes to be interpreted and
understood within everyday life.
1.4 Methodology: Discourse Analysis of Urban Water Management
1.4.1 Studying Discourses and Making Sense of Them
As Milton (1996:166) explains, an understanding of discourse can be seen as one
where “knowledge is constituted through communication”, but it is also in particular
about exploring how meanings are attributed within the process of communication within
a specific context. Language is “both a social product of the faculty of speech and a
collection of necessary contentions that have been adopted by a social body to permit
individuals to exercise that faculty” (Saussure 1985:29). Continuing from this, discourse
analysis is a critical engagement of how communication becomes meaningful within the
formation of knowledge in the context of the social (Howarth and Stavrakakis 2000;
Mills 2004; Potter 2004). In taking this into account, discourse analysis has also
increasingly been adopted as an important method to study society.

Studying discourses sociologically involves engaging the relevance of language,
where meaningful knowledge is produced and sustained in relation to the dynamics of the
society. Foucault (1976:76) advocates a focus on studying discourses to understand
society, and argues that:

16


Discourse and system produce each other – and conjointly – only at the crest of

this immense reserve. What are being analyzed here are certainly not the terminal
states of discourse; they are the preterminal regularities in relation to which the
ultimate state, far from constituting the birth-place of a system, is defined by its
variants. Behind the completed system, what is discovered by the analysis of
formations is not the bubbling source of life itself, life in an as yet uncaptured
state; it is an immense density of systematicities, a tight group of multiple
relations…One remains within the dimension of discourse.
Discourses are not simply an end product of any particular historical development, but
are in themselves part and parcel of a concurrent social reality. There is the need to be
careful to take note that “discourse must not be referred to the distant presence of the
origin, but treated as and when it occurs” (Foucault 1976:25). Discourses are also not
just formed as a result of historical development, but are more dependent on how existing
power relations have come to make use of history and to construe knowledge in
supporting existing power relations (Foucault 1990; Moriaty 1991). Making sense of
history in any totalizing manner is more often the attempt at restoring an epistemological
balance of the contemporary subject, whereby one would come to believe that there is a
natural and normally evolving truth to hold on to.

Hence, the study of discourses goes beyond seeing them as depictions of any
definite truth, and is about engaging discourses as part of the existing social reality.
Fundamentally, “a shared way of apprehending the world embedded in language,
discourses construct meaning and relationship, helping to define common sense and
legitimate knowledge” (Dryzek 2005:9). Presentations of discourses are intersubjectively constituted, and what matters more is to engage how the discourses are
produced, interpreted, and become meaningful within a particular context. Instead of
trying to claim any objectivity, the significance of an object of discourse is in fact the
exploration of the inter-subjective relations that have come to formulate the object
(Foucault 1976). Such an approach towards discourse analysis is thus not so much
interested in discourses as specific interactions, but is focused more intricately “on how a
discourse, or a ‘set of statements’, come to constitute objects and subjects” (Potter
2004:608).

17


Discourses are enacted as products of institutional and cultural forces which have
come to shape the world that people in a society come to engage and understand (Dryfus
and Rabinow 1984). In this sense, discourse analysis seeks to engage and study the
discourses to uncover the formative relations behind them, and to explain the apparent
taken-for-granted common sense of the everyday within the society. As Jaworski and
Coupland (2006:5) note, “discourse analysis offers a means of exposing or deconstructing
the social practices that constitute ‘social structure’ and what one might call conventional
meaning structures of social life”. Eventually, discourses are meaningful in how they are
interpreted and engaged, and not simply within the semantic of the language itself
(Dreyfus and Rabinow 1984). With reference to C. Wright Mills’s (1967) concept of the
‘sociological imagination’, Silverman (1993:75) states that “meaning never resides in a
single term … and consequently understanding the articulation of elements is our primary
task” for a sociological analysis of discourses. The use of discourse analysis is thus an
approach to sieve through the variances of the discourses, and identify the underlying
logic behind the discursive structures that have come to dominate the construction of
reality (Mills 2004).
1.4.2 Methods: Making Sense of the Managing of Water Resources in Singapore
This thesis adopts a discourse analysis approach to critically examine the water
management system in Singapore, and to subsequently explore the relationship between
society and the environment. According to Howarth and Stavrakakis (2000:4), “discourse
analysis refers to the practice of analyzing raw materials and information as discursive
forms”; I will be looking at the discourses surrounding Singapore’s water management
system, as a way of understanding the inter-subjectivity of the social system. Instead of
simply assuming that the claims of the state with regards to the management of urban
water in Singapore are absolute or fixed, this thesis seeks to examine the dynamics of the
discourses surrounding such claims to better understand the complexities involved within

what Foucault (1995) identifies as the complex relationship between knowledge, power,
and the consequent controlling and shaping of society. In order to do so, this thesis is
primarily based upon the analysis of archival data covering issues and concerns related to

18


the management of water resources by the state, from the time the dominating party, the
People’s Action Party (PAP), came into power in 1959, up until 2009.

The archival data involved in this thesis include various official texts and
documents covering water management in Singapore, such as newspapers, newsletters,
annual reports, special reports, government press releases, national reports, national blueprints, national master-plans, project brochures and website content. These materials are a
rich source of data of how the state has dominated urban water in Singapore, as they are
key representations of the state’s approach in managing its water resources. As this study
seeks to further explore and understand the relationship between power and knowledge
within Singapore’s water management system, what is of interest to me are the discourses
that have been adopted by the state, and more importantly, how they have been put forth
and presented. Most of the data originate from institutions such as the Public Utilities
Board (PUB) of Singapore and the Ministry of Environment (ENV) (which was later
renamed as the Ministry of Environment and Water Resources (MEWR)), as these are the
key apparatuses of the state within the water management system in Singapore. Thus,
much of the analysis in this thesis is also closely focussed on the PUB and ENV/MEWR.

The abovementioned archival materials provide this study with discourses
associated with water management that were commonly adopted during varying time
periods that I am focussing on in this thesis (Mautner 2008). A stringent and meticulous
process was involved in the collecting, collating, organizing, coding and analyzing of
these archival data (Mason 2002). In the earliest stage, collection of data was facilitated
through the identification of where the discourses covering water management were

located. I systematically searched the newspaper archives for articles covering water
related issues and concerns in Singapore. This involved exploring various key search
terms such as ‘water and Singapore’ and ‘water conservation and Singapore’. However,
in order to have a more comprehensive and encompassing coverage, there was also the
need to understand the various indirect engagements of the water management system in
Singapore. This required a further understanding of the historical development of
Singapore’s water management system, and the ways the state addressed water related
19


issues over the years. In order to understand how the water management system has been
discursively constructed, various official accounts of water management were identified
for review. These included the systematic review of various official documents, such as
the MEWR and PUB’s annual reports and monthly newsletters, national blueprints, and
national master-plans. On top of the organizational accounts depicted in the official
documents, further detailed accounts by governmental officials were also examined from
governmental press releases.

The collected materials provided an overview of the state’s accounts and statements of its
actions towards water management. Various additional search terms for news articles
such as ‘public utilities’, ‘water catchment’, ‘water and wastage’, ‘water and international
relations’, ‘NEWater’, ‘desalination’, ‘water cycle/ loop’ and so on were further
identified. The reviewing of official text and documents provided a substantial amount of
data for analysis. Together with the newspaper articles representing the water
management system of Singapore, a substantive amount of data covering discourses
surrounding Singapore’s water management system over the past four to five decades
was available for analysis. A systematic and organized manner of going through, sorting
out and codification of the data was then critical to make sense of the extensive amount
of texts, pictures and diagrams. This led to an identification of the main themes,
directions, focuses and concerns that was highlighted in the discourses by the state

throughout the years as it developed its water management system alongside its
governance. I actively focussed on the “little things” a style of analysis suggested by
Flyvberg (2001: 133) to highlight the various ways the state addressed water related
concerns; through these various bits and pieces the larger themes were subsequently
identified, bringing to attention the manners through which urban water has been
discursively constructed and engaged over the years.

In attempting to understand and make sense of how discourses surrounding water
management in Singapore have been organized since independence, I structure this thesis
chronologically. I divide my data and analysis into three main parts covering different
periods: the 1960s and 1970s, the 1980s and 1990s, and the 2000s. After collecting,
20