Liquid Dynamics: challenges for water and sanitation

As World Sanitation and Hygiene Week 2008 begins, we explain the STEPS Centre's approach to the challenges ahead

The effects of recurring floods and droughts, the deaths of 6,000 babies daily from waterborne diseases and growing sanitation problems in booming peri-urban and urban centres. No act of terrorism generates devastation on the scale of the crisis in water and sanitation. Despite growing global attention to water and sanitation, there still remains a big disconnect between global rhetoric and the everyday realities of poor and marginalised people.

Dominant framings of water and sanitation problems and their technical solutions may have little to do with local users’ rights and interests and questions of social relations, power and control. Consequently, they continue to fail. Moreover, significant problems in sustainable access remain while new uncertainties arise due to rapid urbanisation and climate change.

At the STEPS Centre, we argue that access to water and sanitation is determined by the complex and dynamic interactions between many different between many different social, technological and environmental processes operating at and across different and multiple scales and working within a variety of timeframes, and whose precise consequences can be uncertain.  We are trying to develop a pathways approach bringing together social, technical and environmental dynamics, thus bridging conceptual and disciplinary divides in questions concerning sustainable access to water and sanitation.

Key here are governance processes, sets of institutional and political relationships that shape interactions between water and sanitation technologies and people. Designprocesses are also key, social appraisal processes through which knowledge of water and sanitation is gathered in order to inform decision-making and wider institutional arrangements that are designed to enhance equity and sustainability. 

We believe that discursive framing of problems lead to certain material attributes of water and sanitation systems which in turn influence governance and design issues. And we are seeking to formulate a research agenda that attempts to bring together the socially constructed aspects of the water problematique with biophysical complexity.

Much current debate, policies and interventions fail to address water and sanitation problems in ways that are sustainable and meet the needs of poorer and marginalised people. First, policy debates and the often generalised, globalised arguments that underpin them often remain disconnected from the everyday experiences of poor and marginalised women and men.

Second, current approaches are often not up to the task of addressing emergent challenges associated with contemporary dynamics in water and sanitation systems. This is what we refer to as ‘liquiddynamics’: the patterns of complexity and interaction between the social, technological and ecological/hydrological dimensions of water and sanitation systems.

These views that see water and sanitation problems in aggregate, technical terms, ignoring
the social, political and distributional issues that often underlie what may appear as ‘scarcity’, for instance - the result is often policies and interventions that promote singular views of ‘progress’ in water and sanitation.

At the STEPS Centre we are seeking to form an alternative view. Our research agenda includes attention to the dynamics of complex socio-technical-ecological water and sanitation systems, and how resilience, robustness, durability and stability might be built in the context of new shocks and stresses from, for instance, climate change, rapid urbanisation and new middle class hygiene movements. Processes at different scales (temporal and spatial), and the ways these interlock and are felt in different places and by different groups, are key.

The framings of water and sanitation systems and dynamics held by different people, and how they lead to particular, valued Sustainability goals and properties are a focus of our work as is the governance and appraisal of water and sanitation systems and how these are shaped by power relations, including political economy and power-knowledge, and how approaches might better enable poorer people's own perspectives and agency in water and sanitation services provision. The influence of history and culture in shaping water and sanitation knowledge and practice, whether in divers local settings or in the contexts of global debates and agencies, is also a crucial factor.

Building pathways to pro-poor, equitable Sustainability in water and sanitation will inevitably involve a plurality of approaches. Mapping what works when, where and how will need to involve detailed case studies, urban as well as rural, whether focusing in on water and sanitation issues or examining their interaction with other processes - for instance in relation to health, food or agriculture.

It is time to move beyond conventional indices of sustainability - and those definitions of water and sanitation problems and solutions - that tell us little about equity, pro-poor agency, power and resilience. The STEPS Centre hopes to advance an agenda for understanding and action in the water and sanitation domain that will link poverty reduction and social justice with Sustainability in today's accelerating liquid dynamics.

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