Abstract
Rapid urbanization in developing countries demands better integration of planning and delivery of basic services if cities are to be sustainable, healthy and safe. Sanitation improvements are commonly overlooked as investments go towards more visible services such as water supplies and drainage networks. The Sustainable Development Goal for sanitation and hygiene currently remains severely off-track. This paper presents the findings of a Delphi method survey to identify expert consensus on both why and how to integrate sanitation, by which we mean both sewered and non-sewered sanitation services, into other basic urban services (including water supply, drainage, energy and roads) to achieve better sanitation and broader development outcomes, notably for poor citizens. Consensus on why integration is important highlights the physical interdependence of services, where neglect of one service can compromise gains from another investment or service. Consensus on how includes actions to address political priorities and leadership; governance and capacity constraints; clearer planning, procurement and financing mechanisms; and adopting incremental approaches matched to wider urban strategies. It was suggested that achieving these actions would improve accountability, monitoring and service level audits. Experience from previous integrated urban programmes should be incorporated into formulating new sanitation service agreements across all service types. Supported by better-informed dialogue and decision-making between those responsible for urban sanitation and for associated basic services, we suggest integrated and incremental approaches will enable more sustainable urban services planning to achieve ‘quality of life’ outcomes for poor urban residents.
Highlights
IntroductionA deepening global specialism of non-sewered systems has seen sanitation move programmatically, and in some cases institutionally, away from water
Developments over the last decade have seen a diversity of technological and logistical solutions being applied to address the challenge of managing human waste in cities
Results of the Delphi survey are presented here in relation to the two major components framing the survey: Why integrating urban sanitation with other basic urban services is considered necessary to achieve wider development outcomes, and how this can be achieved through actions aligned to three enabling components
Summary
A deepening global specialism of non-sewered systems has seen sanitation move programmatically, and in some cases institutionally, away from water This may be for good reason, allowing for dedicated mandates and budget lines of an often-neglected sector. Global awareness of the extent to which sanitation was falling behind other development targets at the start of the 2000s in many cases led to increased coverage of access to stand-alone sanitation facilities This has not necessarily been met with access to comprehensive safely managed sanitation services. A more recent call to action in the WASH (water, sanitation and hygiene) sector is for citywide inclusive sanitation (CWIS), whereby appropriate urban sanitation approaches and technologies for global cities are to be (re)integrated into urban development planning and implementation. While there is an acknowledgement that further integration is desirable, the extent of consensus amongst expert researchers and practitioners around key issues of relevance, and insights into how change can best be achieved in practice, is not known
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