A comprehensive framework for analyzing co-production of urban water and sanitation services in the Global South

ABSTRACT

Co-production of water and sanitation services has become a widely discussed option for equitable and efficient service delivery, especially for cities of the Global South. Theoretical conceptualizations of service co-production mainly refer to the public management and governance dimension, while the techno-environmental and spatial dimensions are often disregarded in the literature. This article proposes a comprehensive framework for analyzing water and sanitation co-production based on cross-cutting literature, from public service management/governance to urban, socio-ecological and socio-technical fields. The proposed framework highlights the categories and factors to be considered when analyzing the background conditions and outcomes of unorthodox service delivery.

KEYWORDS:

• Co-production
• water and sanitation services
• urban
• socio-ecological
• socio-technical
• Global South

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Like Mitlin and Satterthwaite (2013, p. 13), we use the term Global South to ‘include all nations classified by the World Bank as low- and middle-income that are in Africa, Asia and Latin America and the Caribbean’.

2. Africa, Asia and Latin America had the highest average rates of urban population growth (3.44%, 2.78% and 1.45% annually, respectively) between 1995 and 2015 (United Nations Human Settlements Programme, 2016).

3. The normative perspective looks at the values that could be embedded in the process of co-producing – such as social justice, democracy and citizens’ empowerment – whatever the final results of the practice are. The instrumental/pragmatic perspective looks at the values that could be embedded in the outcome of a co-produced practice, such as improved efficiency and quality of the service.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by FNRS [grant T.0174.16], in the framework of the PRD project Typologies of Institutionalised Co-production of Water and Sanitation Services in the Urban South (TYCO-WSS).