Water and Citizenship

Though the recent rise of high-level international interest in deriving human rights indicators for basic needs like water and sanitation offers some broad-stroke value in providing general references for policy makers and advocates, the assumption that these indicators serve to: a) promote or facilitate enforcement of human rights to water and sanitation; and b) spur direct funding for water and sanitation are unfortunately empirically dubious claims. The increase in indicator production does not reflect a “need” but rather a propensity in high-level international discourses to quantify and abstract. Such abstraction and quantification are exercises where international high-level professionals have a perceived comparative skills advantage relative to the skill set – and personal/financial/analytical investment – required to actually advocate for or deliver water and sanitation systems themselves ‘on the ground’. Given the very physically localized nature of water and sanitation systems coupled with the widely experienced decentralization to local governments of the responsibility for ensuring the delivery of such systems, the challenges of rights enforcement and of mobilizing funding require greater analytical and empirically-driven disaggregation of what drives accountability and prioritization in different locations, rather than an analytical movement in the opposite direction (i.e. aggregation and ranking exercises). This research explores how International human rights to water and sanitation dialogues, conventions, and report-writing purposefully further generalize prescriptive policy at a dear cost. I argue that their depoliticizing effect is through the facilitation of a disjunction of international and national policy dialogues from the place-based, and ultimately public, responsibilities for water and sanitation systems. Instead, this study gathers and presents evidence about how the accessibility, adequacy, and affordability of water and sanitation systems are necessarily tied to citizenship – and in the age of decentralized administration of basic services – to the most local levels of government.