Our Water Problems Are a Crisis of Management

By Frank R. Rijsberman, Boston Review. Posted January 21, 2009.

Governance. Building dams is not simply a matter of technology and honest impact statements. Large water projects are also particularly prone to corruption. Water managers have access to information that is not available to the users, opening up opportunities for rent-seeking and fraud; specialized management services and equipment lead to one-off contracts, as opposed to standardized products, that are difficult to monitor; large public subsidies, generally provided as budgets devoid of performance requirements, lead to an accountability deficit; and water engineers who dominate the water sector tend to approach water problems as technical problems that require technical solutions, and they are unlikely to address the incentives for corruption that pervade the process.

Researchers Hector Malano and Paul van Hofwegen introduced the idea of looking at irrigation water not only as a resource and infrastructure problem, but as a service that can only work well with effective institutions and an alignment of stakeholder interests. Their emphasis on institutions and governance mirrors a broader discussion in global development on redesigning institutions in order to achieve greater transparency, design better policy, and improve incentives for compliance. The most significant institutional innovation in fighting corruption in water management has been the development of water-user associations that take responsibility for managing water and irrigation systems. Large numbers of such associations have emerged in Mexico, Turkey, the Philippines, Pakistan, India, and, more recently, Central Asia. This irrigation management transfer, or participatory irrigation management, has become standard World Bank policy even though its benefit is hard to prove.

Other attempts have focused on market approaches to service delivery. In most cases in which governments, advised by the World Bank, have given contracts to large French and British water companies to provide water supply services, the intent was to privatize the delivery of accountable water services, not water resources themselves. Still, such privatizations have proven highly controversial, leading to popular protests and even riots. Current, second-generation experiments with water-sector reform tend to emphasize decentralization from national to regional, district, or provincial water agencies, utilities, or companies. Unfortunately these efforts are hampered by a lack of information at the local level that would enhance the transparency of the reforms and resulting services. Consumers find it surprisingly difficult to assess the services they receive or are entitled to.

Making services work for the poor. Despite considerable efforts both by national governments and development agencies, public services -- including water services -- are failing to reach the poor. One reason is corruption, based, again, on an asymmetry of information between consumers and service providers.

Better information can also assist service providers in improving their service and help government decision-makers allocate resources or make investment decisions more effectively. In the cases of sanitation and drinking water, the only information available in most areas lacking service concerns exclusively infrastructure, which does not adequately represent the situation facing the poor. What knowledge is available focuses on the presence or absence of infrastructure improvements, but speaks to neither the amount and quality of water available to individuals (even in the aggregate, at a scale useful for planning, such as a district or province level) nor the correlation between water services and water-related diseases.

Therefore, large-scale investments to achieve the Millennium Development Goals for water are still based on making infrastructure available, rather than on putting a service in place or, better still, achieving health. Water utilities in developing countries lack information about their customers, and they also lack the practical information they need to benchmark their own performance. Poor consumers in the rapidly growing urban and peri-urban areas often live in informal settlements, which implies that they do not have a proper address, cannot open a bank account, and are practically invisible to the formal system.

NGOs such as WaterAid are experimenting with ways to achieve accountability by providing these oft-ignored consumers with scorecards to rate the service they receive. Following similar initiatives in the education sector, others analyze government budgets and reports from water utilities in order to inform communities of the resources that ought to be available to them. Development organizations have begun to produce benchmarking databases that water utilities use to share information on their performance and compare their work to that of their peers. UN-Habitat, in collaboration with the governments of Kenya and Uganda, carried out detailed household surveys in fifteen towns around lake Victoria in order to create a water-service level baseline and establish the relationship between water services and health.

See more stories tagged with: water, drought, dams, privatization, water scarcity, water pollution, desalination, water management

Frank R. Rijsberman is Program Director at Google.org, the philanthropic arm of Google Inc. He was previously Director General of the International Water Management Institute.

Liked this story? Get top stories in your inbox each week from Water! Sign up now »