Indicator 6.b.1: Participation of local communities in water and sanitation management
One of the problems with the water-management “hard path” has been the exclusion of local communities from knowledge generation and decision making. The outcomes of this exclusion have included: building large dams that destroy local homes and livelihoods; imposing sanitation solutions that are culturally or technologically inappropriate; undermining well-functioning community water-sharing practices in favor of externally-derived rules; and many others. Thus, real participation of local communities in all stages of water management is critical for finding and implementing successful solutions.
But how does one go about measuring each country’s progress in ensuring the participation of local communities? GLAAS, the UN agency responsible for this indicator, does this through periodic country surveys. Results are shown in the two maps below. Two features of these maps are worth highlighting:
- Data are unavailable for most high-income countries, since GLAAS surveys are focused on low- and middle-income countries. Local participation is important regardless of setting (though high-income countries may have other accountability mechanisms such as well-established democratic governance practices).
- It is a lot easier to have procedures for local participation in theory (top map) than it is to implement those procedures and actually get local participation (bottom map).
