Specification of a human right to water: a sustainability assessment of access hurdles

ABSTRACT

Any implementation of the right to water requires a sound specification. For that purpose, this article offers an innovative analytical framework. First, the object of the analysis should be the hurdles to access (pecuniary, spatial, temporal, qualitative), not least because they partly fulfil sustainability functions. Second, these hurdles need to be assessed on the basis of three criteria: functionality, reasonableness and non-discrimination. This framework allows the identification of supply situations that infringe upon the right to water, provides starting points for improving access, and honours the commitment of the Sustainable Development Goals to take equal account of social and sustainability concerns.

KEYWORDS:

• Right to water
• Sustainable Development Goals
• access to water
• implementation

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Bjørn-Oliver Magsig, Johannes Schiller and Alexandra Purkus for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The consideration of this article does not refer explicitly to the problem of sanitation. For good reasons, the literature and declarations of recent years regularly speak of a ‘right to water and sanitation’, in that the two are basically related and equally important (e.g. de Albuquerque & Roaf, 2012; de Albuquerque & Winkler, 2010; Murthy, 2013; United Nations, 2015, 2010). However, in line with several contributions to the literature (e.g. Ellis & Feris, 2014), we think the issue of sanitation deserves in part a special analysis in the context of implementation issues (e.g. regarding the problem of privacy), which we could not cover due to limited space.

2. This makes clear that within our approach problems of quantity (‘availability of sufficient water’) result widely from problems of the temporal hurdle.

3. This is the approach taken by Howard and Bartram (2003), see above. They consider a variation of the spatial hurdle. Basically, however, one should always be very careful when reinterpreting empirical observations to arrive at norms; there is nothing automatic about it. For this reason it is also important to take a look at time opportunity costs as well.

4. A waiting time of two hours or more per day can undoubtedly be regarded as an unreasonably high temporal hurdle, as in this example: ‘Residents of the Kibera slums are forced to spend an average of more than two hours a day waiting for water at standpipes that function for 4–5 hours a day or less’ (UNDP, 2006, p. 53).

5. In this connection para. 12 (c)(iii) of GC15 states: ‘Water and water facilities and services must be accessible to all, including the most vulnerable or marginalized sections of the population, in law and in fact, without discrimination on any of the prohibited grounds.’ Following that, paras. 13–16 put forward more detailed remarks about non-discrimination.

6. Here, there are certainly controversies about appropriate or ‘functional’ pricing of drinking water, for example, in the discussion about taking account of the environmental and resource costs of Article 9 of the EC Water Framework Directive (Gawel, 2015).

7. This perception is evidently based on the European civic action initiative ‘Water and basic sanitation are a human right! Water is a public good and not a commodity!’ of February 2014, which attracted great attention (Sule, 2014).

8. The price differences here may be considerable. ‘In Jakarta, Lima, Manila and Nairobi households living in slums and low-income settlements typically pay 5–10 times or more for their water than high-income residents of the same city’ (UNDP, 2006, p. 52).

Additional information

Funding

The research was conducted at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research – UFZ, Leipzig (Germany), and funded by the Helmholtz Association.