Contesting the commons: managing Darjeeling’s springs in a changing Eastern Himalaya

Darjeeling, a city in the Eastern Himalaya, has faced chronic water shortages for decades. Its water supply is fragmented across three spring-dependent systems: a colonial-era municipal network, private delivery services, and neighborhood springs managed by community organizations called samaj . Existing research frames these systems’ water delivery failures as a supply-demand problem: urbanization intensifies demand, governments fail to build adequate infrastructure, and climate change reduces spring availability. Drawing on a decade of fieldwork informed by environmental history and political ecology, we argue that this supply-demand framing obscures more than it reveals, and that the tension between commons and enclosure offers a more productive analytical lens. Through this lens, the samaj -managed springs emerge as the most socially and ecologically embedded of the three systems, constituting what we term a cosmopolitical commons , in which human obligation, ecological process, and embodied knowledge are not merely linked but mutually constitutive. The samaj -managed springs are, however, also a contested commons : the other two systems, driven by statist and commodifying logics of enclosure and extraction, are eroding the samaj ’s capacity for collective stewardship even as the springs themselves deteriorate under intensifying urbanization and climatic stress. Addressing Darjeeling’s water crisis thus requires more than supply-side investment: it demands recognizing commoning as the city’s most resilient water management system, supporting it institutionally, and actively resisting the enclosures that undermine it.