Abstract
Global progress towards the goal of universal, safely managed drinking water services will be shaped by the dynamic relationship between water risks, values and institutions. We apply Mary Douglas’ cultural theory to rural waterpoint management and discuss its operationalisation in pluralist arrangements through networking different management cultures at scale. The theory is tested in coastal Kenya, an area that typifies the challenges faced across Africa in providing rural communities with safely managed water. Drawing on findings from a longitudinal study of 3500 households, we examine how different management cultures face and manage operational, financial, institutional and environmental risks. This paper makes the case for cooperative solutions across systems where current policy effectively separates communities from the state or markets. The contribution of this research is both a theoretical and empirical case to consider pluralist institutional arrangements that enable risks and responsibilities to be re-conceptualised and re-allocated between the state, market and communities to create value for rural water users.
Highlights
In the baseline year of the sustainable development agenda, 2015, 2.1 billion people lacked safely managed drinking water services globally and 844 million people did not have basic drinking water services (WHO/UNICEF, 2017)
This research provides a mechanism to specify these differences by drawing on cultural theory (Douglas, 1970, 1987, 1994, 1999; Wildavsky, 1987) and to illustrate how this theory can help understand the critical gap between the performance of the rural water sector and the goals of the sustainable development agenda as well as underpin new pluralist approaches to achieving these goals
The contribution of this research is twofold: first, it focuses on cooperation between the cultures rather than conflict within the waterpoint management system under a professional service provider; second, it provides a mechanism for the formal recognition of a pluralist framework and for empirical support of new approaches towards managing rural water risks
Summary
In the baseline year of the sustainable development agenda, 2015, 2.1 billion people lacked safely managed drinking water services globally and 844 million people did not have basic drinking water services (WHO/UNICEF, 2017). The contribution of this research is twofold: first, it focuses on cooperation between the cultures rather than conflict within the waterpoint management system under a professional service provider; second, it provides a mechanism for the formal recognition of a pluralist framework and for empirical support of new approaches towards managing rural water risks. The theoretical framework is applied to coastal Kenya drawing on empirical findings from a longitudinal study to examine how the four basic management cultures postulated by cultural theory handle operational, financial, institutional and environmental risks It closes on the discussion of a pluralist institution in the form of a professional maintenance service provider that allows the coexistence of current values while taking the risks of the different cultures as an opportunity for cooperation. Combining the entrepreneurial domain of annual contracts with collective decision-making and local ownership as well as public sector support, it represents a creative and flexible combination of the various ways of organising, perceiving and justifying social relations (Verweij et al, 2006)
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