Infrastructuring common worlds How decentralisation of public health and environmental protection infrastructures occurs in practice

To address contemporary public health and environmental problems, governments pursue the decentralisation of infrastructure to localised, community levels. Activating citizens promises to be an emancipatory tool, liberating them from top-down institutional models and empowering ‘autonomous citizens’ to make decisions regarding social and environmental changes. But how does the decentralisation of public health and environmental protection institutions occur in practice? And what does it mean to take on the task of infrastructuring them? While the (trans)formation of infrastructure lies at the heart of these decentralisation projects and forms the background for the analysis of citizen engagement, infrastructure itself is rarely given analytical prominence. In this dissertation, I trace the ‘slow’, ‘silent’ transformations that occur through configuring infrastructures to explore the common worlds they shape. Drawing on multi-sited ethnography in the Netherlands, I examine firstly how infrastructure convenes a collective. Secondly, I inquire into the challenge of sustaining infrastructural arrangements for collective ways of living. In doing so, I develop a more-than-human perspective on questions of commons, governance, and politics. I demonstrate that the decentralisation of infrastructure does not lead to the emergence of the autonomous individuals envisioned by (neo)liberal policymakers. Rather, it creates new entanglements and dependencies, not only among people but also between people and pipes, buildings, surface waters, bacteria, technology, and soil. By analysing how relations between, and amongst, human and more-than-human actors are variously infrastructured, maintained, and governed, I advance theoretical perspectives on the politics infrastructure itself enacts.