Accountability for Water: Learning from Global Evidence
Community Water Witnesses confront the manager of a wastewater treatment works in Lusaka where untreated human and industrial waste flows into Chongwe River, the source of their drinking water supply. Photo: Water Witness
This September, Water Witness launched the results of the Accountability for Water Programme evidence review, an exhaustive research project to identify and evaluate the global state of the evidence relating to water accountability.
The premise was simple: we wanted to identify what accountability interventions could lead to better water outcomes, considering the factors that enabled or constrained their success. What works? What are the gaps? How can we make more effective interventions to hold power to account?
These were the guiding questions that informed our approach, allowing us to assess the evidence and develop a broad theory of change, which we hope will be of value to researchers, practitioners and policymakers in the water sector.
By trawling through everything from peer reviewed journal articles to NGO reports, we were able to build up a picture of how different accountability mechanisms – everything from citizen report cards to ICT monitoring systems and street protests – could influence water outcomes.
We narrowed down an initial sample of over 7,000 to a dataset of just 151 high quality papers, excluding those that did not fit our criteria based on methodology or relevance, before commencing an exhaustive process of coding and analysis to distil key patterns, trends, and insights.
Our headline findings are encouraging. 80% of the literature finds positive change for water governance from accountability and advocacy interventions.
When you have an informed, engaged, and vocal citizenry, government and water service providers are more responsive to concerns and likely to act.
When clearly defined roles and responsibilities exist within institutions and regulating agencies, rapid action is taken to address grievances and rectify failures in service provision.
When space is opened for constructive dialogue, new perspectives can strengthen governance approaches.
The analysis developed a generic model of accountability, dubbed the “5 Rs”, the necessary and sufficient components of an effective accountability cycle.
The coding of findings revealed a typology of factors that can determine the path to success (or lack of success):
Internal Factors: elements that are within the control of the programme or intervention
External Factors: the hydro-geological, political economy and social context of the intervention that might be beyond the control of, or the target of, the intervention
Interface Factors: elements that control how the programme’s internal factors interact with the external context
The review found available evidence clustered in East Africa and South Asia, raising the question of whether other regions have important insights published in other languages. For example, partners who can shed light on the Spanish or Portuguese literature around South America would be a great help to build on this work and add to the database – please get in touch!
We found that much more attention has been dedicated to understanding WASH accountability interventions (62% of papers) than those for water resource management (32%), or water for agriculture (featured in just 5% of papers).
This evidence review is not a destination, but a point of departure – to guide and inform future practice in the water sector, as we grapple with significant and interlocking challenges around shrinking civic space, spiralling levels of pollution, and the impending threat of climate breakdown. Now more than ever, a better understanding is needed of the tools available to secure a just and fair water future. We hope this evidence review can be a starting point, for learning and for action.
