Politics and provision: on-the-ground realities of water and sanitation development

Addressing the challenge of water and sanitation under-provision requires a subtle understanding of several factors: the nature of the resource, the wider poverty environments in which millions of people live and the politics within which problems are framed and solutions are sought. How do current policy debates deal with these factors?

Research from the UK's Institute of Development Studies (IDS) and Overseas Development Institute (ODI) explores many aspects of water and sanitation. ODI research on 'SecureWater' in South Asia considers the community contexts in which the development of 'demand-responsive' approaches is taking place. IDS research on water and global public goods examines questions of privatisation, access and control in urban contexts. Finally, collaborative research by both Institutes looks at the impacts of new institutional forms such as decentralisation, participation by poorer groups and rights-based discourses on poor people's access to water in southern Africa. This crosses issues of both integrated water resources management (IWRM) and community-based water supply development.

The research indicates that understanding relations of power between individuals competing to gain access to water and sanitation is central to the challenge of improving sustainability and the 'fit' between policies at a higher level and interventions on the ground. This involves the problem of elite groups and individuals capturing key resources, established initially by community consensus, as illustrated in rural Zimbabwe where powerful individuals have captured communal supplies. A further problem lies in responding to the demands of the poor, when their demands are less likely to be heard and/or easily manipulated by more powerful interests at local, national and global levels. In parts of rural India, the local political power of higher-caste groups can affect the nature of expressed 'demands' for new services by communities.

The findings also suggest that:

• Southern Africa and South Asia have highly politicised local environments, frequently misunderstood as benign by many intervening agencies. Who is selected to participate in decision-making and what is deemed as important are political practices that create institutional 'glass walls', effectively excluding the poor from the decision process.
• Global and national debates on water and sanitation often offer simplistic and politically neutral solutions to current problems that exclude the perspectives and understandings of the poor. For example, the controversy surrounding the 'Washing Hands' campaign in Kerala, India, makes clear that campaigns like 'handwashing can save a million lives' need to be sensitive to the lives of the poor and beware of becoming just a marketing tool for big business.
• Calls to privatise water services or build partnerships with the private sector, to efficiently manage water and provide it for 'all', often ignore questions of sanitation, and latrine provision, so crucial for the urban poor.

Policy-makers need to ensure that new 'participatory' water supply and management institutions, such as the water point committees in many southern African countries, do not exclude key groups (e.g. communal farmers in Zimbabwe or scheduled tribes and castes in India) from participating, through lack of understanding of the opportunity and transaction costs involved. Even policies around IWRM need to consider inequalities in knowledge, the power to use technologies and the wider capacity of the poor to participate meaningfully in decision-making.

The research offers the following further policy recommendations:

• Pay deeper attention to questions of local-level power and politics as well as local-level understandings of water, hygiene and sanitation when creating effective responses to poor 'water and sanitation environments'
• Integrate issues of sanitation, water and hygiene within policies and locate them within wider debates on livelihoods, entitlements and poverty. Their current classification in global debates is often adverse to the interests of the poor who may not isolate issues of water and livelihoods from sanitation and hygiene in local contexts. But this integration should be demand-led (by the poor), not supply driven (by interveners).
• Gain the full consent of local women and men before privatising water and involve them in questions of regulation and decision-making. Water should not be commodified if this compromises poor people's basic rights to water and sanitation
• Incorporate the range of social and cultural meaning that poor people attach to water - beyond simplistic assertions in policy of its 'economic' nature - into the process of new policy and institutional development.

Lyla Mehta
Institute of Development Studies
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9RE
UK

T +44 (0) 1273 878736
F +44 (0) 1273 621202
l.mehta@ids.ac.uk

Alan Nicol
Water Policy Programme
Overseas Development Institute
111 Westminster Bridge Road,
London SE1 7JD
UK

T +44 (0) 20 7922 0382
F +44 (0) 20 7922 0399
a.nicol@odi.org.uk

See also

• 'Water: Currents and Contradictions' by L. Mehta and A. Nicol (forthcoming book)
• 'Problems of publicness and access rights. Perspectives from the water domain', by L. Mehta, in 'Providing Global Public Goods. Managing Globalization', edited by I. Kaul, P. Conceicao et al, UNDP/ OUP, 2003
• 'Caught in the Act: New Stakeholders, Decentralisation and Water Management Processes in Zimbabwe, S. Mtisi and A. Nicol (forthcoming book)
• 'Water for the twenty-first century: challenges and misconceptions' by L. Mehta, Institute of Development Studies, Working Paper #111 (2000)
• 'The 'Water Crisis': Faultlines in Global Debates, ODI Briefing Paper, July 2002.

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