Change to Preserve: The Evolution of Sector Guiding Paradigms in the Urban Sanitation Sector

Sanitation is in crisis. In urban areas, over half a billion people lack access to improved sanitation. The globally dominant design principle for Urban Sanitation Infrastructure (USI) depends on large water quantities, long planning horizons, capital intensive investments and stable institutions [1], which are not met in cases where the sanitation crisis hits hardest [2]. Where USI exists, sustainability concerns (water stress, resource recovery) challenge its gold standard role [1]; while innovations which promise to deliver on these challenges, fail to grow out of their niche [3]. The crisis is not new. From the water and sanitation decade of the 1980s to MDG 7.3 and SDG6 progress in access to sanitation remains weak [4]. Given these contradictions we ask: why and how does centralized design prevail as a global gold standard for the urban sanitation sector despite the sanitation crisis and increasing sustainability challenges? Following Haas [5] we explain the persistence of sub-optimal institutional structures and technological solutions in the USI sector through integrating the sociotechnical perspective [6] with international political economy (IPE) theory and the model of structural power [7], putting socio-technical regimes in their “contested social relations” [6]. We introduce the concept of sector guiding paradigms (SGP) to describe ideal type governance constellations in regard to their distribution of structural power. We map the evolution of dominant SGPs through analyzing publicly available Sanitation Project Documents (PD) from multilateral development banks (MDB) over the las 40 years through NLP techniques. PDs from MDBs form an extensive corpus which has neither been explored through quantitative nor qualitative techniques. We find two reverse trends: While, principled believes evolved incrementally from public health to environmental health and system health, the financial and production structures preserve centralized accumulation mechanism at the city level and reinforce the position of actors benefiting from them at the global level; those actors are also increasingly represented in the security structure. A transition towards governance constellation in line with SDG 6 is successfully defeated by the absorption of sustainability concerns at the discursive level, resulting in the protection of increasingly globalized players. [1] T. A. Larsen, et al. “Emerging solutions to the water challenges of an urbanizing world,” Science, vol. 352, no. 6288, pp. 928–933, 2016, doi: 10.1126/science.aad8641. [2] P. Reymond, et al. “Towards Sustainable Sanitation in an Urbanising World,” in Sustainable Urbanization, 2016. [3] M. J. van Welie, et al. “Towards sustainable urban basic services in low-income countries: A Technological Innovation System analysis of sanitation value chains in Nairobi,” Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions, 2019, doi: 10.1016/j.eist.2019.06.002. [4] UN Water, “Monitoring Sustainable Development Goal 6,” 2019. [Online]. Available: https://www.sdg6monitoring.org/. [5] T. Haas, “Comparing energy transitions in Germany and Spain using a political economy perspective,” Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions, vol. 31, pp. 200–210, 2019, doi: 10.1016/j.eist.2018.11.004. [6] L. Fuenfschilling and B. Truffer, “The structuration of socio-technical regimes—Conceptual foundations from institutional theory,” Research Policy, vol. 43, no. 4, pp. 772–791, 2014, doi: 10.1016/j.respol.2013.10.010. [7] S. Strange, States and Markets, Bloomsbury. London: Bloomsbury, 1988.