Infrastructure epistemologies: water, wastewater and displaced persons in Germany

Abstract

Recent years have seen historically unprecedented global disaster migration; in 2016 Germany received 1.3 million displaced individuals. Regardless of past resources and future potential, disaster migrants are a new, vulnerable population. This new population increases demand for water and wastewater infrastructure services, despite being temporarily unable to pay for services. As such, this kind of sudden population increase is a resiliency challenge for the receiving infrastructure systems. Qualitative analysis of 1,884 open-ended survey responses was blended with a statistical analysis to discover how and why the German public perceives water and sanitation services have been provided to the disaster migrants. Unprompted, 36% (112/314) of respondents referenced at least one of three infrastructure epistemologies, including water and wastewater as a service, as a basic need, and as a human right. These epistemologies share statistically significant relationships with how long respondents feel water and wastewater should be provided to displaced persons. A temporally limited, normative perception of water and sanitation as a humanitarian good functions to enable water and wastewater infrastructure to deliver a high level of service despite the significant disruption of the large and vulnerable population influx, and has practical implications for the structure of cost recovery.

Keywords:

• Resiliency
• population dynamics
• water and wastewater infrastructure
• disaster migration

Introduction

Population dynamics are a challenge for civil infrastructure. The built assets that comprise the physical components of infrastructure systems are expensive, their design and construction take significant time, and they are sized to serve a particular number of people. While there is certainly some flexibility to the scale of service an asset can provide, significant deviations reduce performance efficiency and sometimes asset longevity (Halpin et al. 2017). For example, if populations grow without a corresponding increase in the wastewater infrastructure that serves them, the environment and public health may be impacted by overflows of raw sewage from treatment plants. In contrast, if populations shrink the fixed operational costs of underutilized infrastructure systems may become excessive on a per capita basis (Faust et al. 2016). Additionally, underutilization may result in changes in performance such as the stagnation of water or increased water age. Fortunately, while population change is a challenge for infrastructure, it typically occurs relatively slowly. For example, between 2011 and 2015, the greater London area was the fastest growing urban region in the UK with an increase of 5.7% of population, with average UK population growth closer to 2.5% across the same timeframe (ONS 2016). In addition, long-range demographic projections mean that this kind of population change is reasonably predictable, enabling advance planning, operational changes, and the time for design and construction that can circumvent many potential issues.

An exception to this paradigm of reasonably predictable and steady rates of population change occurs after many natural or man-made disaster events. The latter includes deep social crises such as war or civil unrest; fundamentally political, these are called complex humanitarian emergencies (Klugman 1999), or humanitarian disasters. In an example of disaster migration triggered by a natural disaster, after hurricanes Katrina, Rita, and Wilma hit the south-eastern coast of the US, over one million people were evacuated from metro New Orleans (Landry et al. 2007). About 250,000 of these people fled to the nearby city of Houston (Settles and Lindsay 2011), meaning that overnight the Houston utilities had an extra quarter million people to serve. In a more recent example of disaster migration, over 200,000 Puerto Ricans arrived to Florida in the weeks following Hurricane Maria (Levin and Smialek 2017). In an example of migration triggered by a humanitarian disaster, since 2015 absolutely unprecedented disaster migration has been occurring worldwide due to a constellation of complex humanitarian emergencies. This latter is the context of this study and is discussed in more detail below. Both natural or man-made disaster events may be sudden and reasonably discrete (for example, an earthquake vs. bombing) or slow and reasonably continuous (for example, climate change vs. regular persecution of a minority population). Regardless, either type of disaster event may trigger unexpected, sudden-onset migration that presents challenges to the infrastructure systems that receive the displaced persons.

There is a significant literature that considers the reconstruction of infrastructure systems directly impacted by disasters (Ingirige 2016, Opdyke et al. 2017). Unfortunately, much less has been written about how sudden, disaster event triggered migration impacts the infrastructure systems that receive the displaced persons. In this situation, the primary disaster event is geographically distinct from the secondary disaster response efforts that seek to ensure the recipient infrastructure can handle the suddenly increased demands. However, this secondary impact is nonetheless caused by the remote disaster event. For the built environment, a particularly fundamental difference between primary and secondary impacts is whether or not the hosting infrastructure has been physically damaged. In the secondary impacts studied here, the challenges arise from a suddenly increased and shifted (geographically, temporally, etc.) demand for infrastructure services rather than damaged assets. Still, the potential scale of these secondary impacts to the undamaged but impacted infrastructure systems makes this an important gap in the literature. As such, this paper contributes to the limited literature treating this understudied topic.

The trigger for the disaster migration considered in this analysis is an ongoing humanitarian disaster. Currently, 65.6 million people worldwide have been forcibly displaced from their homes; this is the highest number of displaced people the world has ever seen (UNHCR 2017). Of this number, over 25 million are either refugees or asylum seekers who have crossed national borders into different nations. More than half of these are fleeing man-made crises in Syria, Afghanistan, or South Sudan. While Turkey remains the nation with the largest number of refugees, in 2016 Germany received the largest number of new asylum claims in the world. As such, by the end of 2016 Germany was host to 1.3 million refugees and asylum seekers (UNHCR 2017). While it is an extreme case (and the context of this analysis), it is by no means the only nation to have received high numbers of refugees and asylum seekers in recent years; this has occurred around the world.

In terms of the built environment, as this new population has settled into Germany there have been significant and highly visible pressures on housing (Garrelts et al. 2016). Emergency housing provision is well known to be a top priority for the construction community in post-disaster reconstruction (Johnson et al. 2006); it is also a top priority in communities that have received large numbers of displaced persons in a secondary disaster impact. For example, in the 2015 German context, there were a variety of housing concerns such as the use of non-traditional housing types, low vacancies in existing buildings, and avoiding creating segregated enclaves of vulnerable, displaced persons. This culminated in government commitments to spend 500 million euros per year in each of 2017 and 2018 for the development of new housing facilities for the displaced populations, in addition to 6 billion euros for initial and temporary accommodation costs (Garrelts et al. 2016). Less publically visible, but no less real, have been pressures on the water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) infrastructure that serve the suddenly increased population. Luckily, a fortunate combination of proactive utility management and previously shrinking German populations (Moss 2008) mean the local WASH infrastructure has largely been able to meet the increased loads at Germany’s typical, excellent, and legally mandated levels of service. Still, providing WASH to 1.3 million additional people with limited front-end planning has real costs, and given the highly disadvantaged situation of the recently arrived refugees and asylum seekers, these costs have largely been borne by the German public through a combination of taxpayer and ratepayer funds.

This tragic situation creates a strategic context for the current research project, which seeks to understand if and how the hosting population frames the provision of WASH services to displaced persons in the highly developed German context, and if those frames are related to whether or not the public is, in fact, willing to support those costs. As such, in the sections that follow, we frame water and sanitation institutions and organizations and describe the practical consequences of changed institutional belief systems (epistemologies). Next, we describe rival epistemologies of WASH infrastructure (e.g. water and sanitation as infrastructure services vs. water and sanitation as basic needs/human rights) and then link these theoretical framings to utility resilience.

The practical implications of water and sanitation institutions and organization

The shift towards formal organization of water supply and disposal is a relatively recent phenomenon. For example, as recently as 2015, the World Health Organization reports that only 39% of the global population was connected to safe sanitation (WHO, UNICEF JMP 2017). Even in wealthy nations with highly developed infrastructure systems, disadvantaged populations such as those in the US colonias may depend on informal arrangements for WASH (Donelson and Esparza 2010). In other words, as the world develops, more people are being served by formal water and sanitation organizations such as public or private utilities, and fewer are getting water and sanitation services directly from the environment. More broadly, this can be described as change in the institutional environment, including regulatory, normative, and cultural-cognitive forces (Scott et al. 2000). For example, in most of Europe and the United States, there are now legally required and enforced standards for pathogen removal in drinking water (regulatory forces) (NSF 2009). Among other things, these regulations are based on technical norms that define a required level of treatment (normative forces), and scientific ways of knowing that link pathogens in water to disease (cultural-cognitive forces). Working together, the regulatory, normative, and cultural-cognitive forces define what is, or is not, understood to be legitimate (Suchman 1995) WASH infrastructure. In an example of illegitimate WASH infrastructure, a sewer that removes waste from the household but does not treat it is no longer seen as legitimate. This has lately been globally codified in the Sustainable Development Goals (UN 2017). Still, current estimates suggest that more than a billion people use sanitation infrastructure of this kind (Baum et al. 2013) and significant infrastructure construction will be required to make these systems legitimate according to the current institutional environment.

To generalize this example, the new definitions of legitimate WASH are driven by regulatory, normative, and cultural-cognitive forces. Meeting these definitions requires the creation and formalization of water and sanitation organizations. These organizations use technology (e.g. pumps, pipes, chemicals, etc.) to transport and treat water and wastewater, and knowledge work to design, construct, and maintain those systems. Both knowledge and technology are expensive, and therefore water and sanitation services are increasingly shifting from something that nature provides outside of the cash economy (e.g. rain from the sky and waste treatment via dilution in rivers) to a service that must be purchased. Still, given the ongoing nature of this organizational transition, it is perhaps unsurprising that the institutional frameworks (Scott 2013) underpinning it are still being negotiated. In other words, does the global shift towards the formalization of WASH mean that water and wastewater are now inevitably economic goods to be individually paid for or foregone? Or, is there still space to instead understand water and sanitation infrastructure as a humanitarian good (Redfield 2012) that, whether or not formally organized, all people must have access to for basic life functions such as health, nutrition, clean water, and sanitation? As we have described here, these institutional belief systems have the power to physically and organizationally shape the civil infrastructure we build. This power motivates the present exploration of the WASH belief systems (or, epistemologies) held by the public who ultimately fund and use the infrastructure.

Infrastructure epistemologies: water and sanitation as infrastructure services

In response to the institutional forces described above, it is becoming increasingly common for households and businesses to make payments in direct exchange for water and sanitation infrastructure services (Danilenko et al. 2014). In this epistemology, WASH is a commodity to be paid for like any other. This is certainly the case in Germany, which has near universal access to excellent and formally organized water and wastewater infrastructure (World Bank 2015a, 2015b). In recent years, Germany has been experiencing a combination of shrinking populations and dropping per capita water demand, which in combination with the fixed costs of WASH services has resulted in the restructuring of consumer tariffs to a combination of a flat-rate charge plus a volumetric, consumption-based charge (Moss 2008). While these charges are certainly in addition to taxpayer contributions to infrastructure, there is an important philosophical difference between pay-to-access utility charges and (taxpayer supported) universal access. While wealthy households typically have higher outdoor water use than poor households, households typically share a similar (if environmentally shaped) base demand for essentials such as washing, drinking, and blackwater disposal (Aquacraft 2011). This inequitable burden on low-income populations has been made visible in shrinking cities throughout the US in the context of drinking water infrastructure (Butts and Gasteyer 2011).

Within this infrastructure epistemology (Schweber 2015), pay-to-access schemes have real benefits. Quite fundamentally, the pipes, treatment chemicals, energy, expertise, etc. needed to provide WASH services are not free, and as such must be paid for. There is some (contested) evidence that volumetric services charges reduce consumption (Barrett 2004, Hoffmann et al. 2006), and there is an entire body of literature relating costs, benefits, and demands (Drèze and Stern 1987). Certainly, reducing waste in service provision (and therefore both financial and environmental costs) is a tangible benefit to all people (Teo and Loosemore 2001). Still, this knowledge must be situated in the institutionalized organizational framework of formal utilities, treatment, and mechanized delivery or removal of clean and dirty water. It must also be understood as standing in contrast to epistemologies that instead frame WASH as a humanitarian good, such as those described below. We emphasize that while the basic needs and human rights epistemologies are presented together in the literature review, we did not anticipate seeing the basic needs epistemology in the data; instead, it emerged during the qualitative analysis.

Humanitarian infrastructure epistemologies: basic needs and human rights

In the 1970s, the international development community shifted from the income approach to the basic needs and human rights approaches (defined below). For the purposes of this literature review, this shift anticipates our analytic distinction between water and sanitation as infrastructure services vs. water and sanitation as basic needs/human rights, discussed below in the section on utility resilience. Due to this shift, the measurement of development outcomes moved from changes in per capita gross national product (the income approach, that assumed individuals with sufficient income could thereby purchase required goods and services) and towards poverty reduction and various social indicators (the basic needs approach). For the international development community, this shift understood the income approach as limited because of issues with (for example) distribution of income distribution, the recognition that the elderly, infirm, and children cannot always work, and that some basic needs can only be achieved through public services (Streeten 1979). While there was – and continues to be – debate on what exactly should be included in the list of social indicators measured as basic needs, the underlying concept of shifting from the means (e.g. increased income) to the ends (e.g. “health, nutrition, housing, income distribution, as well as other aspects of cultural and social development” (Hicks and Streeten 1979, p. 570)) proved to be influential. Unsurprisingly, from very early on, water and sanitation frequently appeared on these lists of basic human needs (Allen and Anzalone 1981).

The 1970s was also the decade in which water and sanitation infrastructure first explicitly appeared in the international discourse on human rights. The 1972 Stockholm Declaration (UN 1972, Klaphake et al. 2001), followed shortly by the Vancouver Conference on Human Settlements and the Mar del Plata Conference on Water Resources, advocated for the provision of clean and adequate water to all (Scheumann and Klaphake 2001). Indeed, these foundational statements continue to be globally influential. For example, in 2010 the United Nations made a formal statement codifying access to clean water and sanitation as human rights (UN 2010). Most recently, the new Sustainable Development Goals (SDG, initiated in 2016) target “universal and equitable access to safe and affordable drinking water for all” and “access to adequate and equitable sanitation and hygiene for all” by 2030 (UN 2017). By targeting water quality, affordability, and equity, the SDG are philosophically linked to the human rights discourse (Fukuda-Parr and Yamin 2013).

Analytically, then, WASH as a basic need recognizes that WASH is functionally necessary for human survival. Linking it to the human rights discourse adds the insight that there are sometimes social constraints on meeting the basic need for WASH, and makes a moral judgement regarding those constraints. In other words, the basic needs approach observes that without WASH people die; the human rights approach adds the judgement that, when socially caused, this is wrong. If people were to die from a true physical scarcity of water (for example, a voyager lost in the desert), it would be a tragedy, but not a societal moral failure.

These two frameworks understand WASH as (different kinds of) humanitarian goods, rather than a commodity. Still, to return to our starting point of infrastructure as a service, regardless of the moral implications professional water and sanitation infrastructure organizations cost money to run. As such, in an increasing number of contexts, individual users now pay directly for access to WASH infrastructure, and understand WASH infrastructure as a service to be paid for. In modern Germany, this pay-to-access model is nearly universal. But what happens when a large population of deeply disadvantaged refugees and asylum seekers suddenly arrive to disrupt this epistemological status quo?

Utility resilience

In the literature on the built environment, resilience is defined as being able to adapt or respond extreme events (Opdyke et al. 2017). Among other things, this definition requires the engineering community to determine which infrastructure services are essential, what failure thresholds are used in design, and construction, acceptable lengths of down time and if and how infrastructure systems may adapt in response to an extreme event (Connelly et al. 2017). This last point is the aspect of resilience of interest to the current analysis; as described below, we understand the motivations of the hosting populations as a component of infrastructure resilience that enables the water and sanitation systems to continue to provide high levels of service.

In a previous publication (Faust and Kaminsky 2017), we surveyed the adult German public to understand their perceptions of how the ongoing refugee situation has impacted water and sanitation infrastructure. We found that the majority of the German public collectively believes that access to WASH should be provided for refugees’ and asylum seekers’ who are unable to pay for a fixed period of time (more than zero years, but not indefinitely). When considering just this majority, the median time the German public thought water and sanitation should be provided for (on average) 2.9 years, although demographic and locational factors influenced this timeline. While we expect this result to be deeply contextual, there are two important insights to be gained from that prior work that are the motivation for this paper. First, there is evidence that public ratepayers expect water and sanitation utilities otherwise unimpacted by a disaster event to be able to serve displaced populations for a multi-year span, even if those populations are unable to pay. This is a significant challenge for utility resilience, as diagrammed Figure 1. If the hosting populations were instead unwilling to pay, levels of service to the community would drop. It is only their decision to pay for infrastructure services for others, as happened in Germany, that prevents this from occurring and enables continued system performance. Secondly, we suggest that this decision may indicate a temporary disruption in the epistemologies of infrastructure (also shown in Figure 1) that enables the continued status quo system performance despite the disruption. Specifically, and as we explore in the present analysis, the influx of disaster-impacted individuals may mean that the hosting population perceives a temporary shift between water and sanitation as a service to water and sanitation as a basic need/human right.

Figure 1. System resiliency and the transition from a right to a service (from Faust and Kaminsky, 2017, used with permission).

Operationally (Bernard 2006), in this paper, we ask if and how the epistemologies of water and sanitation as a service and water and sanitation as a basic need/human right are used by the hosting population as they absorb and support a new disaster displaced population that cannot immediately pay to access WASH services. As we will describe below, the results show that the hosting population do indeed make these epistemological distinctions, and that there are statistically significant relationship between them and whether and how respondents are willing to provide WASH services to the disaster displaced populations.

Methods

Research design

The data analysed in this project were collected through an online survey; details of data collection and analysis follow. This survey asked both quantitative and qualitative questions regarding respondent perceptions of the provision of water and sanitation services to disaster displaced persons. As described below, the mixed-methods analysis leverages answers to the open-ended, qualitative questions, one categorical question, and one quantitative numerical question. This enables us to discover statistically significant variations in the coded qualitative data.

Data and analysis

In August 2016, a survey was given to a representative sample of the general adult public in Germany. It was deployed in German using an online platform. Survey participants were identified via random sampling carried out by a third party (Qualtrics 2016), based on geographic constraints. Five hundred and seventy-five survey responses were collected, representing gender, age (above 18), and socioeconomic status, as well as residence in all states of Germany.

The survey was piloted with eight subject matter experts with expertise spanning survey analyses, civil infrastructure, human–infrastructure interaction, public perception modelling, and German language and culture prior to deployment. Next, it was piloted with 15 members of the German population to further assess word choice, translation, and general accessibility for the public. None of the pilot responses are included in the final data-set. After data collection, bilingual German-English speakers translated all responses to English.

Qualitative data and analysis

The qualitative questions were all intended to elicit respondent perceptions of the provision of water and sanitation services to disaster displaced persons. Each question was structured in a different way in order to reduce bias as well as to elicit more detailed responses. For example, by asking respondents what other people think about this situation, we allow respondents to separate themselves from their response and thus reduce social acceptability bias. The qualitative questions were:

As asylum seekers and refugees have arrived in Germany, people and organizations have attempted to provide them with WATER and WASTEWATER services. Please write a paragraph to describe what you know about HOW this has, or has not, been accomplished.

As asylum seekers and refugees have arrived in Germany, people and organizations have attempted to provide them with WATER and WASTEWATER services. Please write a paragraph to describe what you think about WHY this has, or has not, been accomplished.

As asylum seekers and refugees have arrived in Germany, people and organizations have attempted to provide them with WATER and WASTEWATER services. Please write a paragraph to describe what PEOPLE OTHER THAN YOURSELF may think about WHY this has, or has not, been accomplished.

As asylum seekers and refugees have arrived in Germany, people and organizations have attempted to provide them with WATER and WASTEWATER services. Please pretend you were in charge of this, and write a paragraph to describe HOW you think this ideally should, or should not, be accomplished.

As asylum seekers and refugees have arrived in Germany, people and organizations have attempted to provide them with WATER and WASTEWATER services. Please pretend you were in charge of this, and write a paragraph to describe WHY you think your proposed solution(s) should, or should not, be accomplished.

Please list AT LEAST FIVE FACTORS that you think should be considered regarding meeting asylum seekers’ and refugees’ needs for WATER and WASTEWATER services. Please also tell us WHY you think each factor is important.

Our research design is deductive in the sense that we sought responses referencing human rights or infrastructure as a service. However, the qualitative coding used an emergent, en vivo strategy (Saldaña 2009) to describe and analyse the motivations respondents gave for providing WASH to refugees and asylum seekers who were otherwise unable to pay. The 1884 responses were iteratively coded, using the respondent text to develop a coding dictionary (Table 1). During this process, an unexpected, emergent distinction was found between responses that framed water and sanitation as a human right and those that framed it as a basic need; this philosophically important distinction was retained in the coding (Table 2). An intercoder reliability test resulted in a pooled Kappa value of 0.90, indicating excellent agreement (Miles and Huberman 1994).

Table 1. Coding dictionary.

Code		Typology	Representative quotes from data
Humanitarian	Human Rights	Humanitarian – human right – all people must/should/ought have services – normalcy/modernity/civilization – all people are equal – moral implications	“Safe and clean drinking water was recognized as a fundamental human right by the UN 6 years ago – it is an important building block for health”
			“Clean drinking water, which everyone in Germany has a claim to”
			“All people are equal and therefore have the same basic right to water”
			“Humanitarian responsibility”
	Basic Needs	Everyone has the same water/sanitation/hygiene needs – basic needs – people can’t live without it – people have to drink/other specific usage examples	“Just normal, every person needs water and sewage”
			“Water is essential to life”
			“A water supply is a basic need for all people”
			“Refugees and asylum seekers have at this time the same needs as you and me”
Infrastructure as service		Someone has to pay – it’s a luxury – I’m not paying for someone else – I shouldn’t pay more – displaced persons should be involved/should pay- only some should get it – it’s a problem that someone else is paying for their service	“One has to do more than increasing the costs that the citizens have to bear. That is very antisocial”
			“That the water supply for everyone living in the city is also to pay”
			“Always work for it”
			“Also they should pay themselves”

Table 2. Code counts and relative frequencies.

Code parent category	Code	Count of respondents*	Relative frequency (of 112 survey responses referencing an infrastructure epistemology)	Relative frequency (of 314 survey responses with substantive qualitative responses)
Humanitarian	Human rights	48	43%	15%
Humanitarian	Basic needs	61	54%	19%
Infrastructure as service		23	21%	7%
At least one of the above codes		112	100%	36%
All respondents		314	–	100%

*Respondents were coded to more than one category as needed to represent their answers.

The qualitative responses were analysed using the Dedoose qualitative coding software package (Dedoose 2014). While the survey required respondents to answer the qualitative questions, not all typed answers were relevant for analysis. We filtered out responses that were not substantive (for example, respondents who simply answered “I don’t know” or “no idea”) or were otherwise without reference to water or sanitation (for example, “I have a third eye.”) If even one of the qualitative questions received a substantive response, all respondent text was included in the analysis. After these filters, 314 substantive qualitative responses were taken forward for analysis. Each of these responses includes answers for the six open-ended qualitative questions, resulting in a data-set of 1884 qualitative answers regarding members of the public’s perception of how and why water and sanitation has been provided to asylum seekers and refugees in the highly developed German context.

Mixed methods data and analysis

This qualitative coding was cross-referenced against two separate survey questions. The first of these questions was categorical, and asked respondents to indicate if they felt there was an abstract-collective responsibility (WE should provide …) to fund refugees’, and asylum seekers’ water or sanitation services indefinitely, for a fixed period of time or not at all (explored further in Faust and Kaminsky, 2017). Table 3 shows the counts and relative frequencies of the qualitative coding as cross-tabulated against this abstract-collective responsibility question. The second cross-referenced question asked respondents to indicate a number of years that they personally would be willing to financially support these same services via increases in service bills (individual-local responsibility; I will provide). For analytic consistency, we categorized these responses into categories corresponding to those used in the categorical question: indefinitely (more than 20 years), for a fixed period of time (1–20 years), or not at all (0 years). None of the respondents who indicated they would provide service for a fixed period of time selected a time period above 20 years, validating this categorization. Table 4 shows the counts and relative frequencies of the qualitative coding as cross-tabulated against this individual-local responsibility question.

Table 3. Abstract-collective responsibility vs. infrastructure epistemologies.

Respondents who feel abstract-collective responsibility to provide WASH for …			Humanitarian (95 responses)		Infrastructure as Service** (Count/% of 23)
			Human rights** (Count/% of 48)	Basic needs** (Count/% of 61)
Water (112 responses)	… 0 years*		2/4%	4/7%	4/17%
		… 1–20 years*	26/54%	37/61%	13/57%
		… Indefinitely* (>20 years)	20/42%	20/33%	6/26%
	Water sum		48/100%	61/100%	23/100%
Wastewater (112 responses)	… 0 years*		2/4%	4/7%	4/17%
		… 1–20 years*	26/54%	38/62%	13/57%
		… Indefinitely* (>20 years)	20/42%	19/31%	6/26%
	Wastewater sum		48/100%	61/100%	23/100%

*Answer to “I believe we should provide WATER/WASTEWATER service to incoming refugees who are unable to pay for WATER/WASTEWATER service for a specified amount of time: (1) Yes, we should provide WATER/WASTEWATER service to incoming refugees for a defined amount of time, not indefinitely; (2) No, we should provide service to incoming refugees who are unable to pay for the service, indefinitely; (3) No, we should NOT provide service to incoming refugees who are unable to pay for the service for any amount of time.”

**Per emergent qualitative coding of the six open-ended questions listed in the methods section.

Table 4. Individual-local responsibility vs. infrastructure epistemologies.

Respondents who feel individual-local responsibility to provide WASH for …			Humanitarian (95 responses)		Infrastructure as service** (Count/% of 23)
			Human rights** (Count/% of 48)	Basic needs** (Count/% of 61)
Water (112 responses)	… 0 years*		17/35%	24/39%	13/57%
		… 1–20 years*	26/54%	35/57%	8/35%
		… Indefinitely* (>20 years)	5/10%	2/5%	2/9%
	Water sum		48/100%	61/100%	23/100%
Wastewater (112 responses)	…0 years*		15/31%	24/39%	14/61%
		… 1–20 Years*	28/58%	35/57%	7/30%
		… Indefinitely* (>20 years)	5/10%	2/3%	2/9%
	Wastewater sum		48/100%	61/100%	23/100%

*Categorized answer to “How LONG (years) would you be willing to pay these increased rates for your WATER/WASTEWATER service to help provide service to the incoming refugees (1–20 years, 20 years indicating indefinitely)? Click the slider at ‘0’ if you would not be willing to pay more for your water service?”.

**Per emergent qualitative coding of the six open-ended questions listed in the methods section.

Finally, these cross-tabulations were analysed using chi-squared tests to discover statistically significant relationships between the qualitative coding of infrastructure epistemologies and the categorical responses on individual-local and abstract-collective responsibilities for WASH provision. Table 5 shows these results.

Table 5. Chi-squared results, p values.

	Abstract-collective** responsibility (distribution of responses: indefinitely, temporarily, never)		Individual-local responsibility*** (distribution of responses: indefinitely, temporarily, never)
	Water	Wastewater	Water	Wastewater
Human rights coding (Code Present, Absent)	0.064	0.044	0.176	0.057
Basic needs coding (Code Present, Absent)	0.619	0.629	0.050	0.072
Infrastructure as service coding (Code Present, Absent)	0.270	0.275	0.351	0.129
Humanitarian* coding (Codes Present, Absent)	0.050	0.053	0.190	0.049

*Either of Human Rights or Basic Needs Coding.

**Answer to “I believe we should provide WATER/WASTEWATER service to incoming refugees who are unable to pay for WATER/WASTEWATER service for a specified amount of time: (1) Yes, we should provide WATER/WASTEWATER service to incoming refugees for a defined amount of time, not indefinitely; (2) No, we should provide service to incoming refugees who are unable to pay for the service, indefinitely; (3) No, we should NOT provide service to incoming refugees who are unable to pay for the service for any amount of time”.

***Categorized answer to “How LONG (years) would you be willing to pay these increased rates for your WATER/WASTEWATER service to help provide service to the incoming refugees (1–20 years, 20 years indicating indefinitely)? Click the slider at ‘0’ if you would not be willing to pay more for your water service?”.

Limitations

Few respondents cited the infrastructure as service epistemology. It is possible this is due to social acceptability bias; in other words, respondents are less likely to feel comfortable giving reasons why they would not pay for disadvantaged others. While some respondents were still willing to indicate that they would not pay for those services in the categorical questions, it may have been more uncomfortable to type extended explanations of this than simply choosing a checkbox. It is also possible that those respondents who are willing help financially support refugees are aware that this steps outside the local norm for paying for water and sanitation (infrastructure as service), and that this leads them to need to vocalize a reason for the normative transgression. As both of these reasons would influence the distribution of responses observed for the various infrastructure epistemologies, different research designs should be used to validate the results presented here. In addition, the German context where we collected data did not experience reductions in levels of water or sanitation services due to the influx of displaced persons. It is possible that survey responses would be significantly different in contexts where infrastructure performance is negatively impacted. Similarly, we expect the length of time the displaced populations are in residence would influence both hosting population perceptions and the applicable technical responses. An additional limitation of this analysis is that we did not ask about other infrastructure services Germans typically access through a pay-per-use, infrastructure as service model (for example, electricity, transit, or information communication technology). As such, we cannot determine if water and sanitation services are thought of differently than other types of infrastructure services. In other words, with the current data-set, we cannot be certain whether we can generalize our results just to water and sanitation infrastructure, or more broadly across different types of civil infrastructure. Still, the observed differences between the water and wastewater infrastructure types (discussed below) suggest that future research to investigate this question would be valuable. Respondent demographics may also influence responses and should be investigated in future research. Finally, anchoring bias may have influenced survey responses; serving the large number of incoming people clearly requires large investments, and it may have been difficult for respondents to scale aggregate infrastructure costs to individual utility bills.

Results

As shown in Table 2, 36% of respondents who provided a substantive qualitative answer referenced one of the infrastructure epistemologies in response to our open ended questions. Most often, the referenced epistemology was a humanitarian one (basic needs or human rights). Only 23 respondents made a comment that was coded to infrastructure as a service. As shown in Table 3, about 60% of all respondents in our data-set feel a collective responsibility to provide refugees and asylum seekers with access to WASH for a fixed period of time, almost 15% feel society should not support these services at all, and about 25% of respondents feel society should financially support these services indefinitely (defined in our survey as more than 20 years). In contrast, when asked about individual-local responsibility for these costs, about 35% are never willing to provide WASH services, about 60% remain willing to provide services for a fixed period of time, and less than 10% are willing to provide services indefinitely. In addition, Table 5 tests if the reported temporal distributions (never, temporary, indefinitely) are statistically different than expected for the responses that were, or were not, coded to each infrastructure epistemology. As shown in that table, the infrastructure epistemologies have statistically significant relationships to how long respondents were willing to provide water and wastewater services for refugees and asylum seekers, both at an abstract-collective level (“WE should provide…”) and at the individual-local level (“I will provide …”).

As defined in Table 1, respondents who cited the emergent basic needs epistemology did not provide a moral rationale for why services should/should not be provided. In some cases, they clearly noted that there are practical reasons for meeting this need. For example, water and wastewater is necessary for “toilet use, handwashing, showering, brushing teeth, cooking, [and] everyday things.” More often, they simply stated that “the needs of the asylum seekers are the same as those of all other people.” or that “without water, one dies.” In our coding, we did not assume there was a moral motivation behind these statements. This led us to differentiate between those who referenced basic needs and those who referenced human rights. However, it seems reasonable that most respondents who are concerned about displaced persons dying from lack of WASH are so for moral reasons rather than (for example) out of concern for funeral logistics. The data support this assumption; as shown in Tables 3 and 4, those respondents referencing human rights have a slightly higher relative frequency of being willing to financially support WASH costs for refugees and asylum seekers indefinitely, but generally the relative frequencies are similar across the basic needs and human rights coding. As such we present these two as a grouped humanitarian category as well as individually. Still, the present research design cannot absolutely validate this assumption, and future research is needed to explore this difference.

Discussion

The research question for this study asked if and how the epistemologies of water and sanitation as a service and water and sanitation as a basic need/human right are used by the hosting population as they absorb and support a new disaster displaced population that cannot immediately pay to access WASH services. The relationships shown in Tables 2–5 show that (1) respondents do indeed reference infrastructure epistemologies and (2) at a statistically significant level, the referenced epistemology is related to answers regarding whether and how long WASH should be provided to refugees and asylum seekers who cannot pay.

When comparing the three infrastructure epistemologies against abstract-collective and individual-local responsibility (Table 5), we see the highest count of statistically significant relationships for the human rights epistemology, followed by the basic needs epistemology, followed by the infrastructure as service epistemology. Part of this may be an artefact of the relative sample sizes; for example, and as shown in Tables 3 and 4, the infrastructure as service epistemology had the fewest respondents referencing it. However, these relationships are not entirely a function of sample size; the basic needs epistemology had a larger count of respondents coded to it than the human rights epistemology, and the human rights epistemology shows the higher number of significant relationships.

As the chi-squared results presented in Table 5 can only indicate the presence or absence of relationships, we turn to Figure 2 to show a visual representation of the data trends. Figure 2 shows breakdowns of the 112 respondents who referenced any one of the infrastructure epistemologies in their qualitative responses; these can also be seen in Tables 3 and 4. The centre circle shows the prevalence of each infrastructure epistemology code, the middle ring diagrams how respondents feel regarding the extent of abstract-collective responsibility (WE should provide), and the outermost ring diagrams how respondents feel regarding the extent of individual-local responsibility (I will provide). As shown in that figure, a higher percentage of respondents who explicitly linked water and wastewater provision to the human rights or basic needs discourses indicate that WASH should be provided to refugees and asylum seekers who cannot pay; a higher percentage of those who reference the human rights discourse indicate these services should be provided indefinitely. This is true for both the abstract-collective and individual-local responsibility measures.

Figure 2. Infrastructure epistemologies and abstract-collective vs. individual-local responsibility.

In contrast, at the individual-local level, about 60% of the respondents who referenced the infrastructure as service epistemology said they were not willing to fund WASH for refugees and asylum seekers who cannot pay. This is a higher relative frequency than that observed for either of the humanitarian epistemologies, where between 31 and 39% indicated they were personally not willing to pay more to provide those services. As shown in Table 5, it should be noted that the relationships between the infrastructure as service epistemology and the responses for the collective-abstract and individual-local questions are not statistically significant. Given the small count of respondents who referenced this epistemology, more research is needed to determine if this is an artefact of that smaller sample size, or if there is indeed an absence of relationship.

Still, across all the epistemologies, a large number of respondents who indicated that WASH should be provided at the abstract-collective level subsequently indicated that they were not personally (individual-local) willing to contribute financially for that services provision. Indeed, and as shown in Table 4, there were almost no respondents who indicated they were individually-locally willing to fund WASH for refugees indefinitely. We claim this supports the transition that we described in Figure 1; even those respondents who understand WASH as a human right seem to put a time limit on this status. For at the period of time when it is seen as reasonable that the displaced population is unable to pay for itself, the humanitarian epistemologies are used to frame the situation. After this time period, most survey respondents seem to believe that after the displaced persons have had a reasonable chance to become able to pay for WASH, they should do so. In other words, once the local social constraints on the displaced persons’ access to WASH have been removed (either by the displaced persons returning home or by becoming integrated into German society), the perceived moral imperative to provide WASH (or, the human rights epistemology) fades. Still, the abstract-collective measures complicate this explanation; here, between 26% (infrastructure as service epistemology) to 42% (human rights epistemology) of respondents indicated services should be provided indefinitely. The difference between these indicates the need for future research that can explore and problematize this empirically observed difference. For example, the collective emphasis of the abstract-collective measure may have shifted responses away from a particular set of individuals and towards an expected baseline percentage of the population that is expected to be unable to pay at any given time (for example, orphans, homeless individuals, refugees, etc.).

The basic needs epistemology showcases the differences between the abstract-collective and individual-local responses. For responses coded to this epistemology, when considering the abstract-collective responsibility for providing services, the distribution of timelines (never, temporary, indefinitely), respondents were willing to support WASH costs for was not significantly different than the calculated expected values (p = 0.619 and 0.629 for water and wastewater, respectively). However, the response distribution for the individual-local question was significantly different than expected (p = 0.05 & 0.07 for water and wastewater, respectively). This difference may be linked to the collective vs. individual nature of the various epistemologies. For example, the basic needs epistemology is concerned with meeting the needs of people as individuals. In contrast, the human rights epistemology claims a set of basic rights for all people and is inherently collective, even though water and sanitation services are used on an individual basis. As such, the responsibility to provide those rights retains the individual-local link, but adds the sense of a more collective responsibility. The infrastructure as service epistemology is even more intensely individual than the basic needs epistemology, but as argued above it does not share the moral motivation for services that would provide the motivation – either abstract-collective or individual-local – to take responsibility for others. And indeed, as this interpretation would suggest, the response distributions for the human rights coded answers are statistically different than expected for both the abstract-collective and individual-local questions, and the infrastructure as service epistemology is not significantly different than expected for either the abstract-collective vs. individual-local responsibilities.

Finally, while the results for water and wastewater are similar enough that we have thus far discussed them together, they are not identical. For example, the local-individual relationships for wastewater are more often statistically significant than are the relationships for water. It is worth noting that we did not ask the qualitative questions separately for water and wastewater infrastructure because we feared erosion of data quality through respondent fatigue. However, we did ask respondents separate abstract-collective and individual-local responsibility questions for the two infrastructure types. In other words, the observed differences in statistical significance have to do with the relative timelines respondents gave for water and wastewater provision. Specifically, for the respondents that were coded to either of the humanitarian epistemologies, the different categories of time to provide service (i.e. never, temporarily, indefinitely) for wastewater contain more responses in the temporary/indefinite categories, and fewer in the never category, than statistically expected.

These relationships are not as consistent for the responses treating water infrastructure, and this explains the difference in significance shown in Table 5. These categorical results mean that respondents were usually willing to provide wastewater services longer than for water services, if and only if they referenced either of the humanitarian epistemologies. Together, these results suggest that the morally founded humanitarian epistemologies classify water and wastewater differently; specifically, wastewater has a stronger link to humanitarian motivations.

Conclusion

Refugees and asylum seekers who cannot immediately pay for water and wastewater services challenge currently dominant, market-based mental models for how these services are to be sustainably provided. This epistemology – which we call infrastructure as service – accurately observes that utilities cost money to run, and thereby expect households to make direct payments to access the services those utilities provide. However, water and wastewater are also commonly understood to be fundamental human rights (UN 2010); this adds a humanitarian, or moral, dimension to these infrastructure services. In this analysis, we sought to understand if the general public references these epistemologies when asked how and why refugees and asylum seekers were being provided with water and wastewater in the highly developed German context. As described above, we found that 112 of the 314 individuals who gave substantive qualitative responses to our survey questions did indeed reference an infrastructure epistemology. The three epistemologies identified in our qualitative analysis were the infrastructure as service epistemology (“they should pay themselves”), the human rights epistemology (“a fundamental human right”), and an emergent basic needs epistemology (“every person needs water”).

The qualitatively identified epistemologies were cross-referenced against categorical and numeric questions that sought to understand how respondents felt about collectively or individually taking financial responsibility for providing the water and wastewater services for refugees and asylum seekers who cannot afford them. We find statistically significant evidence that the epistemologies relate to both how long respondents feel it is appropriate to provide water or wastewater services, and also relate to respondent perspectives on whether the related financial responsibilities are abstract-collective (WE should provide …) or individual-local (I will provide …). Future research is needed to explore this abstract-collective/local-individual distinction. Specifically, more respondents who reference either of the morally founded humanitarian epistemologies (basic needs and human rights) are willing to fund infrastructure services for refugees and asylum seekers who cannot pay; this relationship is strongest for the human rights epistemology. In addition, the data show wastewater services are more closely linked to the humanitarian epistemologies than are water services. Finally, while most respondents indicate they would take personal responsibility for meeting the cost of WASH for the refugees and asylum seekers for a temporary period of time, almost none would do so indefinitely. We interpret this as meaning that there is a timeline (Figure 1) for when a hosting population understands the provision of services through a humanitarian lens (and is thereby willing to pay for others’ access to WASH) and for when the new population is integrated into the more typical, infrastructure as service epistemology (and should thereby pay for their own WASH).

This knowledge is important for utility planning, policy, and design. Specifically, there is evidence that the public expects utilities to be able to provide water and wastewater services to populations displaced by extreme events; a previous analysis for the German context quantifies that time period as almost three years (Citation Redacted for Review). Given the additional costs and unexpected nature of this newly increased service provision, this is a challenge to utility resilience. While the data show there are various epistemologies driving this public expectation, humanitarianism (basic needs or human rights epistemologies) is referenced unprompted by most of the respondents in our data-set, and we do not see any reason to believe this trend is not analytically generalizable across most populations. Importantly, there are differences in how respondents perceive the abstract-collective vs. individual-local responsibilities to meet the costs to provide WASH to the displaced and vulnerable populations. This has implications for publically acceptable structures for cost recovery, and as such future research is needed to better understand perspectives of the national vs. local responsibility for those costs.

By being able to structure the cost recovery in a manner acceptable to the public, utilities and governments will be better able to provide water and wastewater services to disaster displaced populations while minimizing project conflict and public protest (Teo and Loosemore 2011). Given the importance of water and wastewater to public and environmental health, this is an important benefit to both the pre-existing and disaster displaced populations. Considering the potential impacts of disaster migration before it occurs enables advance planning that can minimize both costs and negative impacts (Faniran et al. 1994). Indeed, there is evidence that if properly managed, sudden population dynamics can be leveraged to improve the performance of infrastructure systems rather than just minimizing negative impacts (Faust and Kaminsky 2017). As with all engineering undertakings, however, good outcomes are the result of evidence-based planning, good design, and quality construction. As such, and as the data presented here show that the public we serve feels a humanitarian mandate to provide services to vulnerable disaster migrants, we claim that the potential for displaced populations should become a standard consideration in the practice of water and wastewater infrastructure planning, design, and construction.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Funding

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation [grant numbers 1624417 and 1624409].

Acknowledgements

We thank the many individuals who took the time to answer our questions and share their perceptions and knowledge with us. We also thank Sierra Gernhart, Max Bartosik, and Lena Bartelt, the translators who supported this project.