This study explores the politics of urban water supply and sanitation delivery in the city of Colombo, Sri Lanka, where improvements in coverage have been achieved within a national context characterised by almost three decades of civil war. Though Colombo is by no means an unqualified success, or representative of the country as a whole, this isolated case offers an opportunity to unpick the role of politics in a story of relative progress. It also presents a possibility to compare the politics of two closely related but nevertheless technically and organisationally distinct services, and to examine whether and why these sectors attract different political dynamics.
The broad conclusion is that pervasive features of the political economy environment can interact with sector-specific characteristics to produce particular political dynamics around the delivery of different services. Both water supply and sanitation have been able to function effectively because these political dynamics have remained relatively stable over the medium term, in spite of the wider context of civil war.
The story of progress that emerges is not a rosy picture of collective collaboration to achieve universal goals, but neither is it a simple case of empowered citizens demanding the provision of services from duty bearers. Rather, these sectors are examples of a ‘low level equilibrium’ in which in spite of some contestation, the political and economic incentives of key actors (citizens, politicians and bureaucrats) are sufficiently served by the system for it to be able to sustain itself. At the same time, no actor is free from limitations on their behaviour, which allows for the management of potential threats to stability (e.g. free riding, rent seeking).
These political dynamics can be interpreted as a product of both pervasive features of the national political economy context and the particular characteristics of the sectors in question. With respect to the former, progress has been facilitated by historical legacies of (uneven) service provision by a centralised welfare state to some of its key constituencies, which have enabled a degree of policy coherence over time; generally high expectations on the part of citizens, which accumulate over time in response to performance and help underpin the credibility of subsequent political promises; and high levels of technical competence in the implementation agency, which help buffer provision from potential policy incoherence.
At the same time, the two sectors also have characteristic differences to do with the intrinsic nature of the good being produced, how it is demanded, and the tasks involved in delivering it. These characteristics have political effects. Notably, the level of political salience across the two sectors helps to explain why the central state has conceived its role differently within them, and its willingness to devolve responsibility to lower levels of government. The nature of the tasks involved in delivery can in principle help us understand the varying opportunities for rent extraction, and the limitations thereon. Pressure from below can be analysed as a product of citizens’ capacity to collectively organise to articulate their demands, which is associated at least partly with the way the service is consumed.
Together, these findings raise questions about approaches to analysing the politics of service delivery:
- First, it is clear that sectors are both an expression of the national political economy environment but also spheres of politics in their own right. In practical terms, if we want to understand the particular political dynamics of different sectors, we have to understand not only the wider political context, but also their technical and organisational characteristics.
- Second, while our observations acknowledge the importance of accountability relationships, they fit broadly with the turn away from an ‘us versus them’ approach to social accountability, and with the move to reconcile the long-standing top-down and bottom-up dichotomy. A deeper appreciation of the coexistence and complementarity of principal agent relationships and collective action might be useful, given that neither approach alone could sufficiently explain this particular case of progress.
