Institutional designs for water accountability practices in Tanzania
Introduction
This blog posts examines how the different meanings ascribed to water influence accountability practices in Tanzania. A better understanding of water’s hybrid economic, political and cultural value can address gaps in institutional design for strengthened WASH accountability.
Water: what kind of a good?
In Tanzania, as elsewhere, water is a contested and politicized concept. Water is variously categorised as a private good, a public good and a common pool resource.
Water as a private good: The idea that water is a commodity like any other, to be provided for a fee to cover costs of the provider. This rationalization involves fairly systematized thinking and calculation: what fees to charge, to whom, and when and where to collect them. These questions translate into organizational technologies, i.e. meter reading to determine rates of payment, invoices to bill customers, and pipelines to distribute water to customers in order to know where exactly to collect the fees.
Water as a public good: Water as a public good is a fairly universal and commonly understood principle. The idea of public goods underpins ideals of citizenship in many contexts, past and present. Also while it may be free at the point of use, it is still funded through other mechanisms e.g. general taxation. The thinking did not originate from the minds or consciousness of Tanzanians, but from the bodies of knowledge and opinions that the post-independent government popularized in a quest to gain mass support and legitimacy.
Water as a common pool resource: The notion that natural resources like meadows, rivers, lakes, and streams are common resources that everybody freely uses. This is common in cattle herding societies and rural economies in Tanzania. However, this view is challenged by Garret Harding who argue, in his famous work “tragedy of the commons” that the notion of common pool resource eventually leads to depletion of resources where individual users bend the social and formal rules that govern access to land and use them in their favor contrary to the common good of all users.
A question of delivery
There remain disagreements about how best to delivery improved water access in particular contexts. For instance, in his ethnographic case studies of establishing modern westernized drinking water provision in Arusha and two other middle-sized Tanzanian towns, Rottenberg (2009) treats ‘water’ as a ‘marketable commodity’, i.e. a rationality that ascribes a price to water and subjects it to the forces of supply and demand. This contrasts to popular understandings in Arusha, that water is a public good to be provided free at the point of use. Perhaps, this can be generalized: in urban areas, the political, administrative and commercial disagreements around water provision are between these two meanings. But in rural areas, a rather different contestation exists. There, the conflict is between water as common pool resource – a lake, river, water stream, or well - where rural inhabitants go to fetch water for free; or a public good, to be provided for a fee to cover costs to the provider.
When rural inhabitants fetch water for free this translate into a ‘mentality’ that water is a public good that should neither be subjected against a price in a market, nor received for a fee. This mentality is common among the rural dwellers in Tanzania (Freyhold, 1979). Thus, the fact that the concept of water centers around three contested definitions with different rationalities, mentalities and technologies attached to it. Institutional designs for water provision (at least in theory) needs to reflect that contestation.
Different goods, different designs
The existing socially and politically dominant views on the nature of a ‘good’, result into at least three different institutional designs for their production, dissemination and provision: individualist/rationalistic institutional design; community institutional designs; and the large-scale and standardized institutional design.
Individualist/rationalistic institutional design
This design considers institutions as either 'rationalities' (explicit norms and values) or organizational 'technologies' (private companies vs. public monopolies). They are rationalities because they employ rational thinking in shaping and regulating behaviour of individuals in a quest to make it predictable. On the other hand, institutions are organizational technologies because they use technological apparatuses to stimulate behavioral change. For instance, in the case of private goods, a commodity is produced by private firms and sold to users as consumers on a market against a price, usually in the shape of a monetary transaction. Here, the market set the rules of buying and selling and regulate consumer behaviour by providing a wide range of choice on what to buy and at what price. This is usually referred to as an individualist institutional design, because (in principle) transactions are free and symmetrical between individual actors. Firms may be highly hierarchical organizations, but if there are many, consumer may freely choose to buy their product. Under certain conditions this creates a so-called ‘perfect market’, leading to efficient and therefore ‘fair’ prices (Wesselink et al., 2015). A proposed advantage of this rationalistic institutional design is that the price of the good aggregates and optimally uses contextualized knowledge of all those involved in the market for the good – producers, consumers, and those in-between.
Community institutional design
The community design involves systems of human relations and practices where transactions between people are still free – i.e. members of the community make their own rules of self-guidance – but, contrary to rationalistic designs such as markets, transactions are asymmetrical. Thus, compared to markets, community designs have less ‘inhabitants’, and cannot scale so easily beyond their original limits. People tend to be embedded in the communities where they live, abiding by common rules because they are part of the social fabric. However, due to the more egalitarian nature of pastoralist, smallholder farmer and fisherfolk communities, there are plenty opportunities to raise their voice and demand accountability. As other community members have the same incentive, every member’s uncodified or tacit knowledge is mobilized through community debates and decision-making. Thus, in this context, thinking becomes a collective activity. This may, over time, lead to changing rules, adapting to changes in the direct common pool resource environment. Through technologies of mutual monitoring, shaming and blaming, the community holds each other accountable for common pool resource use.
This design is common in cattle herding societies and economies in rural areas. As long as water resources are widely available as natural resources, they can lead a nomadic existence. But as population grows, people may become more constrained in their movements. If there are too many no-longer nomadic pastoralists and cattle relative to a fixed common resource pool, every individual pastoralist has an interest in letting his herd graze/drink more than those of others, and this, gradually, will erode and destroy common resource pool. Fortunately, as well-researched and analyzed by Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom, people have been smart enough to find ways of common pool resource management. Frequently, these are very local, peer- or citizen-based systems of self-rule and self-guidance.
Large-scale and standardized institutional design
Finally, public goods are ‘public’ because, they cannot be partitioned in smaller portions (a prerequisite for selling a good); and because once made available to some, no one can be excluded from using or consuming it. Military defense and flood defense systems are iconic examples (Wesselink et al., 2015). If some, affluent, members of society provide these services to themselves – they are the only ones who can afford it, they are ‘natural monopolists’ – all other, less affluent members cannot be excluded from also enjoying their provision. Here the major narrative is that of the free rider: instead of fairly participating in the costs of the provision of the public good by paying a proportional fee – modern states have elaborate tax systems for this function – you shirk and look the other way and still use the public good to personal advantage. The institutional design invented to deal with free riders, of course, is the large-scale, territorially dispersed but highly coordinated and standardized ‘natural’ monopoly, which, by force if necessary, extracts contributory fees from everybody who objectively profits from the provision of the public good.
The state or government as bureaucratic service provider represents this hierarchical institutional design best. It is hierarchical because transactions between people are neither free nor symmetrical. They are guided by explicit norms and values which force people to participate in the system; and, depending on their rank or status, they are not free to interact freely with whomsoever you choose; you may interact with many others, but according to system-imposed rules of expected behaviour. Rules are devised by experts and the ‘authorities’ in the monopoly. Only centrally-rational, mobilized knowledge goes into the design of public rules as organizational technologies. This practice best represents formal reflexive thought articulated in various academic disciplines.
Against this backdrop, the institutional design for water is complex and at times difficult to manage. For instance, in urban areas (Dar es Salaam, Arusha, Dodoma, etc.), a path-dependent legacy of water as public good informs systems of urban natural monopoly by bureaucratic and water engineering professional elites, to a larger public of water consumers (Wesselink, et al., 2015). But, at the same time, New Public Management (NPM)-type reforms, pushed for by external donors try to transform this hierarchical design into a market design for water as a commodity. Moreover, there already exists an ‘informal water market’ –or actually two such markets, one for affluent, and another one for less affluent water users (Nganyanyuka, et al., 2014). The formal hierarchical-bureaucratic type of water provision is systemically connected to the institutionally individualist design of an informal market. The deliberate underperformance of the bureaucratic monopoly system has given rise to the functioning, in tandem, of an informal oligopolistic water market that overcharge the price for water compared to the fee in the bureaucratic system (Nganyanyuka, et al., 2014; Wesselink, et al, 2015). The monetary surplus streams back to actors in the formal system.
This is different again in rural areas. On the one side, the top-down, long arm of hierarchical bureaucracy reaches down to local levels by installing Water User Groups (WUGs) for water as public good. On the other side, WUSs are required (by law, paradoxically) to function as a kind of common resource pool management design, because local people are supposed not only to dutifully pay their fees, but to actively cooperate in the production and provision of water as local communities (Wesselink, et al, 2015). Thus, WUGs are either the very local ‘street-level bureaucrats’ in a state-organized hierarchical scheme for local water provision, or they are pivotal elements in a community design for providing water as a common resource pool, freely engaging in production and provision practices and deliberating as peers about the best way to achieve well-functioning water points with good quality water (ibid). However, the majority of local people still maintain the ‘political/cultural values that ’ that water is a public good to be provided for free.
Bringing institutional design into accountability research
The different institutional configurations of Tanzania’s WASH sector demonstrate knowledge gaps at the community and governance levels. At the community level, studying WUSs as either the hyper local ‘street-level bureaucrats’ in a state-organized hierarchical scheme for local water provision, or part of a pivotal element in a community design for providing water as a common resource pool could generate comparative accountability insights under the two institutional designs. Equally, looking at the governance dynamics, one can study accountability practices of the private sector in WASH service delivery. Finally, regulatory accountability/ legal accountability is yet another important research area, potentially investigating the large-scale and standardized institutional design.
Jesper Katomero is National Research Coordinator at Shahidi Wa Maji