CHAPTER 2.2 DOMESTIC WATER AND SANITATION


A number of countries have recognized the human right to clean and safe water in national legislation or their constitutions (WASH United/Freshwater Action Network/WaterLex 2012; UN 2010). In the Netherlands a law passed in 2004 prohibits drinking water (but not sewerage or wastewater treatment) services from being privately owned (Hall et al. 2004). Many developing countries have policies in place to make safe water accessible to low-income users for reasons including social and public health objectives, environmental concerns and political considerations (African Development Bank 2016; OECD 2009; Le Blanc 2007). In 2001 the Government of South Africa made a policy decision to provide a basic amount of water to all citizens at no cost (Muller 2008).


Integrated Water Resource Management (IWRM): Managing competing economic, social and ecological water demands, especially for agricultural and industrial uses, requires a co-ordinated policy approach. Over 80% of countries have Integrated Water Resource Management (IWRM) principles in their water laws or policies and two-thirds have developed IWRM plans (African Development Bank 2016; Cherlet 2012). Studies of IWRM practices and policies reveal persistent problems related to participation, elite capture of processes and resources, and lack of awareness of the importance of local social, gender and power relations (Van Koppen et al. 2007). In Africa such policies may tend towards (re)centralizing power (Movik 2010) and facilitating the dominance of expert authorities (who are most likely to be male) over local knowledge and management practices (which are most likely to include women) (Shah and Van Koppen 2005; Biswas 2004). Many countries have plural, overlapping and competing formal and informal legal and customary systems; most countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, for example, are characterized by primarily informal water user practices that cannot be easily integrated into IWRM (Shah and Van Koppen 2005; Biswas 2004).


Transboundary waters: Water is almost always a transboundary resource. Aquifers, lakes, rivers and rainfall cross national borders. Almost 40% of the world population lives


in some 276 transboundary


rivers (World Bank 2016; UN-Water 2008). Multilateral and transboundary river basin and water management policies exist in many regions to address competing demands for water extraction and to share management of monitoring, pollution response, flood control and other infrastructure. Most transboundary watersheds


have some form of co-operative management body (WWF and DFID 2010; Wolf et al. 2003). Only a minority of these bodies incorporate a substantial gender- sensitive approach. One of the few that has made strong commitments to gender mainstreaming is the Mekong River Commission, whose members are Cambodia, the Lao People’s Democratic Republic, Thailand and Viet Nam. Among other elements, it requires detailed social (and gendered) impact analysis of the impacts of dams and other water resource developments (MRC 2016).


Transboundary agreements are typically negotiated at high policy levels, far removed from the users and local informal managers of water. Often they do not include use of a gender lens, although they are created out of highly gendered processes: both the political domains and the corps of professional water managers are highly masculinized (Earle eds. et al. 2016). Most international transboundary water management processes are driven by a conceptual frame rooted in the “hydraulic mission” (Molle et al. 2009), which is manifested primarily in a preference for constructing mega-infrastructure such as dams and water transfer schemes. Such “heroic” engineering approaches are rooted in a masculinized discourse, with its emphasis on construction, command and control. The best-fit actors within this discourse are technical, economic and political elites operating in what is generally referred to as the national interest. Left out of such an approach are local communities that rely on these resources directly, including water users, women, the poor and other (overlapping) groups (UN-Water 2008).


Formal employment and decision-making


Women are poorly represented in staffing and formal employment in the water and sanitation sectors. Half the governments that responded to the 2011 GLAAS survey reported that women made up less than 10% of the professional and managerial staff in these sectors (WHO and UN-Water 2012). Since comparable data were not reported in the 2015 GLAAS update, it is not possible to assess trends.


Even when women are participants in formal decision- making processes, their interests are rarely taken into account due to gender-related inequalities and restrictive definitions of appropriate female behaviour. They are often discouraged from speaking in public fora by norms of female decorum. Women usually have less time to participate due to a heavier burden of work,


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