Introduction

The urban landscape is a product of human interactions with nature (Heynen et al. 2006). Cities constitute complex social-ecological systems (Cumming 2011), and the sustainability and resilience of cities is strongly related to the ecosystems and ecosystem services they provide (Elmqvist et al. 2003; MEA 2008; TEEB 2011).

Within the complexity of the urban social-ecological system, urban commons deserve special mention. Commons, or common pool resources, refer to goods and services that are not excludable (difficult to enclose or limit access to), and where excessive use by one user reduces the benefits available to others (subtractability) (Berkes et al. 1989; Ostrom and Hess 2007). Today urban commons have become synonymous with a range of urban public spaces including lakes, parks, streets, wetlands, and remnant forests (TEEB 2011). Although ownership of these spaces rests with the state, a range of city residents and communities access them and influence their management, thus they constitute operational commons (Garnett, 2011).

While urban ecosystems are inherently vulnerable to loss of resilience and sustainability (TEEB 2011), this vulnerability is exacerbated in ecosystems that constitute urban commons, as a consequence of their increased susceptibility to enclosure and conversion to private or government regimes. In rural environments across most parts of the world, ecosystems such as lakes, wetlands and forests have been largely managed as commons (Ostrom and Hess 2007). With urbanization, many of these spaces experience a transformation from consumptive spaces with traditional, local cultural elements into locations of urban recreation (D’Souza and Nagendra 2011; Monbiot 1994). The trend towards rapid urbanization concomitant with rising land prices has also led to large-scale privatization of many urban commons.

At the same time, many governments have moved towards a regime of centralized control of services with respect to natural resources and commons (Ades and Glaeser 1995). Alongside these changes, the ability of the public sector to provide quality services has been severely critiqued (Milakovich 1991; Osborne 1993; Gael 2010. This growing dissatisfaction with state management has led to the rise in the prominence of Private- Public – Partnerships (PPPs) (Lanjekar 2009).

PPPs can be defined as ‘the combination of a public need with private capability and resources to create a market opportunity through which the public need is met and a profit is made’ (UNEP 1996; Budds and McGranahan 2003). The rationale for PPPs often arises during periods of ‘regulatory slippage’, when government management and monitoring deteriorate, providing space for new experiments with governance (Foster 2011). The PPP model invites greater participation from the private sector, especially in those roles where the government has traditionally been responsible. The entry of private stakeholders can bring in much needed infusions of capital, but can also result in the exacerbation of inequities in access to services, through resource commoditization followed by increases in pricing (Lanjekar 2009). This can further lead to disruption in the social fabric of local communities dependent on these resources (Foster 2006). Yet, PPP partnerships have gained favor globally, with many cities in different parts of the world having implemented such initiatives (Prager 1994; Domberger and Jensen 1997).

The imposition of access regulations following privatization strongly derives from unconfirmed perceptions that unregulated nature is over exploited (Rowe 2008). Yet, although privatization of public resources has been widespread in urban contexts, the impact of this change in governance remains poorly understood (Heynen and Perkins 2005; Foster 2006). Some scholars suggest that the privatization of urban commons has resulted in the exacerbation of environmental inequalities (Heynen and Robbins 2005). This is perhaps most clearly visible in the case of provisioning and cultural ecosystem services (Plieninger et al. 2013). Cultural values associated with a landscape are often locally specific, unique and irreplaceable (MEA 2008; Plieninger et al. 2013). It is therefore very important to understand traditional cultural services that have co-evolved locally with the ecosystem, and the interaction of these explicitly social features with the entire ecosystem (Schwartz 1997; Grimm et al. 2000; Alberti and Marzluff 2004; Redman et al. 2004). Unfortunately, cultural ecosystem services are also less researched, particularly within urban landscapes where planning has remained focused on urban recreational and provisioning ecosystem services (Tengberg et al. 2012; Milcu et al. 2013; D’Souza and Nagendra 2011). It thus becomes imperative that we understand how the impact of privatization can influence bundles of ecosystem services, especially within the context of provisioning as well as cultural ecosystem services.

The Indian city of Bangalore provides a useful context within which to examine the issue of privatization of the commons, and its’ impact on access to ecosystem services. The city is India’s fifth largest, with a population close to 8.4 million (Census of India, 2011), and struggles with the challenge of balancing intense economic growth and urban expansion along with conservation and management of its natural resources. Bangalore is known for its interconnected network of lakes that were for centuries traditionally managed as commons, but later experienced a transition to government control. In recent years, the city has experimented with PPPs in a few lakes. This situation provides an opportunity to contrast differences in ecosystem services provided by privatized and public lakes, and to assess the influence of privatization on land use within and around these water bodies. We focus on provisioning and cultural ecosystem services and map them by contrasting public and privatized lakes in order to understand the impacts of different governance regimes.

Study area

Bangalore

Bangalore is located in the semi-arid Deccan plateau, in a region prone to water scarcity. The city has historically accessed fresh water from a network of hundreds of interconnected, artificial lakes that were distributed across the region (Rice 1897). There are four major watersheds associated with Bangalore, in the Hebbal, Koramangala, Challaghatta and the Vrishabhavathi valleys (Sudhira et al. 2007; Mahapatra et al. 2011). Some of the lakes in the city can be dated as far back as the 4th century A.D. (Annaswamy 2003; Rice 1905), and hold significant historical and cultural importance for Bangalore. In a sense, the social history of human settlement in Bangalore is intimately linked to its ecological profile, with the city constituting a tightly coupled social-ecological system (Mathur and da Cunha 2006).

Apart from serving as important sources of fresh water, Bangalore’s lakes have provided important cultural contexts for religious ceremonies, for livelihoods such as fishing and grazing, and for recreational activities such as nature watching and art (D’Souza and Nagendra 2011; Sudhira et al. 2007; Sundaresan 2011). These lakes are now facing severe challenges due to pollution, encroachment and disruption in connectivity following urbanization (Narayanan and Hanjagi 2009). The degradation of lakes has exerted considerable impact on the social fabric of neighborhood areas (Sundaresan 2011). Lake degradation and disappearance has also led to environmental and health consequences that range from flooding and increased urban heat island effects to decline in ground water and increased incidence of mosquito-borne infectious diseases (Prasad et al. 2002; Kiran and Ramachandra 1999; Gowda and Sridhara 2007).

Bangalore’s lakes have thus served communities around them in diverse ways. The city provides a useful context to follow transformations in social ecological systems following changes in governance and managerial regimes. As with all commons, the issue of lake management and maintenance has proven to be highly challenging for city administrators. A number of institutions are associated with the management and maintenance of lakes, including the Bangalore Development Authority (BDA), the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP), Forest Department, Minor Irrigation and Fisheries, Pollution Control Board, and various Indian Armed Forces establishments. In 2002, the Lake Development Authority (LDA) was formed with the aim of consolidating management of all lakes within the city – an objective that has not yet been achieved (Center for Science and Environment 2013). Today, this nodal agency is one among the many that are accountable for this function, rendering unclear the issue of accountability for the current decline of lakes.

The foundations for this paper lie within a significant undertaking of the LDA, which in 2004 leased out lakes to private parties for management. The organization invited tenders for privatization of four lakes in the city - Hebbal Lake, Nagavara Lake, K.R. Puram Lake (Vengaiahnakere) and Agara Lake. The exercise was conducted without extensive discussions or inputs from the general public or community stakeholders. The implementation was also carried out in the face of strong public opinion against this decision (D’Souza 2006; ESG 2008). The PPP model did not proceed further in one of these lakes – Agara – due to legal interventions through a Public Interest Litigation by the Environment Support Group (D’Souza and Nagendra 2011, D’Souza (2011). Thus, we selected the remaining three lakes for this study.

These lakes were leased out to private enterprises for development into revenue generating ventures. Lessees were responsible for overall maintenance of the lake, and were permitted to develop the lakes into profit-making recreational facilities for the paying public (D’Souza 2006). While privatization of additional lakes has subsequently been discontinued in Bangalore, there is a recent resurgence of interest in what is being termed “People Private -Public- Partnerships across India, as well as within Bangalore, specifically focused on lakes: underscoring the need for detailed studies of these previous experiments with privatization.

Study design: Paired public-private lakes

For each privatized lake, a companion public lake was chosen for comparison, taking care to select an adjacent lake of similar size in the same sub-network for maximum comparability. These lakes differ primarily in terms of their governance structures as well as the nature of land use around them. The three privatized lakes identified for the study are Hebbal Lake, Nagavara Lake (also called Lumbini Gardens following privatization) and K.R. Puram Lake or Vengaiahnakere (also called Fantasy Lagoon, or Hagalu Kanasina Kere, following privatization). The corresponding publicly managed lakes are Rachenahalli Lake, Jakkur Lake and Kodigehalli Lake or Sadaramangala Lake respectively (Fig. 1). Given that the city has only three privately developed lakes as explained earlier, we believe that this study site selection is adequately representative for the purposes of this study (Table 1).

Fig. 1
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Study area: Location of study sites within the city of Bangalore, Karnataka, India

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Table 1 Description of study sites
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Methods

Field research for the study was conducted between July-August 2012. This corresponds to the post-monsoon season in Bangalore, when water levels are maximum, and when lake use is at its highest during the year. At each of the six lakes under study, two researchers conducted a transect walk along the immediate periphery of the lake. In private lakes, surveys were conducted after payment of the required gate entry charges. The area extending from the periphery of the lake to 500 m outside the lake boundary was also surveyed, with the exception of areas that were inaccessible to researchers, largely due to private land use restrictions imposed by landowners and managers. Lake boundaries were identified based on fencing at their periphery, which provided a basis for demarcation. Field visits were conducted both during the weekdays as well as during weekends. We also took care to conduct our observations in the mornings as well as evenings in order to capture the maximum range of activities – both commercial and traditional that occurs in and around the lake. Three transect walks were undertaken around each lake - on a weekday morning, a weekday evening and a weekend. Researchers ensured they accessed areas distant from roads and lake gates in order to obtain a comprehensive assessment of activities around all parts of the lake. During each transect walk, the provisioning and cultural ecosystem services accessed by lake visitors were recorded.

In order to map ecosystem services through their users, we adopted two approaches to collect our data. The first was by means of direct visual observations of people engaged in a particular activity such as fishing. The second was through indirect evidence of uses such as alcohol consumption through observation of indicators such as discarded alcohol containers or of religious ceremonies through observation of waste (such as old flowers or coconuts) observed around the water body. .

The activities observed at each lake were further categorized based on the nature of activity involved and the kind of ecosystem service it represented. Based on the nature of activity, three categories were identified– commercial, subsistence and non-income generating. Commercial activities included those directly aiding profit making such as commercial fishing, manufacture of mud bricks and commercial water based recreation. Subsistence activities were those activities which benefited the user and his or her family. Such activities as the harvest of fodder grass, green leafy vegetables, reeds as well as livestock grazing were grouped under this category. Other domestic, recreational and spiritual uses of the lake were grouped under the non – income generating category. Each of these uses was also classified based on the type of ecosystem service it provided – provisioning or cultural, based on the definitions provided in the Ecosystems and Well Being: Manual for Assessment Practitioners (Ash et al. 2010).

Detailed observations were made about the types of land use at the periphery of the lake (within a distance of 500 m from the lake fence), with specific attention to the type of settlements around each lake (high and middle-income vs poor settlements) (Table 2). Spatial locations of specific uses and types of settlements were recorded using a Geographical Positioning System (GPS), and were used to create detailed land use maps for each of the studied lakes.

Table 2 Description of housing categories
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Results

Differences in land use

In general, we observed that land use near the privatized lakes is mainly commercial, while that around the public lakes was quite heterogeneous at the time of this study. This heterogeneity is in the form of rural settlements and livelihood based land uses interspersed with those that are representative of urbanity such as apartments and gated communities Fig. 2.

Fig. 2
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a Land use map – Hebbal Lake. b Land use map – Rachenahalli Lake

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Hebbal Lake and Rachenahalli Lake

Hebbal Lake

A commercial park was developed around this lake subsequent to its administration and privatization by the Lake Development Authority. An entry fee of Rs.15 (roughly 0.24 USD) is charged per adult visitor. The area of the lake accessible to park visitors is restricted to a portion of the lake facing a high volume traffic road, the Outer Ring Road. Owing to the large area of the lake and the presence of multiple unmanned entry points into it, the entry fee does not appear to restrict entrance into the lake. Unauthorized access is penalizable through fines, although this seems to be poorly enforced.

The lake is largely surrounded by commercial enterprises and low to middle-income settlements. Some sections of the lake that are distant from the road are surrounded by fallow land and land belonging to the Indian Armed Forces.

Rachenahalli Lake

This public lake is part of the Hebbal Lake sub-network, and is managed by the Bangalore Development Authority, connected to three villages. The lake is bounded by three academic institutions, a gated residential community, rural and peri-urban low-income settlements of local adjacent villages, and a large grazing land. Land use is heterogeneous, with agricultural fields and pasturelands interspersed with slums, high-income houses and a few commercial establishments Fig. 3.

Fig. 3
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a Land use map – Nagavara Lake. b Land use map – Jakkur Lake

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Nagavara Lake and Jakkur Lake

Nagavara Lake

This privatized lake contains an amusement park that offers boating and other water-based recreational activities. There is one entry point into the lake that is accessible to users on payment of an entry fee of Rs.20 (approximately 0.32USD). All other entry points into this lake are locked. The lake connects with a village on the eastern, the previously mentioned Outer Ring Road to its west and another main road to its south.

Land use around the lake is primarily commercial in nature, with numerous informal establishments including stone sculptors, transport warehouses and small shops. A prominent Information Technology park and a few engineering colleges are also located near this lake. The village consists primarily of low-income households.

Jakkur Lake

This is a public lake downstream of the Nagavara Lake and connects with three villages as well as a recently formed residential gated community. It is managed by the Bangalore Development Authority.

A railway line and main road are located close to the lake; however, land use around the lake is semi-rural with wetlands and pasturelands interspersed with small villages and open areas, as well as recent gated communities and apartments. A sewage treatment plant is present at the northern end of the lake while a sacred grove or “gundu thoppu” is located near the east, accessed by nomadic communities and as livestock grazers Fig. 4.

Fig. 4
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a Land use map – Vengaiahnakere. b Land use map – Kodigehalli Lake

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Vengaiahnakere and Kodigehalli Lake

Vengaiahnakere

This privatized lake is located within the Koramangala Challaghatta Valley. A commercial park was constructed along its banks with provisions for a food court and recreational facilities including boating and a children’s play area. Entry into the lake is regulated by means of a fee of Rs.30 (approximately 0.47 USD) per adult. Unlike the other privatized lakes, an additional surcharge of Rs. 100 – Rs. 150(approximately 1.69–2.53 USD) is levied for the use of electronic equipment such as cameras and video recording devices.

The landscape surrounding to the lake includes residential layouts, a prominent academic institution and a sewage treatment plant. Commercial enterprises are present along the eastern edge of the lake, which is also connected to a busy main road.

Kodigehalli Lake

This is a public lake downstream of Vengaiahnakere, and is situated in a peri-urban neighborhood. The lake is relatively inaccessible from large motorable roads and does not attract a large number of visitors.

Agricultural fields and plantations surround the lake. The fields towards the northern end of the lake are fallow with two sewage channels feeding into them. A large slum rehabilitation project was nearing completion at the time of the study. Two disused open wells, a mud brick-manufacturing unit and a few commercial enterprises were located near the northern edge of the lake.

Differences in ecosystem services

A diversity of provisioning and cultural ecosystem services were observed across the six lakes studied, as characterized further in Table 3.

Table 3 Diversity of activities observed around lakes under study
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Table 4 presents a comparison between privatized and public lakes in terms of the ecosystem services observed around the lakes.

Table 4 Comparison between private and public lakes in terms of ecosystem services derived
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Provisioning services

Activities, which do not involve community initiatives, and are centrally controlled, such as commercial fishing are common to both private and public lakes. Commercial fishing is regulated by the Minor Irrigation and Fisheries department and therefore exclusionary regulations such as admittance fees do not restrict their activities. In contrast, occupations such as commercial washing of clothes and the manufacture of mud bricks are only observed in public lakes. These constitute traditional livelihood occupations that are characteristic of the village communities who are long-term residents of this landscape. These people have historically maintained these lakes before they were engulfed by the expanding city, and their management was taken over by the city municipality.

Services ensuing from commercialization of the commons such as the levy of an entry fee and sale of tickets for amusement rides are, of course, exclusive to the privatized lakes. In contrast again, subsistence activities such as the grazing of livestock and harvest of fodder grass, green leafy vegetables or reeds, which do not require direct access to the water body, but can take place either on its periphery or wetlands are found in all public lakes. However, they were observed in only one privatized lake – Hebbal – due to its large area and the difficulty in securing the periphery of the lake from unauthorized visitors. Even in privatized lakes, thus, some of these activities continue to take place in areas around the lake, where access restrictions to the water body itself do not apply. Finally, while groundwater is extracted for agricultural purposes from both private and public lakes, only public lakes provide domestic water supply through open wells at their periphery. Related to this, only public lakes provide water accessed for domestic uses such as bathing and washing clothes, which is particularly adopted by migrants and poorer households from local neighborhoods. The imposition of entry fees coupled with usage regulations around private lakes effectively act as a barrier to marginalized people who depend on these lakes for domestic use and consumption.

Cultural ecosystem services

Recreational activities such as walking and jogging were common to both private and public lakes. Sacred cultural elements were frequently observed in all public lakes, while less prevalent in privatized lakes. Relics indicating the abandonment of former worship (such as disused stone idols) were found near two private lakes, attesting to their former spiritual significance. The presence of these discarded religious relics is also suggestive of a gradual alienation of communities from the water body, aided perhaps by restrictions on access and appropriation due to the boundaries imposed by private management. Further, sacred groves and village forests, commonly found near most lakes in this region, were not observed near any of the privatized lakes, further lending support to the theory of alienation of people from the resource. In contrast, in areas surrounding the commercialized privatized lakes, proximity to the lake appears to be a selling point for the real estate market, with hoardings prominently advertising the sale of “lake front” property, and high income land development in the form of gated communities and commercial establishments. The only exception was one public lake, Rachenahalli Lake, which also supports a high end is real estate market aided by the presence of multiple academic institutions and a gated community in the vicinity.

Discussion

Strong social networks and cultural identities are extremely important in maintaining a city’s innate resilience to change, perhaps even more so than infrastructural advances (Campanella 2006). It has been said that a society’s capability to withstand change lies in its actors, the strength of its social networks and its institutions (Lebel et al. 2006). We argue that in the context of the transformation of urban commons, there has been an alienation of both actors and social networks from the ecological landscape. According to the Constitution of India, the state serves as a custodian of the commons while actual ownership rests with communities who access and appropriate from the resource (Justice NK Patil Report 2011). The principle however does not seem to have been implemented in the current context of commons within the country. .

The demands around a resource include the material and the imagined - brought through the agency of culture and the symbolic that revolves around feelings evoked by the resource. The presence of these demands and their realization leads to the circulation of capital in the landscape. This circulation of capital creates possibilities for the improvement of infrastructure around the resource by the people who have access to it. Once the resource is ‘tamed’ or controlled, it begins to evoke an alternate cultural imaginary of circulation that emphasizes that resources are finite and there is a need to conserve them. It eventually leads to what has been called privately managed scarcity, which leaves access to the resource in the few hands deemed capable of accessing it (Oliver 2006). The resource becomes revalued and re highlighted as a scarce economic good that must be paid for in order to access its services (Smith and Ruiters 2006). This commoditization of services also necessitates the identification of and the commercialization of single services as against the multiple ecosystem services derived from a non-commercialized resource (Muradian and Rival 2012). In this study, we have discussed the initial impetus to conserve the finite resource by bringing it within state governance and attempts to bring in private management of that scarcity. This management includes actors who can pay for services that derive from the ecosystem and excludes those who cannot.

By mapping the users of each lake in this study, we were able to demonstrate differences in provisioning and cultural ecosystem services as well as issues relating to equitable access of the resource. This spatially explicit method seems to have greater sensitivity in capturing diversity in cultural ecosystem services as well as the tradeoffs involved and agrees with previous studies on assessing cultural ecosystem services (Morcillo et al. 2013). We observed that ecosystem services derived from a resource are a product of many experiences and interactions people have with the ecosystem (Tengberg et al. 2012) and hence may not fit neatly into specific categories.

This study also agrees with other similar studies in that it confirms the existence of relics that point to a consumptive use of a lake while showing that there is a transition of the resource into being purely recreational and unequally beneficial. For example, a study conducted at the “Rajapalayam Lake” (a pseudonym for a lake in Bangalore) concluded that the communities surrounding the lake have become alienated from the formerly important resource due to a combination of local neglect of the resource and bureaucratic mismanagement of the lake (Sundaresan 2011).

Following privatization of lakes in Bangalore, changes have been observed in the use and access of these lakes. Privatization of water bodies appears to have resulted in reducing access to certain traditional groups of resource users to the lake, in particular for domestic, traditional livelihood and cultural uses. A potential reason for the conspicuous absence of the use of privatized lakes for these purposes could be the imposition of restrictions in accessing the lake. Restrictions in the form of entry charges as well as the overall focus on recreation and aesthetics, favours the presence of certain groups of users (such as joggers and park visitors) over others (such as grazers and people washing clothes), leading to the exclusion of marginalized communities. People dependent on traditional lake-associated livelihoods and on lakes for domestic and subsistence use often belong to already marginalized communities of village inhabitants and migrant workers, and their exclusion from common spaces is made complete by policies such as privatization. This loss of dependency on a resource system may lead to decreased social ecological resilience of the system in the long run.

Efforts towards the privatization of lakes in Bangalore seem to follow a discursive shift. From being projected as a public good in surplus that was used abundantly in history into one where the discourse of scarcity took over, lakes are being transformed in the public view into a commodity that can be accessed only by the capable. The discourse on scarcity (Kaika 2006) directs the path of policy towards exclusionary measures such as privatization, which serve to transform erstwhile common spaces with many functions into commodities with one specific purpose, of monetization of ecosystem services. Cultural ecosystem services are perhaps most ignored in these discourses, being a product of dynamic and complex interrelations between humans and ecosystems over extended time scales (Fagerholm et al. 2012; Plieninger et al. 2013). In our study too, this seems to be the case with recreational uses being prioritized over the cultural. However, given that the city’s urban character follows a continuum with its erstwhile rural nature (Nagendra et al. 2013), distinctive cultural uses were observed as being part of the social ecological landscape. These seem to be largely ignored in decision-making processes however. Global governance regimes including those of India, have proven to be extremely myopic towards the complexities of socio ecological systems built around natural resources and the potential disruption,certain policy measures have upon them (Smith and Ruiters 2006).

The PPP articulation with its rosy discursive arguments of decentralized service delivery and governance closer to people has in fact a tendency to depoliticize its services and discursively transform its citizens into customers (Smith and Ruiters 2006). It is imperative that these issues be taken into account for inclusive and socially just policy measures aimed at governing common spaces, in such a manner as to provide the maximum benefits of ecosystem services to all who can access the resource. Given the recent resurgence of interest in “People Private -Public- Partnerships” internationally, as well as more locally within India and in Bangalore, lessons from this study indicate that concerns of equity and fairness need to be paramount while engaging with new forms of governance.