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Reports of Missing Persons in Innovation and Infrastructure to Achieve Water and Sanitation for All
Get PDFWe live in a world where 844 million people lack basic drinking water services, and more than four billion people lack access to safely managed sanitation. Somehow, these people go missing in the process of water and sanitation provision. Reaching these billions requires not only technological innovation but also socio-political ingenuity. This dissertation provides theoretical and on-the-ground insight into key social and political components of technological interventions, or what I call the “invisible infrastructure” of tech-led transformations. I focus on infrastructure in low-income regions and explore how social systems relate to technological systems, particularly in terms of street-level bureaucracy, interdisciplinary research, and pro-poor policy implementation. I employ mixed-methods research approaches, producing social science and spatial datasets as well as rich ethnographic observations and archival work. I conduct analyses through both quantitative and qualitative coding, drawing from and contributing to the scholarship of development studies and practice, city and regional planning, and development engineering—all with the practical hope of one day achieving water and sanitation for all. In the Introduction of this dissertation, I propose an invisible infrastructure framework for tech-led transformations in order to help render missing people and social dynamics more visible. I describe how invisible infrastructure is the conceptual arc of my whole endeavor in research to unlock water and sanitation solutions. Each of the following chapters of my dissertation uncovers various aspects of invisible infrastructure (summaries below). The chapters are quite distinct from one another in that they: focus on various regional contexts, draw from various theories and disciplines, and use different data sources and analytical approaches. However, the common goal is the provision of water and sanitation services with an overarching message that certain stakeholders—in particular from marginalized groups—and social dynamics have been rendered invisible. Hence, I consider the chapters as reports of missing persons in innovation and infrastructure to achieve water and sanitation for all. Chapter 1: Significant development funding flows to informational interventions intended to improve public services. Such “transparency fixes” often depend upon the cooperation of frontline workers who produce and disseminate information for citizens. We study frontline worker compliance with a transparency intervention in Bangalore’s water sector, providing one of the first multi-method companions to a field experiment. We examine why workers exhibited modest overall rates of compliance and why compliance varied across neighborhoods. Drawing on ethnographic observation and an original dataset, we find that it is essential to understand how workers prioritize new responsibilities relative to longstanding ones. Perceptions of “core” jobs can be sticky—especially when reaffirmed through interactions with citizens. When family responsibilities take time away from their positions, new tasks are even more neglected. While the street-level bureaucracy and principal agent literatures suggest attributes such as race and education influence compliance, we highlight the importance of financial and familial circumstances. Chapter 2: Sanitation research focuses primarily on containing human waste and preventing disease; thus, it has traditionally been dominated by the fields of environmental engineering and public health. Over the past 20 years, however, the field has grown broader in scope and deeper in complexity, spanning diverse disciplinary perspectives. In this chapter, we review the current literature in the range of disciplines engaged with sanitation research in low- and middle-income countries. We find that perspectives on what sanitation is, and what sanitation policy should prioritize, vary widely. We show how these diverse perspectives augment the conventional sanitation service chain, a framework describing the flow of waste from capture to disposal. We review how these perspectives can inform progress toward equitable sanitation for all (i.e. Sustainable Development Goal 6). Our key message is that both material and nonmaterial flows—and both technological and social functions—make up a sanitation “system.” The components of the sanitation service chain are embedded within the flows of finance, decision making, and labor that make material flows of waste possible. The functions of capture, storage, transport, treatment, reuse, and disposal are interlinked with those of ensuring equity and affordability. We find that a multilayered understanding of sanitation, with contributions from multiple disciplines, is necessary to facilitate inclusive and robust research toward the goal of sanitation for all. Chapter 3: The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed underlying inequities and inadequacies of infrastructure that require immediate attention. It has underscored the needs of marginalized groups, particularly those who depend on public spaces for their livelihood and on public infrastructure for access to water and sanitation. Throughout Indian history, prominent figures have made the case for accessible and well-maintained sanitation facilities in public spaces such as marketplaces, railways, and low-income areas, but this call has gone largely unheeded. As a result, during the COVID-19 pandemic, thousands of migrant workers and their families crowded buses, trains, stations, and streets—or were locked down in low-income areas—with no access to clean sanitation facilities. In this chapter, I trace how distress related to epidemics has been linked to advocacy for public sanitation across India’s history. I show how disease and war constrained but also inspired past advocates to see their visions fulfilled. Informed by these lessons from the past, I recommend concrete actions for Swachh Bharat Mission-Urban in order to improve its effectiveness for the poor by focusing on public sanitation. I argue that we learn from history that pandemics are precisely when we should prioritize sanitation, especially in public spaces and particularly for the poor
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Perspectives on Carbon Capture and Sequestration in the United States
Get PDFOverall, this dissertation examines a sequence of important interconnected issues: the perspectives of potential and actual CCS host communities, the perspectives of the environmental community on the rationality of CCS as viable mitigation solution for the United States, and strategies for engaging with the public on CCS. Much of the research in this dissertation is original work addressing major interdisciplinary gaps in existing literature as well as in industry and government public engagement practice. Each of the chapters is a stand-alone paper that provides a unique contribution to a series of different types of carbon management technologies and academic disciplines. They are assembled together to provide a unique integrated evaluation of these related problems. Collectively, these chapters capture some of the major challenges facing mitigation technology engagement from the potentially time consuming need for careful social site characterization to the opportunities for using citizen-guided marketing methods to identify factors that may enhance effective public engagement. Chapters 2 and 3 are essays on the perspectives of potential and actual CCS host communities. Chapter 2 finds that host communities in California's Central Valley are more concerned with the social risks of hosting a CCS project (e.g. fear of neglect should something go wrong) rather than with the technical risks of the technology. Chapter 3 finds that host communities across the US are more concerned with social risks, and want a say in how those risks should be mitigated. This Chapter concludes with a discussion of how a `social site characterization' conducted along side a traditional site characterization when evaluating the potential for a CCS project may be a good way to both encourage positive relationships with community members and mitigate potential concerns.Chapter 4 is an essay on the perspectives of the environmental community towards the potential of CCS as a viable mitigation solution in the US. This Chapter shows that environmental non-governmental organizations' position on CCS falls into one of four camps who believe: CCS should be developed and deployed in the near-term (Enthusiasts), CCS should be studied (Prudents), CCS will likely need to be deployed but only as a last resort (Reluctants), and CCS should not be deployed (Opponents). This Chapter finds that only Enthusiasts plan on educating the public about the technology in the near-term, however their ability to influence the public may be limited because they are more adept at targeting policymakers (not as experienced with the public) and receive much of their funding from industry (not seen as particularly trustworthy).In this dissertation, Chapter 5 is an essay on using citizen-guided emotional messages about CCS as a way to effectively communicate with the energy veteran public. This Chapter finds that Wyoming citizens believe information about CCS presented within an emotionally self-referent framework is likely to be a more persuasive way to garner support for or rejection of the technology amongst the Wyoming public than just the presentation of the same information alone
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Empowerment in Theory and Practice: Epistemic Communities and Adolescent Experiences in South Asia
No full textThis dissertation is a critical exploration and analysis of women and girl’s empowerment in global development in South Asia. Gender approaches in global development have gone through iterations since US President Truman’s Four Point Plan in the 1940s. “Third-World” South Asian Women have been recipients of development aid to mixed results and in many cases, expanded economic and social inequalities. Local resistance and feminist critiques attempt to transform the norms and practices of the development epistemic community, which absorbs these critiques into reforms without challenging the values of the liberal democratic capitalist class. The current iteration of development is a continued emphasis on rationality and individualism, but the focus is on adolescent girls viewed as champions for economic and social prosperity. I explore the norms and values of development efforts in “empowering” adolescent girls. In Chapter 2, I evaluated the impact of The Girl Icon Program, a girls’ leadership program in Northern India, on girls’ resiliency, self-efficacy, and their attitudes related to gender norms. I identify micro-empowerment practices feasible for adolescent girls. This is significant because most adolescent empowerment measures are tailored for adults, not for the specific challenges and opportunities of the adolescent age group. In addition, elder brothers are valuable social support systems; incorporating sibling relationships into adolescent empowerment programs could strengthen girls’ empowerment. In Chapter 3, I conduct a scoping review of adolescent empowerment measures in South Asia (1990-2022). I identify a landscape of adolescent empowerment theories and use the concept of epistemic community as an analytical tool to compare their research gestalt. In Chapter 4, drawing from the empirical findings in Chapter 3, I use the analytical lens of ‘epistemic governance’ to examine the theoretical shortcomings of the post-positive quantitative publications. I compare the post-positivist conceptualizations of empowerment with critical realist and interpretive epistemic communities and explore potential possibilities of maintaining the liberatory imagination within empowerment while also examining the specific benefits of quantification
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Pathways for progress toward universal access to safe drinking water
Get PDFOver two billion people globally lack access to safe water. This is both a public health problem and a violation of human rights. The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, through its ambitious and human-rights based framework, and the safe water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) community, through its calls for "transformative WASH," have signaled that status quo interventions will not achieve universal safe water access goals. Rather, there is a need for new pathways toward the progressive realization of the human right to available, safe, acceptable, accessible, and affordable water for all. In Chapter 1, I present the results of a systematic review of adherence to chlorine point-of-use (POU) water treatment at the household-level, a widely promoted and inexpensive strategy for improving drinking water quality and health. While centralized chlorination of urban piped water supplies has historically contributed to major reductions in waterborne illness, sub-optimal adherence to household-level water treatment indicates that chlorine POU products are unlikely to lead to the widespread public health benefits associated with centralized treatment of piped water supplies. In Chapter 2, I present the results of an evaluation of system-level, passive chlorination technologies in small water systems in rural Nepal. These passive chlorination technologies have the potential to automatically treat water, without requiring the household-level behavior changes that are required for POU products. While these technologies have been rigorously evaluated as decentralized treatment solutions in some urban settings, little data exist on their performance in remote, rural systems, for which these technologies can serve as fully centralized chlorination systems. Over one year, we found that these technologies significantly improve the quality of water accessed by households. While service delivery models should be explored to ensure long-term sustainability, passive chlorination technologies have the potential to radically improve how rural households gain access to safe water. In Chapter 3, I present a synthesis of the literature at the intersection of gender and domestic water. The vast water and health literature is overwhelmingly focused on the consequences for child health, while focusing less attention on the health of the water carriers and managers, the women and girls who are typically the implementers of household-level treatment strategies. Yet, failing to understand the full consequences for women and girls leaves a major gap in our accounting of the value of accessible and safe water and cannot lead to gender equality
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The Politics of Pipes: The Persistence of Small Water Networks in Post-Privatization Manila
Get PDFThis project examines the politics of water provision in low-income areas of large, developing cities. In the last two decades, water privatization has become a global paradigm, emerging as a potential means for addressing the urban water crisis. In Manila, the site of the world's largest water privatization project, service to low-income areas has improved significantly in the post-privatization era. But whereas expansion of a water utility typically involves the replacement of informal providers, the experience in Manila demonstrates that the rapid connection of low-income areas actually hinges, in part, on the selective inclusion and exclusion of these smaller actors. Based on an ethnography of the private utilities and community-based providers, I use the persistence of small water networks as a lens for exploring the limits of water privatization in Manila.I focus on what I call micro-networks — community-built infrastructure that extends the formal, private utilities into low-income neighborhoods that the utilities do not wish to serve directly. In such a setup, the utility provides water only as far as the community boundary; beyond that, the micro-network operator constructs internal infrastructure, monitors for leakage and theft, and collects bills. But while these communities may gain access to safer water, they are also subject to higher costs and heightened disciplinary measures. By tracing the ways in which the utilities selectively use micro-networks to manage sub-populations, I show how the utilities make low-income spaces more governable. Delegating localized water management to micro-network operators depoliticizes the utilities' roles, shifting the sociopolitical difficulties of water provision to community organizations, while allowing the utilities to claim that these areas are served.This research leads to three related arguments. First, the persistence of small water networks highlights lingering inequities in access to water, for micro-network consumers are subject to disparities in cost, materials, and personal freedoms. Though Manila's water privatization project has resulted in significant improvements to the centralized system, its success must be tempered by the inequalities that remain. Second, the two utilities are largely able to shape both the geographies of water access and the production of knowledge. For this reason, the utilities typically use micro-networks where cost recovery may be difficult — such as in areas with uncertain land tenure or where higher levels of nonpayment are perceived — while including these areas in their aggregate coverage statistics. Third, the presence of multiple providers of water and other basic services blurs the boundaries between public, private, and community. But that blurriness serves to consolidate the private utilities' power, while increasing the opacity by which citizens navigate processes related to urban water provision.The persistence of micro-networks thus allows us to understand the ways in which low-income spaces are made more governable. By focusing on this peri-urban frontier, this project asserts that differentiation and discipline serve simultaneously as tools of governance and as points of contestation. What emerges is a waterscape consisting not of one type of privatization — where service and access are uniformly provided — but multiple, coexisting, and differentiated privatizations
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Safe Drinking Water for Low-Income Regions: Preferences and Affordability among End-Users - Case studies from Urban India and Rural Tanzania
Get PDFWell into the 21st century, safe and affordable drinking water remains an unmet human need. Globally, at least 1.8 billion people are potentially exposed to microbial contamination in their drinking water on a regular basis (Onda, LoBuglio, and Bartram 2012). These people are found disproportionately in low-income households located in developing countries; nearly half of all people without access to an improved water source live in Sub-Saharan Africa, while one fifth live in Southern Asia (WHO/UNICEF 2015). Attempts at increasing access to safe water include a wide range of scales, from urban piped water networks providing services to millions of people, to Household Water Treatment and safe storage Systems (HWTS) which allow individuals to provide safe drinking water to their family. Encouraging uptake across a population and ensuring consistent and correct usage are vital for the creation of improved health outcomes from HWTS interventions. For urban water utilities and community systems, assessing and addressing health risks, planning successful upgrades and forecasting revenue streams requires an understanding of how people access, collect and store water, as well as their willingness to pay (WTP) for water services. In the cases of both HWTS interventions and piped water systems, addressing this public health issue requires an understanding of the perspectives, preferences, access points and financial means of end-users, especially those at the lowest income levels and in the most inaccessible locales.This dissertation has focused on two different case studies: one in rural Tanzania and the other in urban India. In both locations our teams collected observations regarding preferences and current practices of water access and usage. We measured WTP across a variety of potential options for drinking water treatment and access in both locations. In the city of Hubli-Dharwad, India, I evaluated a pilot project, measuring stated WTP for both end-users experiencing continuous water service (CWS) and those experiencing intermittent water service (IWS). In four rural villages of Tanzania we asked local residents to evaluate six HWTS, and then collected information on user preferences and WTP. For both locations I analyzed our observations with current policy debates in mind, and gave recommendations for both future research as well as the local management of domestic water systems. These two very different locations have little in common except for a need to improve access to safe drinking water; my research provides vital information on how to create interventions that people want and need. The results from Tanzania are relevant for other countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, as well as other developing regions with limited access to improved water sources and high rates of turbidity. The results from Hubli-Dharwad are relevant to other urban areas in South Asia, and IWS piped water networks in other developing regions as well.The knowledge generated in both locations also contributes to the literature on user preferences and WTP for water services. For the HWTS literature, my research addresses questions about why some HWTS interventions may have failed to scale up to a larger population or to sustain usage among participating households over time; namely that taste, smell, aesthetics, familiarity and ease of use are all vital components of an individual’s decision as whether or not they will treat their drinking water. For this reason, boiling deserves reconsideration as a potentially important option for future HWTS interventions. WTP for retail HWTS is non-zero for the majority of households even in a highly impoverished location such as rural Tanzania, but it is still far below retail prices. The user preferences and WTP analysis for in Hubli-Dharwad sheds light on what piped water services are valued by end-users, and gives some indications on whether and when they should be pursued, adding to the research literature concerning urban utility management and informal urban services. In particular, three key findings emerge from my work there. The first is that CWS may not always be the best upgrade option, and may not provide all of the benefits that it usually is assumed to provide, depending on the experiences, preferences and beliefs of the local end-users. Second, a subset of low-income households depends on free supplemental water sources and therefore service upgrade projects should not include their removal. And finally, water quality is important, but taste and smell can confound households’ perceptions of water quality, and therefore water aesthetics are a salient issue that may deserve greater attention in the future
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Bordering on Water Management: Ground and Wastewater in the United States - Mexico Transboundary Santa Cruz Basin
Get PDFIntensive use of groundwater in internationally shared aquifers and flows of untreated wastewater across international borders not only create negative environmental and economic externalities, they also generate tensions amongst neighboring nations. Although there exists a growing body of literature on cooperation over surface waters, few studies examine the management of transboundary groundwater and cross-border flows of wastewater. Templates from research on cooperation over transboundary rivers are likely not applicable to transboundary ground and wastewaters, as they have different physical and institutional characteristics. Through an investigation of the shared ground and wastewaters in the Upper Santa Cruz River basin (USCRB), located along the US-Mexico border, my research improves understandings of factors that heighten and hinder bi-national cooperation over those transboundary resources. In the USCRB ground and wastewaters are characterized by a high degree of uncertainty. Contested visions, ill-defined management goals, an inability to quantify water needs, and incommensurability between outcomes cause the utility functions of both the US and Mexico to be poorly defined. Moreover, due to incomplete conceptual models, insufficient data, and subjectivity in interpretation, physical processes are not well understood. As a result, it is unclear what either side of the border stands to gain or lose from implementing transboundary ground and wastewater management activities. In addition to this uncertainty, institutional arrangements within both the US and Mexico condition the position of each country vis-à-vis its shared waters. Polycentricism in national and sub-national institutional regimes leads to gaps and overlaps in authority while concurrently, the evolving nature of institutional arrangements leads to ambiguity in authority and responsibilities. These gaps, overlaps, and ambiguity limit the capacity of each country to conduct transboundary water management activities. The combination of this complex institutional environment with considerable uncertainty compels each country to undertake unilateral action based on that country's ethos of water and the immediate incentives it faces. Strengthening the internal capacity of each country, by addressing structural problems in the institutional realm and improving knowledge in the technical-information realm, will lead to greater awareness of possible synergies from cooperation and will increase its ability to take advantage of those synergies
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Presumptions and Precarity: Probing Electricity Infrastructure
No full textThe international community has for decades tasked itself with worldwide “Development,” broadly understood as a project to improve the human condition. Among development projects, electricity infrastructure has received an outsized amount of money and support. Despite this concerted effort, electricity development goals have been largely unrealized and huge disparities in electricity production and reliability persist worldwide. Infrastructure scholarship leans on an old global dichotomy: infrastructure in the Global South is marked by failures while in the North it is successful and taken-for-granted. Centralized grid systems of the Global North are characterized by cheap, constant, plentiful access, or “abundant” systems, while Global South services are characterized by expensive, erratic, absent access, or “constrained” systems. In the prevailing narrative, electricity providers, workers, and the users themselves, particularly those in sub-Saharan Africa, are to blame for failing electrical systems. By both scholars and policy-makers, users are often cast as “corrupt,” “thieves,” and “non-payers,” whose behavior culminates in non-technical losses. This link between bad users and bad systems informs policy measures and technical interventions, but it has not been sufficiently justified. In this dissertation, I leverage the global energy dichotomy in order to move past oversimplified, prescriptive narratives. The challenges of electricity development and inequality are compounded by an astounding array of disciplines required to understand them. This project uniquely synthesizes power system engineering, critical theory, and social science. I argue that social and material relations underpin electricity infrastructure, and use a Marxian understanding of these relations to explore the material conditions of “the grid” (i.e. voltage fluctuations, power outages, and intermittency) alongside the actors and actions they mediate and through which they are mediated. Ultimately, this work has implications for the interdisciplinary study of electricity, establishing important groundwork for understanding how vulnerabilities and opportunities are spread, by whom and for whom, along “the grid.”Situated in electricity services in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) and within “modern energy for all”—the international commitment to support electricity access in poor communities worldwide — this dissertation uses Unguja, Tanzania as a main site to investigate how contemporary assumptions about the value of electricity development impact inequalities. Specifically, it probes three key assumptions in contemporary electricity development – those of goodness, equity, and abundance – and explores related aspects: the evolution and fragmentation of authority and responsibility in the governance of electricity provision; the production of everyday life in constrained electricity systems (characterized by expensive, erratic, absent, and hyper-visible access); and the implications of using abundant grid systems as benchmarks for grid development today. Guided by a historical comparative lens, I use interviews, surveys, and two years of voltage monitoring to develop an ethnographically-grounded study of the social and material relations produced, and the responsibilities contained within, the Unguja grid. In chapter one, I offer an introduction to the political economy of grid development and provide a theoretical framework that guides the rest of the dissertation. In chapter two, I explore equity as it relates to “modern energy for all,” andspecifically the rise of prepaid meters as the technical solutions to theft and mismanagement. I find that the rise in the prepaid meter represents a shift away from a provider- and user-centered relationship to a more overtly techno-human one, with new roles for Unguja residents. For the state-owned utility, a less visible, seemingly distant relationship with its customers emerged. Importantly, I find that although governmental and non-governmental institutions are, on average, more indebted to electric utilities, utilities and foreign donors (such as the World Bank and IMF) push prepaid meters more aggressively on residential users. Thus the responsibility for “unsuccessful” grids is discursively and actively falling on residential users, but so too are the vulnerabilities these constrainedsystems induce.Chapters three and four probe the assumption of goodness in an electricity connection. Broadly, I ask: what life do constrained grids produce? In light of constrained grids, how do we interpret the quest of “modern energy for all?” By all accounts, the Unguja electric grid is a constrained system. Grid services in Unguja are considered highly unreliable, thus creating daily challenges for their relatively poor Zanzibari users. Nevertheless, technical experts in the area claim that “households can cope.” Chapter three explores what residents are forced to cope with. I combine extensive empirical mapping of electricity quality with household surveys, showing that extreme voltage fluctuations result in dim lights at best and power outages and broken appliances at worst, denying many residents the expected benefits of access to electricity. Finally, in chapter four I explore residents' experiences with, and expectations of, their electricity services, and deliberately highlight their stories as they more broadly relate to a global development discourse on electricity infrastructure. I argue that perhaps expectations are being met because expectations are so low. This is a type of national politics that allows global development politics to ignore the precarious vulnerabilities of unreliable services, in turn reinforcing the logic that “a little goes a long way.”This dissertation shows how assumptions in electricity development have served to misplace blame on, and helped spread new burdens and vulnerabilities in, SSA communities. It is guided by what I believe is the future of “modern energy for all”—constrained electric grids. Ultimately, I hope this project will spark a reckoning over the possible limits of contemporary electricity development and inform future policy decisions
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
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