Contingent valuation and rural potable water systems: A critical look at the past and future

Abstract

Determining the value of environmental goods that impact human populations, such as potable water, is often highly problematic. The all‐too‐common lack of realistic markets for the provisioning of these goods necessitates the use of nonmarket valuation techniques. Contingent valuation surveys are often an appropriate method, thanks to their ability to value hypothetical changes and nonuse values, and their limited prior data requirements. When properly implemented, contingent valuation surveys can estimate the maximum willingness to pay of surveyed individuals, allowing the value of the environmental good to be accurately measured. An analysis of the extant body of contingent valuation studies of rural potable water systems in developing and emerging countries indicates that rural water consumers are willing to pay, often substantially, for the creation of a potable water system or for improvements to existing system. Studies involving changes to existing potable water system, through improving an existing system for greater reliability or sustainability, showed a high degree of consistency in respondents' willingness to pay estimates as a percentage of income or current water tariff. Higher incomes, higher levels of education and youth, among other characteristics, were found to be positively correlated with higher willingness to pay estimates. Future contingent valuation studies focusing on improving comparability through greater methodological consistency, and addressing the impact of community power dynamics, intercommunal cleavages, and subsidies could be especially productive. This article is categorized under: Human Water > Value of Water Engineering Water > Planning Water Human Water > Water Governance

Tourists’ Willingness to Pay Increased Entrance Fees at Mexican Protected Areas: A Multi-Site Contingent Valuation Study

“…This makes their task of estimating consumer surplus much more realistic than for an intangible good, reducing the impact of hypothetical bias on the respondents' willingness to pay estimates. [27,36,[48][49][50].…”

Groundwater Constituents and Trace Elements in the Basement Aquifers of Africa and Sedimentary Aquifers of Asia: Medical Hydrogeology of Drinking Water Minerals and Toxicants

“…5) could have sourced drinking water from alternative low-F wells if they were not given the 'false' threshold. In many rural settings, people are willing to pay for their water (Whittington et al 1990;Witt 2019), and therefore, setting national standard carefully, or replacing the so-call (non-legal) standard with lower unenforced recommended limit, may help many to avoid this unnecessary 'political exposure'. Food is the main source of daily exposure to Na, therefore, its content in water needs to be communicated to people in similar way by both international and national policy instruments.…”

Evaluating the Effects of a Minimalist Deliberative Framework on the Willingness to Participate in a Payment for Ecosystem Services Program

“…Conceptually, WTP should be used to value a gain or prevent a loss, whereas WTA should be used to value a loss; however, losses are instead generally repurposed into asking individuals how much they would pay to keep the environmental good they are losing [33,91,92]. The reluctance to use WTA stems from concerns with violating long-standing best practice norms such as Arrow et al (1993), strategic over-bidding, lack of budgetary constraints, and the disequilibrium between WTP values and WTA values for the same goods [3,24,33,[91][92][93].…”

“…Stated preference valuation techniques, such as contingent valuation or choice experiments, have emerged as some of the most popular methodological approaches for the valuation of non/quasi-marketed good and services, particularly environmental good and services, due to their ability to estimate hypothetical changes and non-use values. However, stated preference techniques have also been subject to extensive criticism over issues of validity and bias, especially related to the process of preference formation for unfamiliar or complex goods and services, as well as more philosophical critiques related to incommensurability of values and the role of the respondent as consumer or citizen [1][2][3].…”