Water & sanitaton

Overview

Water rightly constitutes one of the most prominent and hotly debated environmental issues of the 21st century, with important links to health and disease, livelihoods and agricultural and economic development.

There is growing acknowledgement that water availability is highly variable and shaped by dynamics over many scales, whether the effects of climate change locally or globally, or socio-political arrangements which alter distribution.

Failure of global portrayals and policies

Nevertheless global projections of water availability tend to draw on aggregate numbers (concerning both populations and the volumetric control of water) that obscure the politics of water use and control. Moreover, global portrayals of water and sanitation ‘crises’ rarely address local-level uncertainties generated through complex interactions between hydrological and technical interventions on the one hand, and socio-cultural processes on the other.

Solutions, consequently, often fail on both sustainability and equity grounds. While detailed studies, both historical and contemporary have highlighted that water systems cannot be isolated from socio-cultural and political systems, global and national interventions still tend to be techno-centric and rely on water management.

An alternative approach is needed

STEPS work in this domain will build on longstanding experience in the water field in both IDS and SPRU to develop alternative approaches to achieving sustainable and equitable water and sanitation practices that embrace complex local dynamics, and promote decision-making processes and institutional arrangements that embrace diversity and meet the priorities of poorer groups.

STEPS Working Paper 6: Water & sanitation

Floods, droughts, 6,000 babies dying daily due to waterbounre 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. This paper demonstrates there is a big disconnect between global rhetoric and the everyday realities of poor and marginalised people.

Creative Commons License This work is licenced under a
Creative Commons Licence.

Research Projects: cutting across domains & themes

  • Crop, disease and innovation in Africa - focussing on dryland Kenya, maize and farming system dynamics in areas affected by climate change.
  • Urbanisation in Asia - urbanisation and sustainability in Asia's growing cities, on the expanding peri-urban fringe of a major city, indicative of conditions for an increasing proportion of global poor.
  • Rethinking regulation -addressing the gap between current assumptions about regulation in the cases of drugs, seeds and water in China and Latin America, and more complex realities.
  • Risk, uncertainty and technology - how different institutions and groups frame and respond to risks and uncertainties in areas of rapid scientific and technological advance.
  • Epidemics, livelihoods and politics - HIV-AIDS, SARS, avian flu, BSE - procedures for addressing epidemics that support rather than compromise poor people and support social justice.

Related research, ideas & items

Affliated projects

Find out more about our affiliated projects

Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) Bangladesh, India, Cambodia, Indonesia, China, Nepal and trials in Africa.
A participatory approach to encourage communities to carry out their own appraisal and analysis of community sanitation.

 

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