Abstract
Building upon extensive field interviews with past and current public officials from domestic agencies and international organizations who are involved in safe drinking water policy in Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, and South Korea, the research identifies and clarifies the causal mechanisms behind the different rates of expansion in access to safe drinking water among these five countries. It then examines how well theories in public administration, particularly with emphasis on theoretical frameworks in implementation scholarship, help capture and explain these mechanisms. Both strengths and weaknesses of public administration theory are examined where efforts to improve existing frameworks are suggested with their merger with theories from comparative politics. This opens the discussion on how public administration scholars should be involved in addressing and offering insights and advice to tackle the outstanding global challenge of 663 million people still living without access to safe drinking water.
Highlights
According to United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund’s (UNICEF’s) and WorldHealth Organization’s (WHO’s) Joint Monitoring Report, 663 million people still lack access to improved drinking water sources, where the “improved water sources” are defined as water with physical barriers erected to prevent fecal contamination (UNICEF and WHO 2015, p. 4)
The question, “why do a large number of the world’s population still lack access to safe drinking water?” This question can be reframed as a question of how can we deliver water services that took much of Europe 150 years to achieve
The question is to what extent do these identified bottlenecks advanced in public administration scholarship offer analytical lens to the understanding the wide variation witnessed in access to safe drinking water across these countries
Summary
According to United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund’s (UNICEF’s) and World. The question is to what extent do these identified bottlenecks advanced in public administration scholarship offer analytical lens to the understanding the wide variation witnessed in access to safe drinking water across these countries. With aims to evaluate the validity of the evolving synthesized implementation framework, five inter-country comparative case studies were conducted These five countries were Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, and South Korea. Based on existing World Bank data, Indonesia is some of slowest improving countries in terms of expanding access to safe drinking water for its citizens. Korea lens an analytical lens since the country was at one time economically more deprived than the other countries, yet it attained universal access to safe drinking water. The country case studies were compiled with visits to field sites and multiple interviews with policy designers and policy implementation unit managers. This discussion on limitations at the end of this article opens up new discussions on future directions of subsequent research that will further build on to this study
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