Redressing the emerging governance crisis in peri-urban water access: Evidence from South Asia

December 15th, 2013

Gregory Pierce, University of California, Los Angeles, United States

This article received first prize in the Global Water Forum 2013 Emerging Scholars Award.

Insufficient household access to water resources in the peri-urban areas of low and middle income countries (LMICs) is an increasingly important issue in transboundary governance. From the geographical perspective of the watershed, water allocation decisions should be made collaboratively between cities and their outlying areas. For political and socioeconomic reasons, however, co-management is rare. Indeed, even cooperation in transboundary water management is rare, and competition is common. This article examines potential transboundary solutions to the peri-urban water access deficit throughout LMICs, with a particular focus on South Asia.

In high income countries, communities in the urban periphery (suburbs) are often privileged vis a vis central cities, but in low-income countries, the situation is usually reversed. Moreover, the crisis of peri-urban water access remains understudied and poorly understood compared to urban-rural transboundary governance dynamics. This lack of understanding is perpetuated by the underrepresentation of peri-urban areas in government statistics.1,2 Even in comparison to central-city slums, peri-urban communities are data-poor.

The fundamental obstacle to adequate water service for peri-urban households is their uncertain status in local governance structures. Many LMICs have only recently established basic service delivery standards for central cities, so peri-urban spaces are hardly on the agenda. While peri-urban areas are defined variously by spatial or socioeconomic metrics, one of their core attributes is that they stand outside the central city government apparatus.

Because water resources in central cities and their surrounding areas are often managed by entirely different government agencies, sometimes under different political regimes, they have an incentive to compete rather than cooperate.3 Central cities have more power than communities in the exurban fringeoften comprised of recent migrants so clean water for primary consumption and economic production tends to flow into the central city from the periphery (or beyond). At the same time, wastewater effluent resulting from primary use flows out from central cities to peri-urban areas, where it is rarely, properly disposed.4 This is not a uniform process. There are in fact peri-urban islands of pristine water service to gated housing communities and special economic zones 5, but on the whole peri-urban water access is worse than even low central city standards.

Having detailed this disparity, how can peri-urban areas improve access and even work to reverse this trend? In theory, the most straightforward policy answer is that central city utilities with vast economies of scale and experience can take on the responsibility of service to peri-urban areas, perhaps with subsidies from the state or national government. In practice, this rarely happens because the political or economic capital offered to cities does not compensate for the cost of providing service to unincorporated areas.6 Central city governments often struggle to provide adequate services to their core residents, so transboundary extension appears to be a non-starter.

Even if incentives are aligned from a policy perspective, peri-urban access may not result. Recently, the Karnataka state government supported Bangalore’s water utility to extend formal water service to the exurban fringe, but this effort was largely unsuccessful.7 In other words, peri-urban service extension may not succeed even when the central city is willing to provide. Moreover, an example from Hyderabad shows that peri-urban communities are not always eager to be served by central cities, doubting that they will be adequately served or fearing they will be made to comply with other central city regulations.8

In the absence of effective state-led ‘policy driven’ solutions, market and self-organized ‘needs driven’ solutions prevail in peri-urban areas, where residents are clearly both citizens and consumers.1 While peri-urban residents are often depicted as helpless in their capacity to secure sustainable water service, evidence suggests that they are in fact resilient and resourceful. Two emerging service delivery models from South Asia capitalize on local capacity and suggest that peri-urban communities can survive and even potentially thrive by developing their own water resources. Both models fall under the umbrella of social entrepreneurship.

Water Health International (WHI) is a for-profit organization that operates in the state of Punjab, India. In the WHI model, peri-urban (or rural) communities, currently unserved by the government, provide land and access to raw water to WHI. In turn, WHI provides potable water to communities for prices well below the market rate.9,10 While WHI profits from this arrangement modestly, its initial seed funding is derived from international donors, and its chief aim is to keep prices low, and quantity sustainable for over 5 million people.

Veolia Grameen (VG) represents a more radical reversal of the central city, peri-urban appropriation narrative outlined above. Veolia Grameen began as a social business providing potable water to an unserved group of villages outside of Dhaka. To sustain the project on the basis of cost-recovery, however, VG now sells treated surface water from the peri-urban area to businesses in central Dhaka at well above cost.11 In short, central city consumption subsidizes peri-urban water access.

In the absence of effective local government or NGO provision, Both WHI and VG provide water at well-below market prices to households in the peri-urban space. Most promisingly, VG enables peri-urban residents to proactively and sustainably utilize local water resources for their own gain, rather than suffer from central city appropriation or neglect.

In the short term, social entrepreneurship is one of several viable responses to a crisis of household water service provision in peri-urban areas. At the same time, parallel efforts must continue to expand national and sub-national urban governance structures to truly account and provide for peri-urban areas’ basic service needs. Only a combination of ‘bottom up’ and ‘top down’ efforts will help close the peri-urban water access gap.

This article received first prize in the Global Water Forum 2013 Emerging Scholars Award.

References:

1. Allen, A., Dávila, J. D., and P. Hofmann (2006), ‘The peri-urban water poor: citizens or consumers?’, Environment and Urbanization 18(2): 333-351.

2. Pradhan, K. C. (2013), ‘Unacknowledged Urbanisation: The New Census Towns of India’, Economic & Political Weekly xlviii: 36.

3. Pierce, G. (2012), ‘The political economy of water service privatization in Mexico City, 1994-2011’, International Journal of Water Resources Development 28(4): 675-691.

4. Prakash, A. (2012), ‘The Periurban Water Security Problématique: A case study of Hyderabad in Southern India’, Peri Urban Water Security Discussion Paper Series, Paper No. 4, SaciWATERs.

5. Shah, A. (2013), ‘Mainstreaming or Marginalisation?’, Economic & Political Weekly 48(41): 55.

6. Mukhija, V., and D.R. Mason (2013), ‘Reluctant Cities, Colonias and Municipal Underbounding in the US: Can Cities Be Convinced to Annex Poor Enclaves?’ Urban Studies.

7. Ranganathan, M. (2013), ‘Paying for Pipes, Claiming Citizenship: Political Agency and Water Reforms at the Urban Periphery’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research.

8. Ali, M. Roushan (2013), ‘Water Regularisation Scheme Finds No Favour’ The Deccan Chronicle.

9. Hammond, A., Koch, J., and F. Noguera (2009), ‘The need for safe water as a market opportunity’, innovations 4(3): 107-117.

10. Kumar, V. and W. Davies (2011), ‘Thinking Outside the Pipeline: Venturing into Distributed Off-Grid Water Markets’, Bringing Water to Where It is Needed Most: Innovative Private Sector Participation in Water & Sanitation. International Finance Corporation.

11. Pierce, G. (2013), ‘The Prospects for Social Business in Peri-Urban Water Supply: Employment and Household Welfare Impacts of the Grameen Veolia Venture’. IRLE Working Paper.

Gregory Pierce is a PhD candidate in the Department of Urban Planning at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research focuses on the political and economic determinants of urban water access at multiple geographic scales, with a regional interest in South Asia. Mr. Pierce can be reached at gspierce@ucla.edu.

The views expressed in this article belong to the individual authors and do not represent the views of the Global Water Forum, the UNESCO Chair in Water Economics and Transboundary Water Governance, UNESCO, the Australian National University, or any of the institutions to which the authors are associated. Please see the Global Water Forum terms and conditions here.