Rationale and aim

This chapter introduces the rationale of the book, which is a remarkable but hitherto ignored complementarity between the global reform in public services for more accountability to the poor and multiple use water services. The book's proposition is that strengthening these synergies will improve the water sector's performance in poverty alleviation and human development. The aim of the book is therefore to explore these synergies, based on the literature of public services reform as well as scoping studies and other documentation from more than a decade of piloting and scaling up of MUS across the world, in particular in the wash, sanitation and hygiene, and irrigation sub-sectors. The book's audience and structure are described.

Keywords: public services reform, accountability, WASH sub-sector, irrigation sub-sector, multiple use water services (MUS)

Rationale

In the past 10–15 years two approaches have emerged to improve public service delivery for gender-equitable poverty alleviation and human development: global public services reform in various sectors to strengthen accountability, and local and community-driven development (LCDD); and multiple use water services (MUS) in the water sector. Both approaches seek to reach the poor better and to meet their multifaceted needs. They place citizens centre stage as drivers of their own development and then strengthen service providers' accountability through citizens' empowerment and co-production of services. However, the existing and potential synergies between these two approaches have so far received little attention.

Worldwide public services reform covers many sectors, including the water, health, education, transport, and energy sectors. Communities and professionals from governments, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and donor agencies collaborate with civil society, research centres, and the private sector to improve their performance by both strengthening accountability to the poor and innovating a new generation of poverty alleviation programmes (World Bank, 2004; Binswanger and Nguyen, 2005; De Regt, 2005; Binswanger-Mkhize et al., 2009; World Bank, 2011; Tembo, 2012). The decentralized co-production of services in these programmes has five pillars: the empowerment of communities; empowerment of local government; re-alignment of central government; downward accountability; and capacity building (Binswanger-Mkhize et al., 2009). These approaches are widely recognized to improve performance in both poverty alleviation and human development, as well as in meeting the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and the new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). They also operationalize states' duties to respect, protect, and fulfil international human rights frameworks, in particular the socio-economic rights realized through public services.

Public service reform is changing water interventions in three ways. First, the LCDD approach has been applied to several water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) programmes (De Regt, 2005; Binswanger-Mkhize et al., 2009; World Bank, 2011). Second, at a much larger scale, and possibly to the surprise of some water and development professionals, water components emerged in the rapidly growing multi-sectoral LCDD programmes wherever communities prioritized water interventions out of the range of options. This was the case at an unprecedented scale in India's Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MG-NREGS). This scheme, which has been implemented nationwide through local government, provides minimum wage employment to over 50 million people each year. Communities and local government officials choose which assets are created with this labour. In two-thirds of all projects, communities prioritized water and drought-proofing assets, amounting to a total value of US$3 billion per year (Shah et al., 2010; Verma et al., 2011; Verma and Shah, 2012a, 2012b). Well over half of these assets were reported as being for multiple uses (Malik, 2011; Verma et al., 2011). Thus, by changing the programme set-up and decentralizing fund allocation to communities and local governments through well-designed community-driven planning processes, MG-NREGS became the world's largest rural water programme and, as we will show, the largest MUS programme.

Lastly, the water sector itself is also integrating elements of public services reform. For example, in both the WASH and irrigation sub-sectors, the focus is shifting from infrastructure construction (as output) to providing water services in the sense of water provision of agreed quantities and quality at agreed times and sites for people's actual use (as outcome). The management of public schemes becomes more participatory as well. Transparency International and the Water Integrity Network call for greater transparency and accountability in the water sector (WaterAid, 2006, 2008; WSP, 2010). There is also a growing recognition of people's own investments in infrastructure for self-supply. However, these shifts take place within many different water sub-sectors. The water sector is highly compartmentalized, with many sub-sectors that tend to focus on just one element of the hydrological cycle. This could be one water use, domestic use or irrigation but not both, or fisheries, or using only one source for the integrated physical water resources. This lack of horizontal co-ordination means that there is hardly any co-production of water services even within the water sector. As a result, people's water needs are, at best, only partially met. The sustainability of services and human development performance are both worse than they could be.

The other approach that has emerged since the early 2000s is MUS. MUS is a participatory, poverty-focused water services approach that takes people's multiple water needs as a starting point for planning and designing water services (Moriarty et al., 2004; van Koppen, 2006; Renwick et al., 2007). MUS focuses on people in rural and peri-urban areas with diverse agriculture-based livelihood strategies, the majority of whom are poor. They need water for many uses: drinking, other domestic uses such as washing, cooking and cleaning, livestock, (supplementary) irrigation, fisheries, tree growing, small-scale enterprise, crafts, and ceremonial uses. They are also very vulnerable to floods and other extreme events.

The MUS approach has been applied in 22 countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The pilot projects revealed five partially proven and possible strengths of MUS for poverty alleviation and human development: leveraging self-supply; community ownership; locally appropriate priorities;...