Privatization, efficiency, gender, development, and inequality—transnational conflicts over access to water and sanitation

Human Rights & Human Welfare, Annual, 2008 by Srini Sitaraman

Several chapters in the Coles and Wallace volume describe how women and the socially disadvantaged are routinely excluded from the decision-making process involving access to and management of water at the community level despite repeated assurances offered by the international development agencies that they are pursuing efforts at mainstreaming gender and class--a new approach that seeks to make gender and class central components of social science research and policy prescriptions, instead of relegating them to obscure or specialized margins. Even though women play a central role in procuring water, they are excluded from discussions regarding control and allocation of water in villages. Women are also silenced and they are not able to contribute to policy debates affecting their daily lives because of cultural taboos associated with questioning or contradicting the views of men in public settings (Chancellor in Coles and Wallace: 160). In the last chapter, Sarah House recounts a story to demonstrate cultural resistance to women's public participation in decision-making regarding access and distribution of water. Women in certain parts of rural East Africa are not allowed to express their legitimate grievances regarding water supply and access because they believe that if a woman stood in front of men in a public gathering and addressed them, all the men present at the meeting would die (House in Coles and Wallace: 218). Similarly, in Regmi's chapter on Nepal, he points out that because of the lower social status of women, they are forced to share heavier workloads, and they are provided less food, less education, and "fewer opportunities for self-development" (Regmi in Coles and Wallace: 96). To overcome gender prejudices, the authors in the Coles and Wallace volume issue a call for a systematic approach to incorporating gender as an explicit component of development--gender mainstreaming--and including women in leadership positions within the local community and planning organizations to improve access and distribution of water. Even though the different chapters in the Coles and Wallace book do not cohere smoothly, a common characteristic among edited volumes, the authors are successful in showing how the male-dominated policy making sector fails to appreciate the deeply-embedded gender, caste, and ethnic considerations shaped by local cultural values are influencing distribution and utilization of water resources.

Shiva and authors in the Coles and Wallace volume argue primarily from a practitioner's perspective about the merits of water privatization policies and criticize international lending agencies for their failure to accommodate gender as a critical factor in lending and development policies. Although Gender, Water, and Development is not explicitly about privatization or cost recovery, these two themes preoccupy most chapters in which the authors show how the male-dominated water industry and macro development planning have "failed to appreciate the relevance of social issues involved in accessing water in much of the world" (10). They locate economic development and water distribution within the larger context of social roles and gender inequalities that reduce the effectiveness of externally crafted development policies. Similarly, in Dams and Development, Sanjeev Khagram's (2004) focus is on examining the complex policy linkages between dams and development and why transnational coalitions have emerged in opposition to the development policies inspired by international lending agencies. Khagram, an academic and a former Senior Policy Advisor for the World Commission on Dams (WCD), follows a political science approach that seeks to empirically test the proposition: why the enthusiasm for the construction of big dams, which were variously promoted as temples of modern development by the World Bank and other donor agencies, has markedly declined or at least slowed down during the last decade. Khagram (2004: 3), drawing heavily from the expanding international relations literature on the influence of global norms on decision-making, argues that the "unpredicted and unexpected strength of transnationally coordinated action--constituted primarily by nongovernmental organizations and social movements," has dramatically changed the enthusiasm for building big dams.