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Sanitation justice? The multiple dimensions of urban sanitation inequalities
Abstract
Introduction The launch of the Water and Sanitation Decade (1980-90) marked the first attempt to place urban sanitation within national governments and international organizations’ development agendas. Since then, inclusion of sanitation within the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and global campaigns such as the UN Sanitation Year (2008), the End of Open Defecation Campaign, and World Toilet Day have institutionalized sanitation as one of the core development goals until 2030 and beyond. However, the results of many of these sanitation development initiatives have been disappointing. Regional statistics show alarming results for Sub-Saharan Africa, where urban population growth has outpaced gains in sanitation coverage since the 1990s; 14 out of 46 countries declined in sanitation coverage (UNICEF/WHO, 2015: 17). The MDGs were unable to eliminate inequalities in access to sanitation between rich and poor urban dwellers in most countries (UNICEF/WHO 2015). Depressing as this is, the MDGs have focused only on distributive outcomes (access to infrastructure), overlooking other dimensions of sanitation inequality. Failing to address these dimensions hampers development interventions which aim to reduce these inequalities: sub-surface flows of untreated wastewaters contaminate urban poor settlements’ shallow groundwater sources, displacing health risks onto the poorest, and reducing developmental opportunities for children and adults who themselves may already be using “improved” sanitation services (Graham and Polizzotto, 2013); building onsite sanitation infrastructure and improved access to latrines without provision for emptying or sludge removal services compromises long-term health benefits from “improved” sanitation (Jenkins et al., 2015; Tsinda et al., 2013). Finally, dimensions of access must include consideration of safety and comfort plus any particular needs of urban poor residents who are marginalized by age, disabilities, gender, or other social relations, so they can use the infrastructure provided (Hulland et al., 2015; Wilbur and Jones, 2014). Ignoring these dimensions of environmental and social inequalities can reverse any positive gains in terms of increased distribution of infrastructure. In this chapter, we develop the concept of sanitation justice to capture these dimensions of inequalities and their relations, which are often overlooked in debates on development targets for sanitation. In Section 2 we briefly review analyses of inequalities in relation to sanitation already present in the ecological justice literature, specifically urban political ecology and environmental justice. We draw from this literature to define three dimensions of sanitation justice: distributive, procedural, and recognitional justice.
... In light of the above-cited instances and oft-increasing importance of groundwater consumption in both developing and developed nations, it is necessary to find the causes of its quality being deteriorated and mapping its effect on the socio-spatial configuration of disease prevalence among the humans (Alvarez and Evans 2021;Mattoo et al. 2023). This study draws from environmental justice theorisation for just 'spaces' in terms of groundwater and health frontiers (Abi Deivanayagam et al. 2023;Bulkeley et al. 2013;Graham 2009;Pearce et al. 2010;Alvarez et al. 2021;King, et al. 2021;Wakefield and Baxter 2010;Prochaska et al. 2012) using groundwater quality, sanitary conditions, and disease distribution in lines of social hierarchy formations (Roman et al. 2021;Janakarajan and Moench 2006;Nayak 2009;Delpla et al. 2015;Rusca et al. 2017;Mattoo et al. 2021;Mir et al. 2022a, b, c;Yussof 2021). In contemporary times the question of 'environment' and it is over the past 2 decades or so, the environmental question and its amplitude with socio-ecological relations have been mainstreamed and spatial justice and, in particular, have become the thrust area around which the planetary environmental conditions flow through (Swyngedouw 2022;Whyte 2020;Sultana 2022;Newell et al. 2021;Fisher 2015;Mir et al. 2022a, b, c;Lewis and Maslin 2015). ...
... The risk based on ranks assigned is usually marked as low, medium to high, and very high. Studies have shown synergistic interfaces between such microbial risks stemming from sanitary inspection modules and microbiological investigation (Rusca et al. 2017;Howard et al. 2003;Cronin et al. 2006;Usha et al. 2014;Snoad et al. 2017;Khan et al. 2021). These questions/parameters are generally framed in such a way that when the answer is 'Yes', the risk is present (scored 1), and when the answer is 'No' (scored 0), the risk is not present (Kelly et al. 2021). ...
Groundwater is emerging as vital resource in view of the changing climate and diminishing water surface availability. Due to the changing demographic and burgeoning demands for drinking water, the instances of over-abstraction and contamination are all pervasive. The pattern of groundwater quality deterioration and burdens of disease incidence manifest in Kashmir Himalayas as well. The geomorphological and cultural facets have strongly supported the occurrence and access to groundwater distribution and accessibility. The present study uses socio-geospatial approach for the first time in investigating the groundwater quality conditions and human health. This approach in concert with the spatial justice paradigm would definitely augment in water governance and public health discourse in South Asian geographies in general and world in particular. The study employed the physico-chemical and microbiological (30 sampled sites) parameters which largely suggest some selected pockets in the region faced with poor groundwater quality conditions and the significant disease incidence. Groundwater Quality Index, Disease Incidence, Sanitary Investigation Survey, and finally Prioritization modeling were done with embedded intersectionality of socio-cultural factors. The south and south-western region of the region indicates the microbial contamination owing to the improper sanitary conditions and unplanned waste disposal mechanism. This study voices for liberatory praxis for ‘just’ and safe spaces in terms of water governance and environmental rights which forms the kernel of nature-land relations in the discourse of environmental justice and egalitarian socio-spatial relations. This novel and methodologically pluralistic work of socio-ecological and epidemiological spectrum surely would be the trailblazing endeavor in dissecting the asymmetric nature-land dichotomies across the world.
... Less than 40% of the world's population has access to safely managed sanitation (WHO & UNICEF 2017), with serious public health risks (Fewtrell et al. 2005), as well as economic and social consequences ( Jenkins et al. 2014;Rusca et al. 2018). Effective management of the sanitation chain requires a combination of services, stakeholders and technologies (Thye et al. 2011;Rusca et al. 2018). ...
... Less than 40% of the world's population has access to safely managed sanitation (WHO & UNICEF 2017), with serious public health risks (Fewtrell et al. 2005), as well as economic and social consequences ( Jenkins et al. 2014;Rusca et al. 2018). Effective management of the sanitation chain requires a combination of services, stakeholders and technologies (Thye et al. 2011;Rusca et al. 2018). In Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), over 80% of the population uses onsite sanitation facilities (WHO & UNICEF 2017), requiring adequate emptying and transport services of the faecal sludge contained in pits and tanks to be safely managed. ...
Using a two-round Delphi study, 15 faecal sludge emptiers from 11 cities in Sub-Saharan Africa have expressed views on the regulation of faecal sludge emptying services. Their responses identify the regulatory mechanisms in place where they operate, their opinions of these mechanisms, and prioritisation of those considered most useful to enable safe emptying services for all urban residents. All respondents (100%) support regulation, with 80% finding the regulation they encounter useful. However, all also state that regulatory mechanisms should extend beyond only rules and sanctions, to incorporate support, incentives and pro-poor mechanisms. This study is the first to provide a first-hand account of Sub-Saharan African private emptiers' willingness to accept clear regulation. In that regard, regulation should be flexible and adapted to the context in order to facilitate fair competition, safe and satisfactory service for customers and workers alike, and to alleviate the public and environmental health risks. HIGHLIGHTS
This research investigates emptiers’ perspectives on the regulation of their services in Sub-Saharan Africa.;
Emptiers are keen to be regulated, providing regulation is flexible, adapted to the context and enforced on all.;
This study highlights the importance of support and incentive mechanisms and of pro-poor measures for safe emptying services to be both regulated effectively and accessible to all.;
... Studies have also highlighted and problematized the intersectionality of social identities and belief systems that are embedded in various sanitation infrastructures, which thus can be seen as tools of domination and sources for the reproduction of gendered power relations regardless of their functionality (Truelove and O'Reilly 2020;Kotsila and Subramanian Saravanan, 2017;Nakyagaba et al. 2021;McFarlane and Silver 2017;Morales et al., 2014;Alda-Vidal et al. 2023). Furthermore, critical studies have underlined the need for a differentiated understanding of security as justice, dignity, and recognition, as environmental risks are unevenly distributed across urban space but can only be solved collectively because access to safe sanitation at the individual level does not imply the absence of risks from unsafe sanitation at the societal level (Rusca, Alda-Vidal, and Kooy 2017;McFarlane 2019;McFarlane and Silver 2017). In this regard, (McFarlane 2023) establishes a connection between the right to the city and the geographies of waste and sanitation, demonstrating how the uneven distribution of costs and risks of unsafe sanitation deprives millions of people of their right to the city on a daily basis. ...
Decentralisation and the flexible combination of infrastructures and technologies are advocated to expand access to safe sanitation amid rapid urbanization, worsening water scarcity, resource depletion, and climate change. Yet, narrowly technical approaches such as the citywide inclusive sanitation approach tend to underestimate social and political bargaining and the role of structural power in shaping access to basic urban services. Building on international political economy, this article develops the territorial political economy framework to explore specific sanitation systems' distribution of structural power in security, production, and finance. Utilizing this framework, the study constructs a typology of five sanitation bargains, derived from theoretical insights, expert interviews, scientific case studies, and key policy documents. Each bargain represents an ideal typical combination of technology, organisation, and finance, with the corresponding spatial and social distribution of costs, benefits, risks, and opportunities. Together, this enables a political economy analysis of sanitation systems in cities that is sensitive to both multiscalar negotiations and distributional outcomes associated with sanitation provision in the city. When expanding sanitation services to so-far unserved areas in the cities, the paper shows how the limitations of the citywide inclusive sanitation approach in its current form can be overcome. It enables to explicitly consider the implications of embedded structural power on households when assessing and selecting technological options and organizational models for providing access to safe sanitation inclusively across the city.
... Although the literature on marginality in sanitation beyond toilet access remains sparce, some emerging literature has framed the provision of safely managed sanitation in terms of 'sanitation justice' [98] or 'technology justice' [99]. Rusca et al (2018) stress the connection between safely managed sanitation and dignity, arguing that analyses of sanitation inequalities must consider not only access to infrastructure, but also the necessary services to support infrastructure and crucially their impact on individual dignity. ...
Sanitation is fundamental for health and wellbeing yet cities, especially in the global South, face challenges in providing safely managed sanitation systems. Global and national sanitation campaigns tend to focus on the visible aspects of being ‘on grid’ in terms of toilet construction and connections but rarely address the dangerous, invisible aspects of being ‘off grid’ such as poor or unsafe excreta disposal and inadequate faecal sludge management (often considered to be second or third generation sanitation challenges). These, however, tend to disproportionately affect poor and marginalised people in off-grid locations in rapidly urbanising areas. This review paper engages critically with the growing literature on the challenges of faecal sludge management and circular economy solutions. Through the lens of exclusion and marginality, we review debates regarding access to safely managed sanitation, the burden of sanitation workers and safely recovering value from shit. We argue that sanitation systems often reproduce and exacerbate existing societal hierarchies and discriminations in terms of unequal access to safely managed sanitation and the burden of maintaining sanitation infrastructures. It is thus important for future research on faecal sludge management and resource recovery from shit to focus on issues of marginality and exclusion.
... Yet many scholars, activists, policies and states reject this framing that starts with a modern ideal, instead starting from the south and emphasising how non-modern infrastructures work, explaining their operations, relations and politics (e.g. Alba et al., 2020;Alda-Vidal et al., 2018;Furlong and Kooy, 2017;Jaglin, 2014Jaglin, , 2015Rusca et al., 2017a). Such studies have done much to help us understand the significance of infrastructure and its role in shaping urban lives, economies, ecologies and politics and the possibilities for infrastructure beyond modernity. ...
The idea of the modern city continues to inform urban policies and practices, shaping ideas of what infrastructure is and how it ought to work. While there has long been conflict over its meaning and relevance, particularly in southern cities, alternatives remain difficult to identify. In this paper, we ‘read for difference’ in the policies and practices of sanitation in Kampala, purposefully looking for evidence of an alternative imaginary. We find increasing acceptance of and support for heterogeneous technological artefacts and a shift to consider these as part of wider infrastructures. These sanitation configurations are, at times, no longer framed as temporary placeholders while ‘waiting for modernity’, but instead as pathways towards a not yet predetermined end. What this technological change means for policies, permissions and socio-economic relations is also as yet unclear: the roles and responsibilities of the modern infrastructure ideal have limited significance, but new patterns remain in the making. Further, while we find increased attention to limits and uncertainty, we also see efforts to weave modernist practices (creating legible populations, knowing and controlling nature) into emergent infrastructural configurations. In this context, we consider Kampala not as a complete instantiation of a ‘modest’ approach to infrastructure, but as a place where struggles over infrastructure are rooted in competing, dynamic imaginaries about how the world is and what this means for the cities we build. It is also a place from which we might begin articulating a ‘modest imaginary’ that enables rethinking what infrastructure is and ought to be.
... As various The Urban Metabolism of Waterborne Diseases scholars have noted, for a majority of cities in the Global South, unequal access to sanitation has persisted since colonial times (McFarlane 2008;Letema, van Vliet, and van Lier 2014). In the 1990s, the paradigm shift from centralized to decentralized systems ran parallel with a process of progressive hollowing out of the state in the provision of sanitation services (Cumming et al. 2014;Galvin 2015;McGranahan 2015;Rusca, Alda-Vidal, and Kooy 2018). Responsibilities of constructing and managing on-site sanitation were passed on to the end users, with several negative consequences. ...
In this article we draw on an interdisciplinary study on drinking water quality in Maputo, the capital of Mozambique, to examine the nature, scale, and politics of waterborne diseases. We show how water contamination and related diseases are discursively framed as household risks, thereby concealing the politics of uneven exposure to contaminated water and placing the burden of being healthy on individuals. In contrast, we propose that uneven geographies of waterborne diseases are best understood as the product of Maputo’s urban metabolism, in which attempts of being sanitary and healthy are caught up in relations of power, class, and variegated citizenship. Waterborne diseases are the result of complex and fragmented circulations and intersections of (waste)waters, generated by uneven urban development, heterogeneous infrastructure configurations, and everyday practices to cope with basic service deficits, in conjunction with increasing climatic variability. The latrine—from which ultimately contamination and diseases spread—is an outcome of these processes, rather than the site to be blamed. This article also advances an interdisciplinary framework for analyzing urban metabolism and deepening its explanatory potential. It serves as a demonstration of how interdisciplinary approaches might be taken forward to generate new readings of more than human metabolic processes at distinct temporal and spatial scales.
... This further consolidates the previously stated fact that the past status of urban sanitation in Nigeria is nil or could be better stated as not documented. Another cogent explanation for this could be that the oldest attempt to place sanitation within the development agendas of national governments and international agencies was with the launch of 1980-1990 Water and Sanitation Decade program (32). Though unlimited and sufficient access to water supply and sanitation has been mentioned and discussed at the development and economic summits of 1972 and 1992 with millennium development goals set, planning and implementations were still at the preparation and evolutionary stages, and as Nigerian national environmental and health policies adopt these international guidelines, time and other factors could have delayed its implementation. ...
Though rated among the largest economies in sub-Saharan Africa, Nigeria is currently grappling with enormous socio-economic challenges such as high poverty rate, power and water supply shortages, large-scale unemployment ratio, economic recession and underperforming agricultural sector. Judging by the scale of urgent political and economic importance, urban sanitation definitely ranks low among the government’s priorities. No wonder political slogans and manifestos of political parties feature provision of water supply while sanitation is conspicuously usually omitted. This is suggestive of the opinion that having not critically understood the status, challenges and opportunities associated with sanitation in the country’s urban areas might be partly responsible for this. Thus, the current work presents a detailed review of the past, current and future status of urban sanitation in Nigeria in terms of access coverage, policies, institutions and future challenges and opportunities. The past status was difficult to evaluate because of the absence of data and unclear definitions of the term ‘sanitation’. The current status shows among other findings that water supply issues receive domineering attention than sanitation, mainly due to merging together of discussions, policies and implementation of the two issues together. In cases where sanitation crops up in the agenda, rural areas are favored more than the urban areas. This pattern is also common in the literature. But the future of urban sanitation in Nigeria is double-edged depending on actions or inactions of the government and other stakeholders. The study further makes recommendations for – balanced and sustainable urban development planning, restructuring of land and housing policies and creation of enabling market environment that could trigger a viable sanitation industry – as the way forward.
The service to the Brazilian rural population through sewage treatment services is still precarious. Data provided in the National Rural Sanitation Program (PNSR, 2019) show
that about 80% of the households present in these areas dispose of their sewage inadequately, in the form of septic tanks or directly in lakes, rivers and the sea. This reality affects about 40 million Brazilians. This situation generates risks to public health and harms environmental quality, especially the quality of surface and underground water bodies, as well as soils. It adds to the situation currently observed to that projected as a result of future
scenarios resulting from global climate change. The sixth report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC. 2023) points to an increase in the water deficit for most of
the Brazilian territory, and it is necessary, as a strategy to adapt to this scenario, the development of technological assets aimed at improving water quality and making better use of this natural resource. As agriculture is the largest water-consuming economic activity in the country and heavily dependent on fertilizer imports, it is clear that systems that provide the reuse of treated effluents, as well as the nutrients present in them, gain strength
and become a priority to deal with the expected risks, increasing the resilience and sustainability of production systems. For this reason, Embrapa, in partnership with IICA, developed the Sanitary Sewage Treatment and Water Reuse System for the production of vegetables in rural and isolated communities (ReAqua System), which aims to provide a low-cost alternative, easy installation and operation, low energy and labor dependence, and high efficiency in the removal of organic load and pathogens to serve rural and isolated communities. The ReAqua System consists of two stages, the first consisting of the
Sewage Treatment Plant (ETE) and the second the agricultural system for the production of vegetables. The WWTP is assembled using tanks and water tanks, PVC or fiberglass pipes and connections, as well as materials used for civil construction. The sewage treatment system is based on joint Septic Tank – Anaerobic Filter, followed by sequential slow filtration
with increasing difficulty and chlorine disinfection. The agricultural system stage of vegetable production is based on the use of gravity irrigation, reuse of nutrients by fertigation, use of soil cover by mulching The quality of the reused water, as well as the
agricultural management used, allows the safe production of vegetables with less dependence on mineral fertilizers.
Although sanitation is embedded in the socio-culture, the socio-cultural aspects of sanitation are not fully discussed. In this context, we focus on the socio-cultural aspects of sanitation, especially the connection between socio-culture with health (C), and with materials (B), as in the Sanitation Triangle model, from the perspective of humanities and social sciences in this part. To introduce this part, we first briefly review previous studies on sanitation by humanities and social sciences, and show the socio-cultural aspects of sanitation. Then, after providing an overview of this part, we discuss the theoretical points of each chapter such as “hard work” or “dirty work,” a social configuration of technology, and Menstrual Hygiene Management (MHM) in the local context, and indicate the relevant chapters in this book.
Given the existence of a thriving epistemic community on water sciences, the high politicization of environmental issues in the country as well as the active mobilization of a grassroot movement inspired by environmental justice, South Africa appears to be an ideal case to study the development of a political ecology (PE) approach. Moreover, since the apartheid regime, water issues have long represented a marker of extreme inequality.This paper aims at drawing a panorama of the PE of water in South Africa, its main topics and approaches. In our definition, the PE of water is concerned with human–environment relations, with explicit considerations for power relations. In the first section, we identified texts that, according to this definition, constitute the core of the PE of water in South Africa, going beyond a mere “politics of water.” In the second section and in the discussion, we undertook an in‐depth analysis of the main topics addressed by authors, such as environmental flows, “free basic water policy,” prepaid water meters. PE of water is strongly connected to international debates about the link between water and power, but also capable of addressing in a critical way the specificities of the South African waterscape. It stems from this review that critical PE in urban settings in particular dominates the discipline. We could also note that the PE of water in rural areas tends to put a bigger emphasis on the “politics of ecology” whereas urban PE tends to focus more on the “ecology in politics,” although both thrive to examine the human–environment relations in an integrated manner.
This article is categorized under: Human Water > Water Governance
Human Water > Value of Water
Human Water > Rights to Water
Urban development, and particularly the improvement of basic services delivery, is still approached in mostly technical terms by international development actors and municipalities of the Global South. Sanitation planning, for instance, remains the realm of engineers despite decades of evidence that conventional approaches focusing on infrastructure upgrading have failed to tackle socio-environmental challenges. Against this background, this paper explores sanitation planning in Mandalay, the second largest city of Myanmar. Here, the Asian Development Bank and a French consulting firm have seized the opportunity created by the country’s recent opening to embark with the municipality on a multi-million dollar scheme: the Mandalay Urban Services Improvement Project (MUSIP). Drawing upon insights from critical development studies, the paper argues that the MUSIP can be interpreted as an ‘anti-politics machine’ that ignored local needs and proposed disputable solutions to local sanitation challenges. The paper further explores how this machine jeopardised urban development in Mandalay more generally, and was eventually challenged by the municipality. The paper concludes that the case is not unique and illustrates how urban development is today being reshaped throughout Myanmar, while it also shows the continued relevance of the ‘anti-politics’ framework to understand contemporary urban development assistance projects.
Visual methods are becoming increasingly popular in social sciences, but are still little explored when it comes to water related studies. Drawing on literature on visual methods and documentary filmmaking, this paper reflects on the role and potential of videography to capture and visualize inequalities in urban water supply and access. The paper is based on research undertaken over a period of 4 years, in which a mix of talk based and videographic methods was used to capture the production of uneven conditions of access to water in Lilongwe, Malawi, and Maputo, Mozambique. It reflects on the important and unique ethical questions raised by video‐based methods, including the data collection process, the type of knowledge that is produced, how it is mobilized, who has access to it and the relation between representation of social reality and the power of storytelling.
This article is categorized under:
• Human Water > Methods
• Engineering Water > Planning Water
• Human Water > Rights to Water
Hygiene plays a key role in tipping the balance towards reduction of diarrhoeal and other infectious diseases. Yet it has often been overlooked, positioned as a “supporting rider” of water supply and sanitation services, or narrowly understood as handwashing. By focusing on handwashing infrastructure as proposed for the monitoring of Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6, development actors might miss the opportunity of capturing hygiene practices that are socially embedded and can act as a catalyst for change and risk reduction. We develop this argument by presenting an in-depth examination of hygiene practices in a low-income neighbourhood of Lilongwe, Malawi. Despite the high poverty levels and the constant water shortages in the area, a number of water-intensive hygiene practices are consistently carried out, proving that hygiene is central to residents’ everyday lives. Development projects should start by identifying these practices and by reflecting on the extent that these already work or can be made to work for reducing health-related risks.
Taking as his case-study the city of Guayaquil in Ecuador, where 600,000 people lack easy access to potable water, Erik Swyngedouw aims to reconstruct, theoretically and empirically, the political, social, and economic conduits through which water flows, and to identify how power relations infuse the metabolic transformation of water as it becomes urban. These flows of water which are simultaneously physical and social carry in their currents the embodiment of myriad social struggles and conflicts. The excavation of these flows narrates stories about the city's structure and development. Yet these flows also carry the potential for an improved, more just, and more equitable right to the city and its water. The flows of power that are captured by urban water circulation also suggest that the question of urban sustainability is not just about achieving sound ecological and environmental conditions, but first and foremost about a social struggle for access and control; a struggle not just for the right to water, but for the right to the city itself.
Over past decades strategies for improving access to drinking water in cities of the Global South have mainly focused on increasing coverage, while water quality has often been overlooked. This paper focuses on drinking water quality in the centralised water supply network of Lilongwe, the capital of Malawi. It shows how microbial contamination of drinking water is unequally distributed to consumers in low-income (unplanned areas) and higher-income neighbourhoods (planned areas). Microbial contamination and residual disinfectant concentration were measured in 170 water samples collected from in-house taps in high-income areas and from kiosks and water storage facilities in low-income areas between November 2014 and January 2015. Faecal contamination (E. coli) was detected in 10% of the 40 samples collected from planned areas, in 59% of the 64 samples collected from kiosks in the unplanned areas and in 75% of the 32 samples of water stored at household level. Differences in water quality in planned and unplanned areas were found to be statistically significant at p < 0.05. Finally, the paper shows how the inequalities in microbial contamination of drinking water are produced by decisions both on the development of the water supply infrastructure and on how this is operated and maintained.
Emerging evidence demonstrates how inadequate access to water and sanitation is linked to psychosocial stress, especially among women, forcing them to navigate social and physical barriers during their daily sanitation routines. We examine sanitation-related psychosocial stress (SRPS) across women's reproductive lives in three distinct geographic sites (urban slums, rural villages, and rural tribal villages) in Odisha, India. We explored daily sanitation practices of adolescent, newly married, pregnant, and established adult women (n = 60) and identified stressors encountered during sanitation. Responding to structured data collection methods, women ranked seven sanitation activities (defecation, urination, menstruation, bathing, post-defecation cleaning, carrying water, and changing clothes) based on stress (high to low) and level of freedom (associated with greatest freedom to having the most restrictions). Women then identified common stressors they encountered when practicing sanitation and sorted stressors in constrained piles based on frequency and severity of each issue. The constellation of factors influencing SRPS varies by life stage and location. Overall, sanitation behaviors that were most restricted (i.e., menstruation) were the most stressful. Women in different sites encountered different stressors, and the level of perceived severity varied based on site and life stage. Understanding the influence of place and life stage on SRPS provides a nuanced understanding of sanitation, and may help identify areas for intervention.
In this essay we investigate the discourses around the Human Right to Water (HRW) and the growing acceptance of the importance of this right in environmental justice (EJ) agendas. We argue that there is a need to constructively engage in conversations about what the HRW should mean and how it should be realized. We see significant promise in the aspirational value of the HRW as well as the potential discursive and conceptual possibilities it opens up. The HRW has the potential to directly question conditions of water access and governance and thus to also highlight key social and EJ concerns. The HRW debate also enables new legal bases of redress across scales, in addition to shifting discourses and aspirations that have the potential to reframe the terms of debate even when there seem to be “no alternatives.” For all of these reasons, we believe that there is value in further debates around the HRW with the goal of imagining more socially just and environmentally sustainable water futures for all.
This paper presents an assessment of the extent and conditions under which private financing can be a realistic approach for sanitation in slums. It is based on a cross-sectional study comparing two slum communities in East Africa, where 250 households from Bwaise III in Kampala, Uganda and 379 households from Temeke in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania were interviewed in 2010. Also, 10 key-informant interviews and 8 focus group discussions were conducted in addition to field observations. Findings show that majority (85%) of households used unimproved, private-shared pit latrines. These privately owned latrines had many structural shortfalls besides poor operation and maintenance while the public latrines provided by third-party were structurally sound but were under-utilized in residential slum neighorhoods. This is attributed to the presence free or at least cheaper alternatives which the community members preferred instead of paying per-visit user-fees. For the few who were willing to pay, willingness to pay was positively associated with the presence of a facility User committee and having been sensitized. In this context, a combination of these factors made cost recovery as well as operation and maintenance very minimal. The poor status of privately owned shared pit latrines matched the limited income levels of households. Similarly, cost recovery for public facilities was dependent on the number of users who were willing to pay: the more the users, the more the cost recovery. A combination of private and public financing is thus necessary to fund different but complementary aspects of sanitation in slums.
China has seen rapid economic development and urbanisation and this has included the upgrading of traditional sanitation systems. But the speed of this transition raises concerns about the coexistence of diverging sanitation practices and their impact. This paper asks how this coexistence is experienced by low-income urban residents in Shanghai. It is based on field research during four weeks in July 2013 which involved in-depth, open-ended interviews with 20 low-income urban residents. The article concludes that these diverging everyday practices are situated at the core of urban socio-spatial differentiation, inequality, exclusion and discrimination. Particularly affected are rural-to-urban migrants and ageing working-class residents for whom the lack of access to improved sanitation may be associated with stigmatisation and social isolation. Future research should examine how changing sanitation cultures under urban development and diverging sanitation practices in different contexts can affect family ties, social relations and socio-spatial integration.
Pit latrines are the main form of sanitation in unplanned areas in many rapidly growing developing cities. Understanding demand for pit latrine fecal sludge management (FSM) services in these communities is important for designing demand-responsive sanitation services and policies to improve public health. We examine latrine emptying knowledge, attitudes, behavior, trends and rates of safe/unsafe emptying, and measure demand for a new hygienic latrine emptying service in unplanned communities in Dar Es Salaam (Dar), Tanzania, using data from a cross-sectional survey at 662 residential properties in 35 unplanned sub-wards across Dar, where 97% had pit latrines. A picture emerges of expensive and poor FSM service options for latrine owners, resulting in widespread fecal sludge exposure that is likely to increase unless addressed. Households delay emptying as long as possible, use full pits beyond what is safe, face high costs even for unhygienic emptying, and resort to unsafe practices like ‘flooding out’. We measured strong interest in and willingness to pay (WTP) for the new pit emptying service at 96% of residences; 57% were WTP ≥U.S. $17 to remove ≥200 L of sludge. Emerging policy recommendations for safe FSM in unplanned urban communities in Dar and elsewhere are discussed.
Women's use of water differs from men in essentially one aspect: in cleansing the body of menstrual blood. The pledge of the water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) sector to place ‘women at the centre’ of development has in recent years, therefore, come to focus on menstruation. International development agencies have begun to push the agenda of menstrual hygiene management (MHM), but their use of a medical approach requires critical rethinking. This article argues that through MHM lessons, menstruation is medicalised to construct new and repressive expectations of normality for the female body. A medical construction also poorly accommodates the natural biological process of menstruation within the gamut of existing sociocultural practices. Consequently, menstruation becomes associated with the perceived need for not only sanitisation of the female body of the rural poor, but also to turn it into a working body that is able to ceaselessly and ‘normally’ perform its productive and reproductive chores. I note that the success of medicalisation relies upon the separation of the body from its purported waste, the menstrual blood. Once menstruation is confined to a pathological condition, treatable only by public agents such as doctors and commercially produced goods such as sanitary napkins, a defining essence of womanhood is thereby dissociated from the female body.
This paper examines two interrelated cases of environmental injustice and social mobilisation in the Onondaga lake watershed in Central New York State, USA: (1) the case of the Onondaga Nation, an indigenous people whose rights to, and uses of, water and other resources have been severely reduced through historical processes of Euro-American settlement and industrial development; and (2) the case of the city of Syracuse, New York's Southside neighbourhood, a low-income community of colour, where a sewage treatment facility was constructed as part of a broader effort to remediate the effects of pollution in Onondaga lake. The Onondaga Nation and the Southside neighbourhood are connected by Onondaga creek, which flows through each before joining Onondaga lake. These communities are also linked by shared histories of marginalisation and environmental injustice. Taken together, the cases demonstrate the temporal and spatial continuities of social relations of power, and their embodiment in water resources. Conceptually, the paper brings together the literatures of environmental justice and the political ecology of water resources. In doing so, we employ the concept of waterscape as an analytical lens to examine processes of marginalisation and social exclusion in the Onondaga lake watershed. The waterscape concept, and the political ecology of water resources literature more generally, have much to contribute to the study of water-related environmental (in)justice.
This paper examines the politics of open defecation by focusing on everyday intersections of the body and infrastructure in the metabolic city, which produces profoundly unequal opportunities for fulfilling bodily needs. Specifically, it examines how open defecation emerges in Mumbai's informal settlements through everyday embodied experiences, practices and perceptions forged in relation to the materialities of informality and infrastructure. It does so by tracing the micropolitics of provision, access, territoriality and control of sanitation infrastructures; everyday routines and rhythms, both of people and infrastructures; and experiences of disgust and perceptions of dignity. It also examines open defecation as embodied spatial and temporal improvisations in order to investigate the socially differentiated efforts and risks that it entails. More broadly, the paper seeks to deepen understandings of the relationship between the body, infrastructure and the sanitary/unsanitary city.
In 1987 the United Church of Christ's (UCC) Commission for Racial Justice published its landmark report Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States. The report documented disproportionate environmental burdens facing people of color and low-income communities across the country. The report sparked a national grassroots environmental justice movement and significant academic and governmental attention. In 2007, the UCC commissioned leading environmental justice scholars for a new report, Toxic Wastes and Race at Twenty: Grassroots Struggles to Dismantle Environmental Racism in the United States. In addition to commemorating and updating the 1987 report, the new report takes stock of progress achieved over the last twenty years. Although Toxic Wastes and Race has had tremendous positive impacts, twenty years after its release people of color and low-income communities are still the dumping grounds for all kinds of toxins. Using 2000 Census data, an updated database of commercial hazardous waste facilities, and newer methods that better match where people and hazardous sites are located, we found significant racial and socioeconomic disparities persist in the distribution of the nation's hazardous wastes facilities. We demonstrate that people of color are more concentrated around such facilities than previously shown. People of color are particularly concentrated in neighborhoods and communities with the greatest number of facilities and racial disparities continue to be widespread throughout the country. Moreover, hazardous waste host neighborhoods are composed predominantly of people of color. Race continues to be the predominant explanatory factor in facility locations and clearly still matters. Yet getting government to respond to the needs of low-income and people of color communities has not been easy, especially in recent years when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has mounted an all-out attack on environmental justice principles and policies established in the 1990s. Environmental injustice results from deeply-embedded institutional discrimination and will require the support of concerned individuals, groups, and organizations from various walks of life. The Toxic Wastes and Race at Twenty report condensed in this Article provides dozens of recommendations for action at the federal, state, and local levels to help eliminate the disparities. The report also makes recommendations for nongovernmental organizations and industry. More than one hundred environmental justice, civil rights, human rights, faith based, and health allies signed a letter endorsing these steps to reverse recent backsliding, renewing the call for social, economic, and environmental justice for all. Congress has begun to listen and take action.
Environmental justice has been a central concern in a range of disciplines, and both the concept and its coverage have expanded substantially in the past two decades. I examine this development in three key ways. First, I explore how early work on environmental justice pushed beyond many boundaries: it challenged the very notion of ‘environment’, examined the construction of injustice beyond inequity, and illustrated the potential of pluralistic conceptions of social justice. More recently, there has been a spatial expansion of the use of the term, horizontally into a broader range of issues, vertically into examinations of the global nature of environmental injustices, and conceptually to the human relationship with the non-human world. Further, I argue that recent extensions of the environmental justice frame move the discourse into a new realm – where environment and nature are understood to create the conditions for social justice.
Background
While the sanitation ladder is useful in analysing progressive improvements in sanitation, studies in Uganda have not indicated the sanitation barriers faced by the urban poor. There are various challenges in shared latrine use, cleaning and maintenance. Results from Kampala city indicate that, failure to clean and maintain sanitation infrastructure can lead to a reversal of the potential benefits that come with various sanitation facilities.
Methods
A cross sectional qualitative study was conducted between March and May 2013. Data were collected through 18 focus group discussions (FGDs) held separately; one with women, men and youth respectively. We also used pictorial methods; in addition, 16 key informant interviews were conducted. Data were analysed using content thematic approach. Relevant quotations per thematic area were identified and have been used in the presentation of the results.
Results
Whether a shared sanitation facility was improved or not, it was abandoned once it was not properly used and cleaned. The problem of using shared latrines began with the lack of proper latrine training when people do not know how to squat on the latrine hole. The constrained access and security concerns, obscure paths that were filthy especially at night, lack of light in the latrine cubicle, raised latrines sometimes up to two metres above the ground, coupled with lack of cleaning and emptying the shared facilities only made a bad situation worse. In this way, open defecation gradually substituted use of the available sanitation facilities. This paper argues that, filthy latrines have the same net effect as crude open defection.
Conclusion
Whereas most sanitation campaigns are geared towards provision of improved sanitation infrastructure, these findings show that mere provision of infrastructure (improved or not) without adequate emphasis on proper use, cleaning and maintenance triggers an involuntary descent off the sanitation ladder. Understanding this reversal movement is critical in sustainable sanitation services and should be a concern for all actors.
BACKGROUND: Access to safe drinking-water is a fundamental requirement for good health and is also a human right. Global access to safe drinking-water is monitored by WHO and UNICEF using as an indicator "use of an improved source," which does not account for water quality measurements. Our objectives were to determine whether water from "improved" sources is less likely to contain fecal contamination than "unimproved" sources and to assess the extent to which contamination varies by source type and setting. METHODS AND FINDINGS: Studies in Chinese, English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish were identified from online databases, including PubMed and Web of Science, and grey literature. Studies in low- and middle-income countries published between 1990 and August 2013 that assessed drinking-water for the presence of Escherichia coli or thermotolerant coliforms (TTC) were included provided they associated results with a particular source type. In total 319 studies were included, reporting on 96,737 water samples. The odds of contamination within a given study were considerably lower for "improved" sources than "unimproved" sources (odds ratio [OR] = 0.15 [0.10-0.21], I2 = 80.3% [72.9-85.6]). However over a quarter of samples from improved sources contained fecal contamination in 38% of 191 studies. Water sources in low-income countries (OR = 2.37 [1.52-3.71]; p
The Community-Led Urban Environmental Sanitation (CLUES) approach presents comprehensive guidelines for the planning and implementation of environmental sanitation infrastructure and services in disenfranchised urban and peri-urban communities. The planning approach builds on a framework which balances the needs of people with those of the environment to support human dignity and a healthy life. CLUES is a multi-sector and multi-actor approach accounting for water supply, sanitation, solid waste management and storm drainage. It emphasises the participation of all stakeholders from an early stage in the planning process.
Like most cities in developing countries, Kigali is experiencing rapid urbanisation leading to an increase in the urban population and rapid growth in the size and number of informal settlements. More than 60% of the city's population resides in these settlements, where they experience inadequate and poor quality urban services including sanitation. This article discusses the issues and constraints related to the provision of sustainable sanitation in the informal settlements in Kigali. Two informal settlements (Gatsata and Kimisagara) were selected for the study, which used a mixed method approach for data collection. The research found that residents experienced multiple problems because of poor sanitation and that the main barrier to improved sanitation was cost. Findings from this study can be used by the city authorities in the planning of effective sanitation intervention strategies for communities in informal settlements.
Geographic research on environmental justice and risk is moving beyond its conventional focus on proximity and spatial distribution, increasingly recognizing multiple spatialities entailed in other dimensions of environmental justice—including recognition and participation—and in risk itself. Critical scholarship on environmental justice, however, has insufficiently considered the process of risk assessment, and research on the construction of risk has not fully engaged with the implications of environmental justice. Through analysis of human health risk assessment at the St. Regis Superfund site, on the Leech Lake Reservation in Minnesota, this article investigates intersections between spatialities of risk and spatialities of environmental justice as participation and recognition. I argue that the historical production of the reservation as place, territory, and scale lies at the origin not only of distributive injustices but also of injustices of misrecognition and marginalized participation in the assessment and management of risk. On the other hand, I contend that changing scalar and network spatial relations enabled the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe to strengthen the risk assessment by taking the significance of the reservation into account, as a place and territory associated with rights to tribal traditional lifeways. Nonetheless, the circulation of dominant assumptions about race and property continues to structure the “playing field” of risk assessment as uneven, and scholarship and policy on environmental justice and risk need to attend to this asymmetry.
This paper reviews the use of co-production — with state and citizens working together — as a grassroots strategy to secure political influence and access resources and services. To date, the literature on social movements has concentrated on more explicitly political strategies used by such movements to contest for power and influence. Co-production, when considered, is viewed as a strategy used by citizens and the state to extend access to basic services with relatively little consideration given to its wider political ramifications. However, co-production is used increasingly by grassroots organizations and federations as part of an explicit political strategy. This paper examines the use of co-productive strategies by citizen groups and social movement organizations to enable individual members and their associations to secure effective relations with state institutions that address both immediate basic needs and enable them to negotiate for greater benefits.
This paper describes the evolution of the piped water and sewer system in Kampala, Uganda, between 1920 and 1950, and considers the influences this had on the city’s later development. Large-scale systems for water and sanitation are associated with an inertia that makes them slow to adapt to a new economic, social or environmental context. It is important to know the history of such systems in order to understand issues of sustainability today. This article shows how the piped water and sewerage systems were introduced to serve mainly the more affluent groups in society. Although the systems were economically and socially sustainable in the colonial context, inherent features of the systems made universal service coverage problematic from an economic point of view. Policy makers need to acknowledge the historic influence and the inertia of systems in order to address current shortcomings in water and sanitation provision, and create sustainable and equitable service provision.
“Don’t teach us what is sanitation and hygiene.” This quote from Maqbul, a middle-aged male resident in Modher Bosti, a slum in Dhaka city, summed up the frustration of many people living in urban poverty to ongoing sanitation and hygiene programmes. In the light of their experiences, such programmes provide “inappropriate sanitation”, or demand personal investments in situations of highly insecure tenure, and/or teach “hygiene practices” that relate neither to local beliefs nor to the ground realities of a complex urban poverty. A three-year ethnographic study in Chittagong, Dhaka, Nairobi and Hyderabad illustrated that excreta disposal systems, packaged and delivered as low-cost “safe sanitation”, do not match the sanitation needs of a very diverse group of urban men, women and children. It is of little surprise that the delivered systems are neither appropriate nor used, and are not sustained beyond the life of the projects. This mismatch, far more than an assumed lack of user demand for sanitation, contributes to the elusiveness of the goal of sanitation and health for all. The analysis indicates that unless and until the technical, financial and ethical discrepancies relating to sanitation for the urban poor are resolved, there is little reason to celebrate the recent global declaration on the human right to water and sanitation and health for all.
The present article examines two Latin American gold mining conflicts, one in the city of Esquel (Patagonia in Argentina) and the other in Pascua–Lama (Chilean border with Argentina). We identify the emergence of three dimensions of environmental justice (distribution, recognition, participation) in the anti-mining movements of these two cases. The study finds that some dimensions of justice appear first (participation and recognition), while distribution emerges later, as movements jump scales engaging with national and international networks that provide a systemic perspective of the conflicts. The findings are consistent with other studies that refer to environmental justice as multi-scalar and context related. We also point to the relevance of studying decision-making procedures and jumping scales to understand how environmental justice claims are framed in resource extraction conflicts.
Background: Pit latrines are one of the most common human excreta disposal systems in low-income countries, and their use is on the rise as countries aim to meet the sanitation-related target of the Millennium Development Goals. There is concern, however, that discharges of chemical and microbial contaminants from pit latrines to groundwater may negatively affect human health.
Objectives: Our goals were to a) calculate global pit latrine coverage, b) systematically review empirical studies of the impacts of pit latrines on groundwater quality, c) evaluate latrine siting standards, and d) identify knowledge gaps regarding the potential for and consequences of groundwater contamination by latrines.
Methods: We used existing survey and population data to calculate global pit latrine coverage. We reviewed the scientific literature on the occurrence of contaminants originating from pit latrines and considered the factors affecting transport of these contaminants. Data were extracted from peer-reviewed articles, books, and reports identified using Web of ScienceSM, PubMed, Google, and document reference lists.
Discussion: We estimated that approximately 1.77 billion people use pit latrines as their primary means of sanitation. Studies of pit latrines and groundwater are limited and have generally focused on only a few indicator contaminants. Although groundwater contamination is frequently observed downstream of latrines, contaminant transport distances, recommendations based on empirical studies, and siting guidelines are variable and not well aligned with one another.
Conclusions: In order to improve environmental and human health, future research should examine a larger set of contextual variables, improve measurement approaches, and develop better criteria for siting pit latrines.
The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) set out to halve the proportion of the population without access to basic sanitation between 1990 and 2015. The slow pace of progress has lead to a search for innovative responses, including social motivation approaches. One example of this type of approach is 'Community-led Total Sanitation' (CLTS). CLTS represents a major shift for sanitation projects and programmes in recognising the value of stopping open-defecation across the whole community, even when the individual toilets built are not necessarily wholly hygienic. However, recent publications on CLTS document a number of examples of practices which fail to meet basic ethical criteria and infringe human rights. There is a general theme in the CLTS literature encouraging the use of 'shame' or 'social stigma' as a tool for promoting behaviours. There are reported cases where monetary benefits to which individuals are otherwise entitled or the means to practice a livelihood are withheld to create pressures to conform. At the very extreme end of the scale, the investigation and punishment of violence has reportedly been denied if the crime occurred while defecating in the open, violating rights to a remedy and related access to justice. While social mobilisation in general, and CLTS in particular, have drastically and positively changed the way we think about sanitation, they neither need nor benefit from an association with any infringements of human rights.
As environmental justice concerns become more widely embedded in environmental organizations and policymaking, and increasingly the focus of academic study, the gender dimension dissolves into an exclusive focus on race/ethnicity and class/income. While grassroots campaigning activities were often dominated by women, in the more institutionalized activities of organizations dominated by salaried professionals, gender inequality is neglected as a vector of environmental injustice, and addressing this inequality is not considered a strategy for redress. This paper explores some of the reasons why this may be so, which include a lack of visibility of gendered environmental injustice; professional campaigning organizations which are themselves gender blind; institutions at a range of scales which are still structured by gender (as well as class and race) inequalities; and an intellectual academy which continues to marginalize the study of gender—and women's—inequality. The authors draw on experience of environmental activism, participant observation, and other qualitative research into the gendering of environmental activity, to first explore the constructions of scale to see how this might limit a gender-fair approach to environmental justice. Following this, the practice of “gender mainstreaming” in environmental organizations and institutions will be examined, demonstrating how this is limited in scope and fails to impact on the gendering of environmental injustice.
We shall argue in this paper that the problematic of social cohesion is also one of socio-ecological cohesion whereby the urbanization of nature and its socio-environmentally enabling and disabling conditions are key processes. By viewing the contradictions of the urbanization process as intrinsically socio-ecological ones, the terrain of social cohesion is shifted both epistemologically and politically. The paper critically examines three contemporary schools of thought that consider in different ways the relationship between cities, social cohesion and the environment. First, we shall examine critically the notion of urban sustainainability. The paper will then move on to consider two approaches that emphasize issues of (in)equality and (in)justice in the urban environment, those of environmental justice and urban political ecology. The final part of the paper pinpoints four areas of research that urban researchers must examine if we are to understand more fully -and act more politically on -the nexus between cities, social cohesion and the environment.
It is estimated that at least two billion people have inadequate sanitation. The current situation in water and sanitation services for millions of peri-urban residents is starkly anti-poor and represents a major challenge for the 21st century. By virtue of its cost and water requirements, we would argue that conventional sewerage is an implicitly anti-poor technology. This paper summarises low-cost sanitation technologies that have been developed by engineers from around the world, and seeks to provide evidence that there is such a thing as a pro-poor technology. We argue that simplified sewerage is often the only sanitation technology that is technically feasible and economically appropriate for low income, high-density urban areas. Simplified sewerage will only truly be a pro-poor technology if issues such as lack of investment in sanitation, insufficient cost recovery for sanitation services, conservative technical standards favoured over innovation, low-cost technologies perceived as second class provision, the nature of peri-urban settlements, and lack of engagement with users, are addressed. So often, peri-urban sanitation schemes fail to exist, fail to be sustainable, or fail to be pro-poor. The challenge is for engineers, social scientists and other professionals to work together to make pro-poor sanitation a reality and interdisciplinarity the norm.
Using the results of a comparative three-year research project in five metropolitan areas, this article reviews a range of practices in accessing water and sanitation by peri-urban poor residents and producers. It starts from the observation that neither centralized supply policies nor the market through, for example, large-scale profit-making enterprises are able to meet their needs. Although they are consumers insofar as they have no option but to pay market prices for water (and often for sanitation), the peri-urban poor are, in practice, sometimes regarded as citizens with basic entitlements such as the right to water. This article outlines a conceptual distinction between "policy-driven" and "needs-driven" practices in the access to peri-urban water and sanitation services. The case studies show that this access is mainly needs-driven and informal rather than the result of formal policies. The key to structural improvements in water and sanitation lies in the recognition of these practices and their articulation to the formal system under new governance regimes.
Hygiene plays a key role in tipping the balance towards reduction of diarrhoeal and other infectious diseases. Yet it has often been overlooked, positioned as a “supporting rider” of water supply and sanitation services, or narrowly understood as handwashing. By focusing on handwashing infrastructure as proposed for the monitoring of Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6, development actors might miss the opportunity of capturing hygiene practices that are socially embedded and can act as a catalyst for change and risk reduction. We develop this argument by presenting an in-depth examination of hygiene practices in a low-income neighbourhood of Lilongwe, Malawi. Despite the high poverty levels and the constant water shortages in the area, a number of water-intensive hygiene practices are consistently carried out, proving that hygiene is central to residents’ everyday lives. Development projects should start by identifying these practices and by reflecting on the extent that these already work or can be made to work for reducing health-related risks.
The Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) approach is said to have radically revolutionized a poorly performing sanitation sector. The claims of CLTS programmes successfully stopping practices of open defecation have only recently begun to be critically reviewed: scholars and practitioners are questioning the sustainability and scrutinizing the participatory nature of this approach. This article builds on these analyses to draw attention to the School-Led Total Sanitation (SLTS) programme which promotes the role of children as sanitation change agents to ‘trigger’ a shift of behaviour in their peers and elders in school and surrounding environments. The article reviews the active role of children in SLTS in the context of how ‘participation’ is structured in demand-led sanitation approaches, as well as in relation to children's rights to participation in developmental projects in general. Reviewing the arguments supporting SLTS in practitioner literature and drawing on observations from SLTS case studies in Ghana, the authors notice a significant contradiction in the concept of children's participation as premised in SLTS initiatives and as outlined in the child rights agenda. These findings expose inherent tensions in SLTS between children's rights, participation and the role of children as sanitation change agents. They build on existing critiques of participation as coercion within demand-led sanitation approaches that have ‘gone global’.
This review examines the social and political roots and ongoing implications of centralized, waterborne sewerage. This system has served as a marker of class, a signal of wealth and political power, and a mechanism of social reform. As sewerage networks ballooned in the mid‐19th century throughout Europe and North America in response to a growing public health movement, their use and attendant hygiene practices served to intertwine physical and moral hygiene. The new infrastructure prioritized a felt distance between the user and their excreta, particularly signaled by the absence of odor, access to privacy, and the disassociation of users from any part of the management process beyond the flush of the toilet. Furthermore, the resource intensive system advertised affluence, and emphasized emerging notions of the networked urban space, which had the potential to tame and control Nature. This infrastructure model and its social and political underpinnings were exported to many cities under colonial influence throughout much of the 19th and 20th centuries, and were used to justify class differentiation and racialized agendas. Differential sewerage access in municipal centers of the Global South today continues to serve as a marker of class distinction, and many modern scholars explore how lack of sewerage renders the urban poor politically invisible. Ultimately, consideration of the social and political legacy of the linear sewerage system may offer new ways forward in addressing urban sanitation crises faced across the globe today, including problems posed by aging, unsustainable, and insufficient infrastructure. WIREs Water 2016, 3:63–73. doi: 10.1002/wat2.1108
This article is categorized under: Human Water > Value of Water
The global sanitation crisis is rapidly urbanizing, but how is sanitation produced and sustained in informal settlements? Although there are data available on aggregate statistics, relatively little is known about how sanitation is created, maintained, threatened, and contested within informal settlements. Drawing on an ethnography of two very different informal settlements in Mumbai, this study identifies key ways in which informal sanitation is produced, rendered vulnerable, and politicized. In particular, four informal urban sanitation processes are examined: patronage, self-managed processes, solidarity and exclusion, and open defecation. The article also considers the implications for a research agenda around informal urban sanitation, emphasizing in particular the potential of a comparative approach, and examines the possibilities for better sanitation conditions in Mumbai and beyond.
Adequate sanitation is vital to human health, yet progress on the Millennium Development Goal for sanitation has been slow and the target is likely to be missed by one billion people. Indonesia has the third highest number of people of any country in the world without access to sanitation and, like most developing countries, it is devoting insufficient resources to the issue. In rural areas, rather than providing additional funding, the government — with support of the World Bank — has promoted the Community‐Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) approach, which uses social mobilization to encourage people to construct their own latrines. In Indonesia as elsewhere, CLTS involves more than just education and encouragement; it uses social shaming and punishments. The authors argue that this is not only an inadequate approach but one which echoes coercive, race‐based colonial public health practices. This article thus integrates extant historiography on Indonesian colonial medicine with contemporary scholarly literature and field research on CLTS using case studies of a 1920s hookworm‐eradication programme funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, and the current World Bank Water and Sanitation Programme, both in Java.
For many in the global North, urban life means that your shit is not your problem. We foreword that a possible reason for the global sanitation failure in urban areas is a disconnect between sanitation expectations - what we term the urban sanitation imaginary - and the practices required by proposed sanitation solutions. The case study presented here is based on interviews with residents of Villa Lamadrid, a marginalized neighborhood in Buenos Aires, Argentina, which faces significant public health impacts from an inadequate sewage management system. We solicited feedback regarding specific sanitation technologies frequently prescribed for poor urban communities— among them a urine diversion dry toilet (UDDT) with dehydration vaults. Even as this system is posited as ‘sustainable’ for the context of Villa Lamadrid in terms of ecological and economic factors, conversations with residents revealed why this option might not be sustainable in terms of social expectations. Based on interviews with community members we have defined four aspects of residents’ urban sanitation imaginaries that we consider highly relevant for any consideration of sanitation solutions in this context: 1) an urban citizen does not engage physically or mentally with their shit or its management; 2) an appropriate urban sanitation system requires flushing; 3) systems that require user’s engagement with their shit and its management signify rural, underdeveloped, and backward lifestyles; and 4) urban sanitation is a state responsibility, not a local one. Highlighting the urban sanitation imaginary methodologically and analytically goes beyond a discussion of culturally and contextually appropriate technologies. It examines linkages between user expectations and notions of urban citizenship and modernity. Ultimately it also draws attention to the socio-political dynamics and environmental justice issues embedded in discussions of sanitation and hygiene. While some of our results are specific to the Villa Lamadrid context, our research more generally suggests the need to consider sanitation imaginaries to reframe the discussion on sanitation interventions, particularly in underserved and impoverished urban areas.
Taboos surrounding human waste have resulted in a lack of attention to spatial inequalities in access to sanitation and the consequences of this for human, environmental and economic health. This paper explores spaces where urgent environmental health imperatives intersect with deeply entrenched cultural norms surrounding human waste and the barriers they create for the development of more appropriate excreta management systems. The primary focus is on the global South (particularly India), although literature on sanitation histories in Europe and its colonies is drawn upon to illustrate spatial and temporal differences in cultural attitudes towards excrement.
In this article, Axel Honneth outlines a plural theory of justice. In developing his argument he takes his departure not in the classic elimination of ‘inequality’, but in the avoidance of ‘humiliation’ or ‘disrespect’. He is convinced that an appropriate point of departure for a recognition-theoretical conception of justice must show that the experience of social injustice is always measured in terms of the withholding of some recognition held to be legitimate. Throughout the article, Honneth makes strong reservations about Nancy Fraser’s approach, where ‘recognition’ and ‘redistribution’ are separated into two conceptual totalities with the single goal of ‘participatory equality’. On the contrary, he suggests having a more elaborate concept of identity formation, so that participating in the public realm means participating without shame, capable of unfurling his or her own personality’s potential in an unforced manner and of thus developing a personal identity. From this standpoint Honneth points to three differentiated spheres of recognition that must be obtained if the individual is to obtain a personal identity, namely love, equal treatment in law and social esteem.
This paper queries the relevance of the ‘splintering urbanism’ thesis to postcolonial cities of the South, and responds to calls for the production of a decentered theory of urbanization through a case study of Jakarta. Drawing on archival and interview data, the paper demonstrates that Jakarta has, since its inception, been characterized by a high degree of differentiation of access to water supply, and of fragmentation of water supply networks. We document the origins of this fragmentation in the colonial era, and trace the legacy of the colonial constructions within the postcolonial city. Moreover, we demonstrate that the introduction of private sector management (in 1988) has not significantly disrupted, and certainly not caused, this pattern. In short, we provide evidence to support our claim that Jakarta’s water supply system is ‘splintered’ rather than ‘splintering’, and demonstrate that this phenomenon was not caused by the rise (or fall) of the ‘modern infrastructural ideal’. In order to explain this sustained fragmentation of infrastructure and access, the paper develops a conceptual framework of postcolonial governmentality that emphasizes the interrelationship between materiality, governmentality, identity, and urbanization, in particular through demonstrating how contested and evolving process of social differentiation are linked to the differentiation of water supply infrastructures and of urban spaces. Although we are wary of any simplistic comparisons between the colonial past and present, we argue that the optic of postcolonial governmentality provides a powerful lens for dissecting the power relations that continue to structure access to water supply and urban space in cities in the South.
IntroductionThe Recent Evolution of Environmental Justice ResearchSpaces of Environmental JusticeFuture Directions in Unstable Times: Questions for a Critical Environmental Justice Research AgendaReferences
Over the last decade the scope of the socio-environmental concerns included within an environmental justice framing has broadened and theoretical understandings of what defines and constitutes environmental injustice have diversified. This paper argues that this substantive and theoretical pluralism has implications for geographical inquiry and analysis, meaning that multiple forms of spatiality are entering our understanding of what it is that substantiates claims of environmental injustice in different contexts. In this light the simple geographies and spatial forms evident in much “first-generation” environmental justice research are proving insufficient. Instead a richer, multidimensional understanding of the different ways in which environmental justice and space are co-constituted is needed. This argument is developed by analysing a diversity of examples of socio-environmental concerns within a framework of three different notions of justice—as distribution, recognition and procedure. Implications for the strategies of environmental justice activism for the globalisation of the environmental justice frame and for future geographical research are considered.
In response to the growth of private sector involvement in water supply management globally, anti-privatization campaigns for a human right to water have emerged in recent years. Simultaneously, alter-globalization activists have promoted alternative water governance models through North-South red-green alliances between organized labour, environmental groups, women's groups, and indigenous groups. In this paper, I explore these distinct (albeit overlapping) responses to water privatization. I first present a generic conceptual model of market environmentalist reforms, and explore the contribution of this framework to debates over ‘neoliberalizing nature’. This conceptual framework is applied to the case of anti-privatization activism to elucidate the limitations of the human right to water as a conceptual counterpoint to privatization, and as an activist strategy. In contrast, I argue that alter-globalization strategies—centred on concepts of the commons—are more conceptually coherent, and also more successful as activist strategies. The paper concludes with a reiteration of the need for greater conceptual precision in our analyses of neoliberalization, for both academics and activists.
This article uses detailed research on common property and collective action in an ancient south Indian water resource system to highlight the different objectives, modes of analysis, explanation, and generalization of economists and anthropologists. The article does not try to resolve these differences but goes on to use the south Indian case to show how a recent attempt to deploy "social capital" as a unified socioeconomic concept--one that attends both to anthropologists' interest in social relationships and to economists' concern to identify central trends and general patterns through regressions by isolating "the social" as a variable generating aggregable data--is highly problematic.
This paper presents data on the siting of solid waste facilities in one of the nation's fastest growing cities, Houston, Texas. The findings reveal that solid waste sites were not randomly scattered over the Houston landscape but were likely to be found in predominantly black neighborhoods and near black schools. Institutionalized discrimination in the housing market, lack of zoning, and decisions by public officials over the past fifty years are major factors that have contributed to Houston's black neighborhoods becoming the “dumping ground” for the area's solid waste.
Kampala, the capital city of Uganda is the administrative, political, commercial, industrial, educational and cultural centre of Uganda. The city has an area of 190 km2 and is located 8 km north of Lake Victoria (the second largest fresh water lake in the world) and approximately 42 km north of the equator. The population varies from about 1.2 million during the day to perhaps 0.9 million at night. The anthropogenic activity of this population far exceeds the infrastructure capacity of the city, leading to the deterioration of the urban environment. This article highlights the major sources of environmental degradation and pollution in the city, which include solid waste, abattoir waste, sewage, sanitation, drainage, industrial pollution, traffic pollution, atmospheric pollution, urban agriculture, rapid urbanisation and water hyacinth.
This article examines specific ways in which sanitation infrastructure matters politically, both as a set of materials and as a discursive object in colonial and post‐colonial Bombay. It reflects on a history of sanitation as a set of concepts which can both historicize seemingly ‘new’ practices and shed light on the contemporary city. It considers two moments in Bombay's ‘sanitary history’— the mid‐nineteenth century and the present day — and elucidates the distinct and changing spatial imaginaries and logics of sanitation in their broad relation to urbanization and nature. It conceptualizes colonial discourses of a ‘contaminated city’ and public health, and finds productive sites of intersection between these discourses and contemporary debates and practices in Bombay, including bourgeois environmentalism, discourses of the ‘world city’, and logics of community‐managed sanitation infrastructures. It also highlights an important role for urban comparativism, in the context of different imaginaries and logics, in both cases. By connecting infrastructure, public health discourses and modes of urban government, the article traces a specific historical geography of cyborg urbanization that is always already splintered, unequal and contested. For the urban poor in particular, much is at stake in how the sanitary city is constructed as a problem, how the solutions to it are mobilized, and how improvement is measured.
Résumé
Cet article examine les façons particulières dont les infrastructures d’assainissement jouent un rôle politique, à la fois comme ensemble d’équipements et comme objet discursif dans le Bombay colonial et post‐colonial. Il étudie un historique de l’assainissement en tant que série de concepts capable à la fois d’historiciser des pratiques apparemment ‘nouvelles’ et d’éclairer la ville contemporaine. Deux moments de ‘l’histoire de l’assainissement’ de Bombay sont étudiés (le milieu du xix e siècle puis de nos jours) afin de clarifier les imaginaires spatiaux distincts et changeants ainsi que les logiques de l’assainissement dans leur rapport global à l’urbanisation et à la nature. Les discours coloniaux de ‘ville contaminée’ et de santé publique sont conceptualisés, afin que soient identifiés des points d’intersection constructifs entre eux et les débats ou pratiques contemporaines à Bombay (dont l’environnementalisme bourgeois, les discours sur la ‘ville mondiale’, et les logiques des infrastructures d’assainissement gérées par les communautés). Ce travail révèle, dans ces deux aspects, un rôle important pour le comparativisme urbain dans le cadre d’imaginaires et de logiques différents. En reliant infrastructure, discours de santé publique et types de gouvernement urbain, l’article dessine une géographie historique particulière de l’urbanisation des cyborgs qui, en tout cas, est déjàéclatée, inégale et contestée. Pour les populations urbaines pauvres notamment, il est crucial de savoir comment la ville saine est interprétée en tant que problème, comment les solutions sont mobilisées et comment on mesure une amélioration.