This brief aims to help bridge the gap between governance and sector specialists by examining the politics and governance of water supply through a technical, ‘sector characteristics’ lens. The characteristics of sectors have largely been considered technicalities, but new research is illustrating that they also have political implications.
The study focuses on drinking water supply, often perceived as a subsector within the broader water sector, the latter of which comprises water resource management functions, irrigation and other services, notably sanitation (the subject of another brief in the series) and hygiene.
Within water supply, there are important distinctions to be made between rural and urban services, as well as the spaces in between – such as peri-urban areas and small towns. The technical, and political, characteristics vary substantially between these, thanks to the different configurations of actors and technologies involved. These range from boreholes drilled in rural areas to serve small villages, with management entrusted primarily to user groups; to large networked supplies run by a utility that serves many thousands of urban customers. However, for the majority of low-income households in developing countries, water supply conforms to no archetype, but rather depends on multiple alternative sources.
Key findings:
- The water supply sector has characteristics that have political as well as technical implications. They affect the ways individuals and groups interact in relation to the delivery of drinking water services.
- These characteristics vary in important ways across urban, peri-urban and rural contexts, and across networked and non-networked delivery mechanisms, with implications for the types of political dynamics that might lead to sustainable improvements in sector outcomes. Even where private sector provision dominates, political factors complement market forces and technical needs in determining outcomes.
- Using a structured approach to understanding the relationship between technical and political features can help make sense of key sector debates, bridge the linguistic and conceptual gap with the models of governance specialists and strengthen understanding of why performance in water supply services might either outpace or lag behind other sectors in a given context.
