New Water Policy and Practice Volume 1, Number 1 - Fall 2014 | Page 23

New Water Policy and Practice

ter resources that cut across national and
sub-national boundaries (UN-Water 2013).
An interesting report from the U.S. intelligence community talks about the potential
failure of states that are ill equipped to handle their water woes within their borders and
with their neighbors (NIC 2012). The report
also points to food security and management
of irrigation waters as being closely linked to
the broader notion of water security.

In the backdrop of these challenges
in providing water-related services, managing scarce water resources and maintaining
water security, the international and national
responses have yielded limited success. The
JMP reports that nearly two billion people
gained access to an improved source of water
between 1990 and 2010 (WHO and UNICEF
2014). And yet the number of deaths tied
to water-related diseases does not show any
appreciable decline or a decreasing trend in
this period; perhaps we need to consider how
safe the “improved” water sources really are
for the health of those consuming that water. Many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa
show regression in provisioning of water and
sanitation services as population pressures
get larger. In contrast, the water storage and
hydropower generation potential for this region also remains largely untapped (WWAP
2014).

Continuing to pursue the same
model for water development—the business-as-usual scenario—is unlikely to yield
the requisite magnitude of results. This is so
for three reasons.

First, the easy-to-achieve targets, essentially picking of the low-hanging fruits,
have been achieved. UN-Water documents
that this took place through greater investments into large, urban water/wastewater
development projects (WHO 2010). This
development approach has largely by-passed
the much more challenging urban slums,
peri-urban areas, and large swathes of rural

areas; each of these groups is very difficult
to serve due to differing social, economic,
geographical, and infrastructural problems.
United Nations reports have accordingly
documented huge disparities in provisioning of services between urban and rural areas
(WHO and UNICEF 2014). Creating more
large-scale water and wastewater treatment
systems and large networks of water supply and sewage lines is unlikely to solve the
problems in communities that are either too
densely packed to allow installation of infrastructure or are too widely spread or too remote to create efficient infrastructure.

Second, governments and international donors are not in a position to mobilize the magnitude of capital that is needed.
There is a growing sense that international
aid alone cannot solve the water problems,
and hence, national and sub-national governments must take on a greater burden of
the implementation costs (Bigas et al 2012).
At the same time, these same governments
are being asked to respond to a multitude of
social and economic challenges. As a consequence, the short-term political expediencies
ostensibly trump long-term, strategic investments into water and sanitation services. The
biennial high-level gatherings of economic
and finance ministers from the least developed countries to discuss sanitation and water provisioning seem to represent, at a minimum, a greater recognition of the problem
and its links to other development challenges
(SWA 2014).

Third, the indigenous human resources and relevant expertise that are needed simply do not exist at the scale needed.
The gaps in human capacity have not even
been adequately estimated, but anecdotal evidence suggests that even when socially appropriate and economically feasible technological solution exist, their implementation
is not possible due to the gaps in the human
capital. Some researchers have suggested that
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