Most of the world’s governments and international agencies have committed themselves to the Millennium Development Goals, and more specifically to the target of halving, by 2015, the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation.¹ If this and related targets are achieved, billions of the world’s poorest citizens will be able to live healthier and more fulfilling lives.

The water and sanitation target has helped to bring a greater focus on poverty to the international water and sanitation sector. During the 1990s, one of the international agendas promoted most vigorously in the water and sanitation...

At various times and places during the last two centuries, there have been controversies over the choice between public and private water provisioning, and these controversies have sometimes extended to sanitation. During the last decades of the 20th century, this controversy became global. At one extreme, proponents argued that increasing private- sector involvement would solve the many failures plaguing public water and sanitation utilities, including their failure to provide services to the urban poor. At the other extreme, critics argued that increasing private-sector participation was part of the problem – another step in the dismantling of the policies and institutions...

It is almost a tautology that better governance (see Box 1 for definitions) must result in better water and sanitation services, at least in those locations where everyone acknowledges that current conditions are inadequate. Unfortunately, claiming that the solution lies in better governance does not provide a clear agenda to pursue. Indeed, compared with promoting more investment in water and sanitation infrastructure, promoting better governance can seem very vague and ill defined. Perhaps partly as a result, there has long been a tendency to select a particular model of water and sanitation governance, and to promote that model as inherently...

There is widespread agreement that inadequate water and sanitation provision is at least in part a failure of governance, and the definitions of water and sanitation governance are reasonably consistent. At least superficially, there is also widespread agreement on a number of the critical features that good water and sanitation governance must have.

A recent paper commissioned by the Global Water Partnership identified the following principles of effective water governance, generally (Rogers and Hall, 2003).

Approaches should be:

open and transparent

inclusive and communicative

coherent and integrative

equitable and ethical.

Performance and operation should be:

accountable

efficient

responsive and sustainable....

A framework for water governance, emphasizing how the different elements of good management need to be linked to the needs and priorities of citizens, was elaborated in the recent UN-HABITAT report: Water and Sanitation in the World’s Cities: Local Action for Global Goals (UN-HABITAT, 2003). A similar framework that emphasizes the role of negotiation in ensuring that services such as water services work better for poor people was developed for the 2004 World Development Report, Making Services Work for Poor People (World Bank, 2003). These frameworks are based on the notion that the demands for improvement need to come from...

Many of the early networks for water supply (and to a lesser extent sewerage) were operated by private companies. The late 19th and early 20th centuries saw governments, particularly in the more affluent countries, raising concerns about private operators, and increasing the dominance of public utilities. The late 20th century saw the re-emergence of private utility operators. Again the impetus came from the more affluent countries. Throughout the 1990s, private-sector participation was promoted by international development agencies dominated by the more affluent countries, and most notably the World Bank (Finger and Allouche, 2002; Budds and McGranahan, 2003). While most water...

Corruption can be said to occur when people violate their duties for personal or political gain, either at their own instigation (e.g. embezzlement) or in response to improper inducements (e.g. bribes).² Corruption is poorly documented, but widely discussed. In many ways, corruption is the antithesis of good governance: inherently covert rather than open and transparent; exclusive rather than inclusive and communicative; divisive rather than coherent and integrative; and immoral rather than equitable and ethical. Where corruption is widespread, it can seem inevitable. The concept of corruption includes the notion that once it starts it tends to persist or worsen unless...

The relevant issues and options extend beyond the mechanisms embedded within a particular institutional framework (e.g. how do the interests of the urban poor get represented in the context of a private water concession), and extend to the selection and evolution of institutional frameworks (e.g. how do the interests of the urban poor get represented when the decision is made to grant a concession). Moreover, water governance cannot be disassociated from other governance issues. There are, as it were, strong returns to good governance. Good governance in one sector typically implies good governance in other sectors, not only because all...