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; multiple benefits from multipurpose infrastructure; and efficient management of multiple sources. Nevertheless, it appeared difficult to scale up the 'islands of success' and to institutionalize MUS into existing government structures in the water sector (Smits et al., 2010). The 'simple' intention to meet poor people's multiple water needs has far-reaching implications. People need a voice to express their multiple needs and priorities, while central agencies and authorities have to re-align to meet those needs, which are often well beyond the narrow mandate of their sub-sector. These are precisely the challenges of public services reform. MUS also aligns with the trend towards accountability in sub-sectors, but applies it across sub-sectors. MG-NREGS confirmed the potential benefits of water services reform to MUS: if communities and their authorities are given the opportunity and ownership, they often opt for leveraging self-supply and aim to get multiple benefits from multipurpose infrastructure, while considering the local water cycle in a holistic manner.

In sum, these two new development approaches are closely intertwined. Global reform in public services brings extensive experiences from worldwide piloting and scaling up in a range of sectors, along with robust generic synthesis and conceptualization. Moreover, it brings experience of innovative approaches for community participation in co-producing water services, and doing so at a large scale. MUS in turn brings insights in the specifics of water resources development and management and water's contribution to people's multifaceted livelihoods, in particular for the poor and women. MUS also brings empirical and conceptual lessons about potential and actual improvements in performance and about piloting and water sector reforms that already began in order to scale up accountability and decentralized co-production of services that meet poor people's multiple water needs.

Proposition, aim, methodology, and structure

This book proposes that further exploration of these synergies will open up new opportunities for governments, NGOs, donors, civil society and the private sector to improve public services performance for human development and poverty alleviation in water development and management in rural and peri-urban areas in developing countries.

It aims to explore the synergies between global public services reform and MUS and to identify both evidence-based and potential opportunities to improve the contribution of water interventions to gender-equitable poverty alleviation and human development.

This analysis is based on a literature review of public services reform with a focus on generic concepts and syntheses that also apply to the water sector as well as opportunities and obstacles to scaling up MUS. Much evidence on MUS piloting and scaling up comes from the MUS Group, a network that enables the exchange, learning, advocacy and synthesis of lessons learnt among its 14 international core partners and over 350 individual members. The repository of the MUS Group contains 200 case studies (MUS Group, 2013). This book builds on five national MUS scoping studies in particular, and their synthesis on the barriers to and potential for scaling up MUS. These scoping studies, conducted by the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) and the IRC International Water and Sanitation Centre and supported by The Rockefeller Foundation, are from India (Verma et al., 2011), Nepal (Basnet and van Koppen, 2011), Ethiopia (Butterworth et al., 2011), Ghana (Smits et al., 2011b), and Tanzania (van Koppen and Keraita, 2012) and are synthesized in van Koppen and Smits (2012). The analysis in this book also benefits from the MUS Roundtable in the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center in 2012, supported by The Rockefeller Foundation, in which global practitioners, researchers and policymakers involved in MUS took stock of past experiences to strategize on next steps (Ramaru and Hagmann, 2012).

MUS has been promoted most actively in a collaborative effort between the WASH and the irrigation sub-sectors, so this book will focus on those sectors, where most documentation originates. Evidence of MUS in other sub-sectors, such as fisheries and livestock, is scarce. Part of the analysis will be by logical conjecture. MUS is still too new for any ex-post evaluation and impact assessment. Moreover, monitoring and documentation of global public service delivery is weak in general, and MUS is no exception. In addition, the identification of promising solutions for better performance – the goal of this book – is intrinsically a matter of making a case, by conjecture, for the design of envisaged action that has yet to be implemented.

The book is structured as follows. In Chapter 2, we elaborate our proposition. We first present the insights from global public services reform that apply to the water sector in general and to the opportunities and obstacles faced in scaling up MUS in particular. We then move to the WASH and irrigation sub-sectors and assess their respective performances in alleviating poverty and bringing about gender-equitable human development, and their internal current trends towards more accountability to overcome weaknesses. We conclude with background information on MUS piloting and scaling up and show how MUS takes these trends forward within both sub-sectors (as the so-called 'domestic-plus' and 'irrigation-plus' MUS modalities), and increasingly also across the sub-sectors as the 'MUS-by-design' modality. We call water components that emerge from communities and their local authorities in LCDD approaches such as MG-NREGS the 'implicit MUS' modality.

Chapter 3 pulls evidence and conjecture together to outline the five reasons why MUS is bound to improve water services performance, and also explains why these five strengths have not been discovered earlier.

In Chapter 4, we present the lessons learnt from past efforts to scale up both +plus approaches to re-align services at central levels. These lessons unravel how the institutionalization of expertise in the sub-sectors defines single-use mandates and how a widening up of those mandates would allow a sub-sector to prioritize one use while also promoting other water uses. The chapter further unravels the objections to scaling up of MUS that we heard within both sub-sectors and that contradict and ignore the other sub-sector. A more consistent and mutually supportive cross-sectoral view on funding and water allocation priorities for pro-poor and gender-equitable water services is proposed.

Chapter 5 discusses the co-production of services in the overview of pilot projects of MUS-by-design. It analyses how hurdles were overcome but also the remaining challenges. Opportunities are explored for potential scaling up in the future through donors, implementing agencies, and local government.

Implicit MUS in MG-NREGS and other LCDD programmes that have already succeeded on a large scale are further examined in Chapter 6. This highlights how the institutional space for MUS can both be created and include opportunities for scaling up. We trace from the limited available information how this space is used and what challenges are left.

Conclusions and recommendations on action-research to further consolidate links between public services reform and MUS follow in Chapter 7.

Audience

We have written this book for professionals interested in public services reform, in particular around water, to highlight the promise these reforms hold for gender-equitable poverty alleviation and the fulfilment of socio-economic human rights and other internationally agreed goals. The book addresses fundamental policy questions to senior policymakers and programme managers in governments, donors and policy-relevant knowledge institutions. However, the book is also for the technicians, practitioners and extension workers on the ground who daily face the limitations of programme design in their efforts to make the changes in people's livelihoods successful. Their discretionary efforts to still meet their clients' multiple water needs despite their narrow top-down instructions were vital in triggering MUS innovation.

At the crossroads of accountability in public services and multiple use water services

This chapter outlines the background of our proposition. We first present global public services reform with a focus on concepts and lessons that apply seamlessly to the water sector and will help in understanding the obstacles and opportunities for piloting and scaling up MUS, as discussed in later chapters. This is followed by an assessment of the current performance of both the WASH and irrigation sub-sectors and the partial measures that both sub-sectors have already taken to reach the poor and enhance accountability. The third section shows how MUS takes these trends forward across the sub-sectors. The section introduces MUS, its origins, and pilot projects from four different entry points or 'MUS modalities', and the scope of the scaling up of each of these modalities (domestic-plus, irrigation-plus, MUS-by-design, and implicit MUS). Documentation from these piloting and scaling-up experiences is the evidence base for the later chapters.

Keywords: accountability triangle, silos, co-production of services, self-supply, domestic-plus, irrigation-plus, MUS-by-design, implicit MUS

Public sector reform towards accountability for improved performance

The accountability triangle

The global knowledge base on accountability in public services entails many conceptual and empirical insights that are also relevant for the water sector and the remainder of this book. This section focuses on those. As an overarching framework, the World Bank (2004) conceptualizes accountability in services as a triangle between citizens (poor and non-poor), the state (politicians and policymakers) and service-provider organizations, within which instructions are given from the top down to the 'frontline' staff or local service provision officers who interact with citizens on a day-to-day basis (see Figure 2.1). In this triangle, relations in both directions are defined as accountable if: 1) there is a delegation of, or request for an expected service; 2) there are financial or other rewards for delivering that service; 3) the service is actually delivered; and 4) the ability exists to enforce the expectation, which supposes; 5) that there is sufficient information about the service performance. A long and a short route to accountability are distinguished. The two sides of the triangle represent the long route to accountability, and the base is the short route.