Abstract
This paper quantitatively analyzes the spatial heterogeneity of district‐level correlates of open defecation in rural India. We employ standard non‐spatial regression, spatially explicit regressions and multi‐scale geographically weighted regression to compare the stability of measurable correlates of open defecation across these different methods as well as across analyzed spatial units. Attributes like ownership of household assets, drinking water inaccessibility and prevalent literacy rates were identified as the most stable district‐level correlates of open defecation. Our results also demonstrated the relevance of our hypotheses about (a) possible negative sanitation externalities stemming from the co‐concentration of Scheduled Caste communities and other communities in densely populated rural districts, and (b) possible positive sanitation externalities stemming from the co‐concentration of Muslim and non‐Muslim communities in densely populated districts. Overall, however, our analyses demonstrate notable spatial clustering and significant spatial non‐stationarity of examined variables. Therefore, in our opinion, research findings that ignore spatial heterogeneity of sanitation drivers provide incomplete information for policy development and implementation.
Highlights
Sanitation interventions often fail in meeting the desired expectations
Research findings that ignore the spatial heterogeneity of sanitation drivers possibly provide incomplete information for practice
The above approaches deal with the various spatial heterogeneities in the data, they ignore spatial nonstationarity by assuming the stability of relationships between the independent variables and the dependent variable over space. We explored this issue using Multi-scale Geographically Weighted Regression (MGWR) [62, 63], which is a recent extension of the Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR) models [64, 65]
Summary
Sanitation interventions often fail in meeting the desired expectations. A prominent reason is the ecological nature of sanitation phenomena that inherently associates with its high dependence on contextual specifics. The elimination of Open Defecation (OD) is a critical initial step towards ensuring safe sanitation, with this being a basic prerequisite for improving human health [1] The eradication of this practice has been central to achieving the target of universal access to sanitation by 2030, as was declared under the sixth SDG (Sustainable Development Goal). The most recent endeavour, the Swachh Bharat Mission (2014–2019) (a restructured form of the Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan which ran from 2012–2014), has substantially increased toilet coverage across the country It remains to be seen whether this shall eliminate OD and foster sustainable sanitation changes, with toilet adoption still being far from universal [12, 13, 14, 15]
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