As cities expand, a key challenge is securing water supplies for urban populations and disposing of pollution while minimising impacts on peri-urban communities and the environment. The pressures of urban growth combined with the institutional and policy vacuum associated with management of natural resources in peri-urban areas ultimately often leads to competition, contestation and conflicts over water. This book is about the dialogues and negotiations underway in many peri-urban cities in the South to address these conflicts. It shows how people and communities without good access to water and sanitation services depend upon alternatives to conventional service delivery from utilities, and it illustrates how these arrangements can be supported rather than hampered through searches for creative solutions. It reports from three cities, Cochabamba in Bolivia, São Paulo in Brazil, and Chennai in India, where action research brought stakeholders together to help find better solutions to infrastructural development problems in peri-urban areas and shows how research can provide information, tools and approaches to facilitate these processes.