Download the CE guidance note (PDF) by Seema Thomas and Ghazia Aslam, GPSA
Despite the importance of drinking water for life, a large proportion of world’s population lives without access to clean drinking water. Worldwide, 780 million people do not have access to adequate water sources. Almost 800,000 children die from diarrhea each year. Unsafe drinking water, inadequate availability of water for hygiene and lack of access to sanitation together contribute to about 88% of deaths from diarrheal diseases. More than 35% of the world’s population lacks accesto adequate sanitation. Millions of women and girls, in particular, spend hours a day fetching water(WHO/UNICEF, 2012; US Census Bureau). The Sustainable Development Goals agenda includes a dedicated goal on water and sanitation that sets out to “ensure availability and sanitation for all.” Understandably, the water sector has been the focus of international development interventions globally.
Developing countries are facing issues related to water whether it be accessibility to clean water, depleting water resources, pollution of water sources or conflicts resulting from water resource management despite the huge financial contributions by governments and donors worldwide. In order to solve these issues, historically development practitioners and scholars have focused on technical interventions such as constructing water delivery infrastructure. However, presently there has been a realization that most of these crises are fundamentally attributable to poor governance (Plummer and Slaymaker 2007). While conventional technical knowledge and capacity will continue to be important and necessary, lack of accountability and responsiveness to citizens has been identified as one of the key obstacles to improved service delivery in the water sector (Tropp, 2005).
More recently, practitioners have looked toward citizen engagement and participatory methods and approaches that empower citizens to seek accountability from the government in order to address critical governance challenges in the sector (Velleman 2010; Jacobsen et al., 2013; Plummer and Slaymaker, 2007; Ndwa, 2015). In fact, citizens’ engagement in different aspects of water governance has become a mainstream discourse in the water sector and is being embraced by local and multinational development organizations across the world (Sultana, 2009). This approach has become especially relevant in the light of World Bank’s commitment to increase beneficiary feedback to 100% of WBG-supported projects.
Despite widespread use of CE in the water sector, our understanding of how citizen approaches can be applied in the water sector and how practitioners can best support citizen engagement in water sector are still limited. This note aims to fill this gap by examining selected World Bank projects in the water sector (we limit our analysis to water service delivery). Specifically, we survey the range of CE approaches integrated in the World Bank projects in the water sector and what implementation challenges have been observed in integrating CE in these projects. We also analyze, what lessons can be learned from these experiences. For World Bank projects, we examined Project Appraisal Documents (PADs), Implementation Completion and Results Reports (ICRs), Independent Evaluation Group (IEG) reports and where available external evaluations of the projects. Wherever possible, learning from World Bank projects has been supplemented with other donors’ and civil society organizations’ experience in integrating CE in water delivery operations.
The note begins by briefly discussing the rationales of integrating CE in development projects in general and in water sector in particular. Also present a brief history of CE in development practice, and more specifically in the World Bank. After presenting methodology of the note in the third section, fourth section presents the survey of CE approaches used the water delivery sector. Fifth section identifies some challenges that have been observed in integrating CE approaches in water projects. Sixth section distills some lessons from these experiences. Seventh section concludes.
