Water and Sanitation Utilities in the Global South: Re-centering the Debate on “Efficiency”

Spronk, Susan

doi:10.1177/0486613410368389

Cited by 27 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 45 publications

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“…While many see the rights discourse as addressing broader issues of justice, others warn it can subvert water equity if efficiency and full‐cost recovery are prioritized . Since the Dublin Principles of 1992 that, in part, framed water as an economic good, concerns have been raised that full cost recovery will further exclude the poorest from water provision.…”

Section: Water Rights and Wrongsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Human Right to Water: Critiques and Condition of Possibility

Sultana

Loftus²

2015

WIREs Water

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This Advanced Review analyzes recent debates over the human right to water. While accepting critiques from scholars that the right to water risks entrenching unequal and unjust forms of water governance, the paper nevertheless takes a more sympathetic view of the potentials within struggles for the right to water. Recognizing that such struggles can take many different forms, we urge scholars to adopt more nuanced and geographically sensitive analyses of the conditions out of which movements for the right to water have emerged. We reject the claim that the right to water depoliticises struggles for water justice and we instead find conditions of possibility for deeper and more lasting changes to water governance within struggles for the right to water.

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Section: Water Rights and Wrongsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Human Right to Water: Critiques and Condition of Possibility

Sultana

Loftus²

2015

WIREs Water

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“…Unlike heterodox economists and critical social scientists who have argued for expanding the definition of efficiency to account for broader societal goals (Lefeber and Vietorisz, 2007; Spronk, 2010; Tverdek, 2004; Wolff, 2002), in line with mainstream economic theory from which policy models are often drawn, I restrict the definition of efficiency narrowly to cost. On the one hand, doing so enables me to follow the work that the discipline of economics does in arranging the sociotechnical worlds we inhabit: It illuminates the relationship between the academic discipline of economics and the object it studies—that is, the economy (Mitchell, 2005).…”

Section: Unflattening the Waste Management Policy Landscapementioning

confidence: 99%

“…The idea that profit-driven private enterprises can deliver services more cheaply, hence more efficiently, has dominated prescriptive public sector reform policy and practice since the neoliberal turn (Eggerth, 2005; Lee, 1997; Spronk, 2010). In this sense, privatization of urban waste management services in India is hardly an exception.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Efficiency in waste collection markets: Changing relationships between firms, informal workers, and the state in urban India

Luthra

2020

Environ Plan A

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Although recent scholarship has provided rich accounts of waste management privatization in urban India, the origins of the policy models that informed privatization remain unexplored. Further, the place of informal workers in the history of waste management policy and programs is more complicated than that provided by linear accounts of a transition from informal to formal in the existing scholarship. In contrast to existing explanations of these shifts, this paper draws attention to the rise of efficiency as a core municipal concern that explains the shifting relationship arrangements between the state, the informal private sector, and the formal private sector in waste collection markets. To address their concerns with cost of service delivery, Indian policy-makers justified privatization by indirectly drawing upon the influential work of E.S. Savas, the American economist credited with empirically substantiating the theory of efficiency gains from privatization in waste collection markets. Yet, informal systems are in practice not only more efficient than formal ones, they also conform well to Savas’ policy prescriptions for structuring waste collection markets. Efficiency could thus serve as a basis for securing informal workers’ claims as legitimate market participants.

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“…The Municipal Services Project , to consider one prominent example, takes critiques of neoliberalization and privatization as its starting point, but ‘the project is now fully committed to analyzing successful alternative service delivery models to understand the conditions required for their sustainability and reproducibility’ in Africa, Latin America, and Asia (see http://www.municipalservicesproject.org/our-objectives). One way it has begun to do that is through case study analysis of corporatization in water and other public services, evaluating both the potential for corporatized governance systems to embody progressive ideals and challenge neoliberalism, and the feasibility of transferring more progressive alternative service delivery systems from one part of the world to another . McMillan, Spronk, and Caswell, e.g., discuss ‘technical water committees (MTAs)’ in Venezuela that have empowered neighborhoods and helped to deliver water to poor community members.…”

Section: The Critique Of Urban Water Governance In a Neoliberalized Wmentioning

confidence: 99%

Critical approaches to urban water governance: from critique to justice, democracy, and transdisciplinary collaboration

Finewood

Holifield

2015

WIREs Water

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As global urban regions grow and transform, water systems present a unique set of challenges to stakeholders. Municipalities often struggle to pay for and maintain aging infrastructure as well as create equitable access for growing populations-especially in the rapidly urbanizing Global South. Critical approaches to urban water governance have made tremendous contributions to our collective knowledge of how these systems work. In this study, we argue that the most important direction for these approaches to urban water governance is to translate the insights generated by critique into the positive project to construct more just and democratic systems and practices of governance. However, we contend that in order to do this work, critical scholarship on urban water governance will need to continue deepening its engagement with two larger sets of debates. First, to help realize more just and democratic systems, it will need to grapple with the complex dimensions of debates on how to theorize and conceptualize justice and democracy. Second, in order to create effective alternatives to current paradigms of water governance, it will need to show how recent conceptualizations of urban water as hybrid or heterogeneous assemblage can help build truly transdisciplinary collaborations. We explore these debates through a review of recent critical approaches to urban water governance, with attention to ways forward that embrace epistemological pluralism and transdisciplinary collaboration.

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Water and Sanitation Utilities in the Global South: Re-centering the Debate on “Efficiency”

Cited by 27 publications

References 45 publications

The Human Right to Water: Critiques and Condition of Possibility

The Human Right to Water: Critiques and Condition of Possibility

Efficiency in waste collection markets: Changing relationships between firms, informal workers, and the state in urban India

Critical approaches to urban water governance: from critique to justice, democracy, and transdisciplinary collaboration

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