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In the global South, urban infrastructures and environments are marked by significant heterogeneity and the presence of multiple overlapping systems, configurations and actor networks that keep the city working – water flows, electricity is available, and waste is collected. This occurs in the face of what has been traditionally characterized as failed or incomplete infrastructures and the presence of governance practices that often deviate from formalized norms and policies. However, increasingly academics are arguing that such heterogeneity represents not failure but spaces of possibility and transition. This introduction lays out some of the theoretical underpinnings and conceptual ideas that frame urban environmental and infrastructural governance in the everyday. We then outline how the contributions of this Special Issue (SI) reveal the contested, negotiated, and situated nature of everyday urban governance …