A brief history of community management of rural water supply

Community management of rural water supply and sanitation schemes is now entering its second decade as a key paradigm for water supply development and management. While this book will deal mainly with the current state of community management and the future challenges, it is worth looking briefly at the history of community management and its precursors in the rural water supply sector.

Community management approaches did not appear spontaneously, nor do they exist in a vacuum. They emerged from a long history of trial and error in the rural water supply sector, and are linked to and affected by developments in many other sectors, particularly those related to more general rural development, but also natural resource management and, specifically, water resources management.

The rural water supply and sanitation sector gradually emerged in the two decades prior to the 1980s International Drinking Water Supply and Sanitation Decade (IDWSSD). It developed in reaction to the struggles of post-colonial states to extend the benefits of 'modern' infrastructure to their rapidly expanding populations. In the view of many of these states, rural water supply was the responsibility of the national state.

If a single starting point for the more recent development of the sector is sought, it should be the 1977 Mar del Plata conference which set the groundwork for the IDWSSD. The Decade put the emphasis on community involvement in rural water and sanitation programmes. Community management came into being only during the IDWSSD, when the problems with existing, state and supply-driven management paradigms came to the surface. One of the main arguments of this book is that it is only now, at the start of the twenty-first century, that community management is ready to grow up from being an interesting pilot approach to become a paradigm for rural water supply throughout the world.

Pre-1980s – early days – the first steps towards involving communities

The earliest documented experiences of community involvement in water supply projects date from the late 1960s. The first use of the 'community participation' keyword in IRC's library database (IRCDOC2) dates from 1967, and concerns an introduction to evaluative research (Suchman 1967). The first books in the IRC collection on community involvement in water supply projects came from Taiwan (1969) and Colombia (1975) (Chang 1969; Inpes-Bogotá 1975). The IRC was an early champion of community involvement, and in the late 1970s it produced the first of its many books on the subject. The first bibliography and literature review on participation and education in community water supply and sanitation were published in 1979 and 1981 (Wijk-Sijbesma 1979, 1981).

1980s – the International Drinking Water Supply and Sanitation Decade – community involvement

The community involvement paradigm was officially adopted by the international community during the 1977 World Water conference in Mar del Plata, Argentina. The conference adopted a declaration in which it announced the IDWSSD, the slogan of which was to be Water and Sanitation for All. The conference recognized that to come close to accomplishing this goal, a 'radical overhaul of precepts and investment strategies governing the proliferation of taps, pumps and pipes in the developing world' was required (Black 1998:4).

Such an overhaul was long overdue. The conventional water and sewerage systems, the only ones the international donors had to offer, were complex and affordable only to an elite minority, leaving a large majority of people without services of any kind. Public health experts and engineers had learnt from experience that poor people could only expect exclusion and marginalization from existing models of service delivery (Black 1998). 'The vast majority of those without water and sanitation services were poor, and the countries in which they lived were frequently water short and had little to spend on public infrastructure' (Black 1998:4). Therefore, if there was to be any substance to the Decade's slogan, entirely different, lower-cost approaches would have to be found, capable of extending services to poorer urban and rural areas; and governments and donors had to be persuaded to invest in them.

The new approach was found in concepts of self-reliance and community action that had begun to be popularized using the phrase 'small is beautiful' (Schumacher 1973). Small is beautiful was to become one of the key slogans of the water and sanitation sector. It came with a shift in focus to small NGO-led projects, in which users were encouraged to take an active role in terms of providing inputs, labour or cash for the development of simple, low-cost systems. This was the basis of the 'community participation' model that was to remain accepted practice for much of the rest of the Decade. The Decade also saw a massive expansion of donor investments in water supply and sanitation. These investments were mostly harnessed in projects and programmes. Both the community participation model and the project approach meant a drive away from the supply-driven models that were the territory of the post-colonial states. However, these models of the IDWSSD remained small and scattered and did not begin to approach the scale necessary to address the Decade's ambitious goals.

In parallel with the water sector activities of the IDWSSD, awareness grew throughout the various fields of development co-operation of the need to involve communities or users at all stages of the project cycle. An important chronicler of this process was Robert Chambers. In a...