Water access transformations: Metrics, infrastructure, and inequities

Abstract

Scholarship on water insecurity has carried over an important insight from studies of food insecurity: Insecurity often occurs in the midst of plenty, and water insecurity is therefore better characterized by inaccessibility than by scarcity. Access to clean, adequate, and reliable water is, however, more challenging to systematize than access to food. Water is fluid and protean, and only when it is safely stored can people pretend to own it. In this paper, I make a case for the centrality of infrastructure -systems of water storage and transport -to water security. Equitable access to water often depends on technologies that protect, filter, and distribute water; it also depends on social arrangements that protect the least powerful from exclusion. I analyse two water infrastructure projects in Ethiopia, one a project to protect village water supplies and the other a large hydroelectric dam. The project to protect springs used by villagers for household water supply had the unintended effect of limiting access to those who could pay fees to a water committee. The dam harnessed water to produce electricity and supply irrigated plantations, but deprived downstream communities of water for farming. Water infrastructure can have farreaching implications for water access, both for better and for worse. It is often instrumental in securing one group's access to water at the cost of another's.

A Qualitative Examination of Water Access and Related Coping Behaviors to Understand Its Link to Food Insecurity among Rural Households in the West Region in Cameroon

“…The presence of storage containers also determined the availability of water in the household. In investigating sources of water, as in other studies [10,25], it was discovered that a reliance on surface water, such as rivers and streams, was very common in the study area.…”

Water and mental health

“…Stevenson et al (2016) initially could not offer specific reasons, but suggested that the water improvements might not have solved stressors of water governance (i.e., the stressor was not water itself, but how water was managed). Later work clarified that the water governance was indeed a stressor in this case, as a flat fee structure penalized poorer households and new opening/closing hours heightened the opportunity costs of using the water system (Stevenson, 2019).…”

“…Using a randomized encouragement design, they showed that connection to the water grid yielded significant increases in time gains, social integration, and quality of life while reducing conflicts about water-related problems within families and with neighbors. The second longitudinal study followed 223 rural Ethiopian women's psychological distress (on the SRQ-20) before and after a community water supply improvement project (Stevenson, 2019;Stevenson et al, 2016). Stevenson's team found that SRQ-20 scores showed no change before and after the intervention, even though water security measurably increased by more than half baseline standard deviation.…”

“…For example, trouble accessing reasonable shares at a community tap (Ennis- McMillan, 2001McMillan, , 2006Wutich & Ragsdale, 2008) or dysfunctional household-to-household water-sharing arrangements (Krumdieck et al, 2016;Sultana, 2011;Wutich et al, 2018) can lead to forms of frustrating and distressing conflict with neighbors (Devoto et al, 2012). People's experiences of inequitable water fee structures can also be source of distress (Stevenson, 2019). The sense of unfairness or injustice itself seems to matter, so the distress is possible even in the absence of outright conflicts (Ennis-McMillan, 2006;Stevenson, 2019;Sultana, 2011;Wutich, 2020;Wutich & Brewis, 2014;Wutich, Brewis, et al, 2016).…”

“…People's experiences of inequitable water fee structures can also be source of distress (Stevenson, 2019). The sense of unfairness or injustice itself seems to matter, so the distress is possible even in the absence of outright conflicts (Ennis-McMillan, 2006;Stevenson, 2019;Sultana, 2011;Wutich, 2020;Wutich & Brewis, 2014;Wutich, Brewis, et al, 2016).…”