Regulating Water and Sanitation for the Poor: Economic Regulation for Private and Public Partnerships

Edited by Richard Franceys and Esther Gerlach
Earthsscan, London (2008)
Hardback, 303 pp., £49.95
ISBN: 978 1 84407 617 8

This book is a compendium of papers and illustrative case studies from an international group of water and sanitation experts. It covers the way different legislative models and sets of regulations have worked to improve the supply of services, mainly through the introduction of private–public partnerships, underpinned by small fees for access.

The preface and Chapter 1 provide an excellent introduction to the research case studies later used to illustrate the theoretical chapters. The discussion of privatisation and price regulation is succinct and leads into a concise discussion of societal involvement, responsibilities, obligations and universal availability. The bookend chapters cover economic regulation and pro-poor economic regulation, and neatly introduce and round out the concepts of regulation in water provision. The penultimate chapter about ‘involving and empowering poor communities’ was not a strength of the book as the tables were a little hard to comprehend and the theory seemed, compared with the rest of the book, quite thin and did not add a great deal to the text.

The legislation chapters are comprehensive, covering economic regulation theory, how to regulate, considerations of divested water utilities, and alternative provisions and providers, in resource poor settings. The case studies that are provided to illustrate the theory chapters are from an assortment of locations from Asia, Africa, South America, the Middle East and England, and include urban, semi-urban and rural settings. The problems of providing services to poor communities are described using the different mechanisms discussed.

The provision of water is fundamental to the health of the public, and critical to the provision of primary health care. I am therefore concerned that there is little attention paid to the peoples who are unable to pay even the small costs described in these chapters. There are occasions when lower grade services are conceded as quite acceptable for poorer customers. The main message is that once people understand that reliable water and soil disposal is important to health, and that once this is understood, people are willing to pay. However, there are examples contained in the chapters where clearly there were people too poor to pay and hence resorting to other means to find water, so I am not 100% convinced of the argument. Somehow this does not quite sit with the Millennium Development Goal 7, to ensure environmental sustainability, which includes two targets: by 2020 to achieve significant improvement in the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers, and by 2015 to reduce by half the proportion of people without access to safe drinking water; the Millennium Development Goals get just three mentions in the book: in the introductory paragraph, and once in passing, and lastly in the chapter called ‘Pro-poor economic regulation’, when discussing the problem of ‘transforming “informal customers” into viable utility customers’. The authors rightly point out that the fist half is the easy half; what about the rest?

The book is well designed, with excellent glossaries, references, tables, figures and index, but curiously no photographs. As a book to have available to students of primary health, public health, health promotion, and not forgetting development studies this book is an extremely useful resource, and whilst it may challenge some personal ideologies this should not detract from the very sound and informative content – in fact it would produce some challenging tutorial materials.

Priscilla Robinson
School of Public Health
Faculty of Health Sciences
La Trobe University, Bundoora, Melbourne