Nearly two decades after sanitation was identified as a global priority under the Millennium Development Goals, more than 4 billion people still lack access to safely managed sanitation and two-thirds of all human waste generated remains unsafely disposed. While the Sustainable Development Goals include ambitious targets for sanitation coverage, the current pace of progress will bring us far short of these aims. Despite sanitation's economic promise of 9-fold investment returns and numerous cross-sectoral benefits --from girls' education to environmental health --realizing universal and sustainable sanitation access is proving to be an elusive task.Over the past 20 years, sanitation research has grown broader in scope and deeper in complexity through diverse disciplinary approaches. Originally, sanitation research was entirely focused on containing fecal waste and preventing diarrheal diseases --placed squarely in the domain of environmental engineering and public health. However, the literature on sanitation has since expanded into economics, urban planning, cultural studies, gender studies, and beyond. While this diversity has extended the scope of traditional sanitation research, adding richness to our understanding of this complex topic, it has also rendered the term "sanitation" more nebulous. Such diverse perspectives have led to myriad, and even contradictory, definitions of what sanitation is, what it does, and what it is good for. As a result, we find that ideas about the designated functions of sanitation systems and the priorities of sanitation policy vary widely among academics, policymakers, NGOs, and community members.We review the full range of disciplines that now houses sanitation research with the goal of understanding the overlaps and disparities among and between these perspectives. Our review:(1) examines and systematically summarizes the interdisciplinary conversation around sanitation;(2) facilitates within-disciplinary understanding of cross-disciplinary definitions and priorities; and (3) recommends a more complete framework for sanitation for decision makers as well as for future research. Our aim for this work is to help those in the sanitation sector avoid the pitfalls and disciplinary silos that contributed to the failure to meet the Millennium Development Goals for sanitation as well as the current shortcomings in meeting SDG 6.2.

Significant development funding flows to informational interventions intended to improve public services. Such "transparency fixes" often depend on the cooperation of frontline workers who produce or disseminate information for citizens. This article examines frontline worker compliance with a transparency intervention in Bangalore's water sector. Why did compliance vary across neighborhoods, and why did workers exhibit modest rates of compliance overall? Drawing on ethnographic observation and an original data set, this article finds that variation in workers' family responsibilities and financial circumstances largely explains variation in compliance with the intervention. Furthermore, workers often prioritize long-standing responsibilities over new tasks seen as add-ons, leading to modest rates of compliance overall. Perceptions of "core" jobs can be stickyespecially when reaffirmed through interactions with citizens. This article represents one of the first multimethod companions to a field experiment, and illustrates how the analysis of qualitative and observational data can contribute to impact evaluation. | I NTRO DUC TIO NMore information for lay citizens, cheaply provided and easily accessed, is at the heart of global efforts to "make services work for poor people" (World Bank, 2004). The underlying assumption is that transparency improves citizens' experience with service delivery; information about services positions citizens to make better use of them. In addition, citizens armed with information about service provider performance are better placed to press for improvements and to demand accountability. Improved transparency, in other words, promotes a virtuous cycle leading to improved service delivery. Development institutions, telecommunications companies, and national governments have channeled significant funding into informational interventions to improve the

Forthcoming, Studies in Comparative International DevelopmentAs cities throughout the developing world grow, they often expand more quickly than the infrastructure and service delivery networks that provide residents with basic necessities such as water and public safety. Why do some cities deliver more effective infrastructure and services in the face of rapid growth than others? Why do some households and communities secure better services than others? Answering these questions requires studying the large, politicized bureaucracies charged with providing urban services, and especially the relationships between frontline workers, agency managers, and citizens in informal settlements. Researchers investigating public service delivery in cities of the Global South, however, have faced acute data scarcity when addressing these themes. The recent emergence of crowd-sourced data offers researchers new means of addressing such questions. In this paper, we draw on our own research on the politics of urban water delivery in India to highlight new types of analysis that are possible using crowd-sourced data, and propose solutions to common pitfalls associated with analyzing it. These insights should be of use for researchers working on a broad range of topics in comparative politics where crowd-sourced data could provide leverage, such as protest politics, conflict processes, public opinion, and law and order.

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Although it was reported in 2012 that 89% of the world’s population had access to piped water, it is estimated that at least one billion people receive this water for fewer than 24 h per day. Intermittency places a variety of burdens upon households, including inadequate quantities of supply at the household level, unpredictability of water utilities in making water available, and a disproportionate time burden on poorer households. For many intermittent water systems, the availability of water is controlled by valvemen who turn access on/off to various portions of their service area. Using this information, NextDrop sends notifications via mobile phones to customers as to when water is likely to be available. Although a pilot of NextDrop was successfully implemented in Hubli-Dharwad in India, NextDrop faced significant challenges when expanding to Bangalore. This case study investigates how a breakdown in the information pipeline, as well as corresponding human factors, prevented adoption of NextDrop in Bangalore. Specifically, randomized controlled trials found that valvemen sent reports of their activities to NextDrop only 70% of the time. Even when NextDrop passed messages onto customers, only 38% of customers reported receiving notifications, primarily because either the household “waiters” for water, usually women, did not have daytime access to the mobile phone registered with NextDrop or the notifications are buried under the many other solicitations and informational messages regularly received via SMS. Valvemen were further studied through observation and semi-structured interviews to understand their incentives for complying with NextDrop.