Funding for urban drinking water and sanitation services in developing countries

IDDRI Foundation research programme

Historically in industrialised countries, the provision of collective services (water, sanitation, refuse collection, energy and transport, etc.) has gradually been established as one of the responsibilities of the public authorities. The provision of these “public goods” has worked as a driving force behind the construction of modern States, and as a source of legitimacy for political power. Access to these services has thus gradually become a right.

At the international level, the United Nations’ attention to these issues, followed by the definition of the Millennium Development Goals and the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg in 2002, made the provision of basic services a collective international commitment.
 But how best to share the costs and financing for these services remains a subject of heated debate, including in developed countries, even though the way this field actually works, especially in DCs, is paradoxically poorly understood.

However, in these developing countries, the issue of financing these networks becomes particularly acute given the rapid pace of urbanisation observed there. The problem of global funding for infrastructure in these areas with high population densities, and especially that of access to basic urban services, rightly questions the whole of the international community. The history of developed countries shows that choices made in terms of funding for services have greatly varied from one country to another and from one period to another within the countries themselves. The solutions found are first the result of a social contract concluded between actors, which may be revised if necessary, setting out how costs will be shared between actors for a set of services that a community must provide. The specific socio-economic, legal, cultural, institutional and technological contexts are key aspects of the balances struck within communities. Local/national governance issues therefore largely determine the economic conditions for the provision of basic services.

While water and sanitation services in DCs have been the object of numerous empirical studies, questions concerning real long-term financing and, more specifically, the effective conditions – not just technical but also social – for its (ex post) mobilisation and therefore for real cost-sharing between stakeholders (States, communities, users, clients, firms, official development assistance authorities, backers, donors, etc.), have not resulted in transversal approaches in time or space. In order to understand most of the specific urban situations in which water and sanitation services are developed, we consider that the effective conditions for cost-sharing between actors are at least as relevant as the quantitative constraint implied in the financial volumes to be mobilised.

From this perspective, the purpose assigned to this project of comparative research at the international level includes two dimensions:
• Models for long-term cost-sharing between actors
• The socio-political dynamics at the origin of these compromises.

Contact: Carine Barbier