David ZetlandDavid Zetland is the S.V. Ciriacy-Wantrup Postdoctoral Fellow in Natural Resource Economics and Political Economy at U.C. Berkeley. He writes about the economics of water on his blog aguanomics and has recently appeared on Forbes.com and Fox Business News, discussing America’s “water crisis.” He has agreed to guest blog here this week. This is his first of two posts.
Potability, Politics, and Pipes
By David Zetland
A Guest Post
In 2000, the United Nations declared an intention to reach eight Millennium Development Goals (MDG’s) — each with one or more targets — by 2015. The MDG’s are attracting a lot of money, but money can’t fix everything.
Since I’m a water guy, I’ll explain how money may not work by looking at Target 3 of MDG 7:
Halve the proportion of the population without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation.
Let’s begin with some baseline figures: According to the U.N., 78 percent of the world’s population had access to improved drinking water sources in 1990. As of 2004 (most recent data), that share was 83 percent. (For sanitation, the figures are 49 percent in 1990 and 59 percent in 2004, but let’s ignore this sub-target for now. Let’s also ignore the 1990 baseline for a program that began in 2000.)
But wait, did you notice the discrepancy? The goal being measured and pursued (improved drinking water sources) is not the originally proclaimed goal (sustainable access to safe drinking water). This discrepancy is no accident. Rather, it reflects the difference between the ambitions of development activists (safe and sustainable) and the realities of development bureaucrats.
Since “safe” is hard to measure, bureaucrats use the presence of “improved drinking water supplies” as a proxy for water quality — and they quantify that by counting pipes, pumps, and faucets. Their treatment of sustainable is even worse: “Sustainable access is currently not measured for reasons of a lack of common understanding [of] what constitutes sustainable access and how to reliably measure it [on a] global scale.”
Oops.
As Peter Drucker once said: “what gets measured gets managed.”
We know that thousands of well-meaning people will be spending billions of dollars to install pipes, pumps, etc. Will those pipes deliver safe and sustainable water? We can’t be sure about that result — since it’s not being measured — but we can be sure that projects that deliver pipes will get funded, bureaucrats who deliver 100 percent pipe coverage will be lauded for helping the poor, and outsiders are likely to confuse 100 percent pipe coverage with 100 percent access to “safe and sustainable” drinking water.
Bureaucrats will declare victory, outsiders will applaud, projects will wrap up, money will disappear, and those unlucky enough to have pipes with unsafe and unsustainable water will be left to their own devices.
So has the international development community tried to avoid such an ineffective and wasteful outcome? No. Instead, it has pressed for enough money to install pipes everywhere. Perhaps the most famous proponent of this “solution” (besides Bono) is Jeffrey Sachs, who consistently calls for more money to be poured into MDG’s and international aid.
Is it possible, however, that money spent on pipes will help? Perhaps yes but probably not. Effective water management requires good institutions — i.e., a framework for the formation and enforcement of local rules and norms that will deliver safe and sustainable local supplies. After all, how useful is a well without a means of allocating its water or maintaining its flow? How safe are pipes when they carry water of unknown quality? How sustainable is supply from an overdrafted aquifer?
The trouble with Target 3 of Goal 7 (and other targets, you can be sure) is not just that it has been reinterpreted to meet the needs of bureaucrats (rather than the poor), but that its proponents think that money alone can deliver results.
Bottom Line: MDG warriors, by emphasizing money over institutions, are unlikely to deliver safe and sustainable water. Hopefully, we won’t have to wait until 2015 for them to learn that.
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Zetland complains that agencies are not using terminology and goals that are accurate and focused on the true problems. His idea of a reachable goal that outside agencies can achieve is “a framework for the formation and enforcement of local rules and norms that will deliver safe and sustainable local supplies.”
How would it be possible, without colonization, for outside agencies to reach this goal? Should the UN have a peacekeeper force that goes around the world enforcing local rules and norms? Which local rules and norms should be enforced? Many local norms say that rich people should have what they want and poor people should be quiet. Is this what Zetland wants enforced?
This article on a very important topic was a waste of space.
Drinking water requires the mindset of creating permanent organizations to function as utilities to operate and maintain any capital investments. Organization like Charity Water (as M Todd noted), Lifewater International, Bloodwater, Staff of Hope, and World Vision to name a few take this long view of partnering with local communities to take ownership of well and irrigation projects.
There are a stunning number of 10-15 year old wells that no longer produce potable water in Sub-Saharan Africa because no one was there to tend to the upkeep, only to make the initial investment.
Mr. Zetland has got it right. The right metrics drive the right behavior. Just throwing money at the problem (even in the form of plumbing) won’t solve the problem.
It would be scary if the very same analogy was applied for blood transfusions and scarier if it was true.
i.e the desired outcome (no disease transmission) is not the one measured-(oops we did not check for that one)
I’ve visited many places where tap water is not drinkable. Instead we boil it then drink it. Having water in your house is a lot easier than walking miles to carry water back.
Also, when people talk about ‘pipes’ I think that is shorthand for a water infrastructure.
I would like to know what professor Zetland thinks of a new movie (documentary) out now called:
Flow: For Love of Water
The Plot: A documentary that addresses how dwindling resources, pollution, privatization and other factors are affecting the world water supply. (from IMDB)
Potable water is getting scarce everyday and is a serious problem. Population is not really as big a problem as water is. In the context of India, in spite of its high population density and more than 1 billion people, theoretically all the citizens can be accomodated in a single large state of India if they are all housed in 4 storied apartment buildings which has 16 apartments each. Yet that state will have population density less than New Delhi.
But the problem of potable water is much greater. Already in Bangladesh and Indian states like West Bengal, the aquifer has gone so low that the water contains too much natural Arsenic. This is causing numerous deaths.
So-called sustainable buildings want to push their certification by saying they capture rainwater. You can at home too. But this means less goes into the ground and into the rivers. How does this help?
As an Architect and graduate of U.C. Berkeley I spent some time at the U.C. Berkeley Richmond Field Station with the BIO-ALGOL Research Group and they had an experimental working model of transforming city sewage into algae and fresh water and methane gas with fertilizer. The idea was to pump L.A., San Diego, San Francisco, and Sacramento sewage into the desert and substitute gray water with farm water which would be pumped to the cities, what happened?
Dr. John Benaeman P.H.D. (Chemistry) from Switzerland was in charge. Can you find him and interview him?
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