IRC SYMPOSIUM 2008: Governance and partnerships for sanitation of urban poor

From IRC's Source Weekly:

Urban sanitation faces many challenges such as extreme poverty, high unemployment, high population (and housing) densities, water scarcity and lack of infrastructure. These are compounded by opaque and ineffective urban planning mechanisms, lack of legal land tenure, inadequate finance, technological challenges, poor governance, and so on. IRC is planning to address these issues during a three-day symposium from 19-21 November 2008 linking its 40th anniversary with the International Year of Sanitation. The title is Governance and Partnerships for Sanitation and Hygiene in Informal Settlements and Peri-Urban Areas.

The IRC Symposium 2008 will explore the challenges around urban sanitation for the poor and will present good practice examples, with an emphasis on partnerships and governance.

Focus and objectives:
The focus of the symposium will be on innovative governance and partnership solutions to address the challenges of sanitation delivery in informal settlements.

The objectives of the IRC symposium 2008 are two-fold:

* It will provide a platform to share good practices in the field of improved urban sanitation for the poor through partnerships and/or improved governance. The symposium will focus on approaches that have been tried at scale or show strong potential for scaling up. The symposium will seek to identify factors that contribute to scaling up.

* The symposium will formally close the International Year of Sanitation 2008 for the Dutch water and sanitation sector and will synthesise experiences from the year, looking ahead towards further action to bring about change.

Target Audience
The target audience for the symposium will be practitioners and researchers, some of them existing IRC partners who have actual experience in the field of urban sanitation, and will include participants from the Dutch water sector.

Set up
The duration of the symposium will be three days with the final afternoon specially dedicated to the closure of the International Year of Sanitation in the Netherlands. After an introduction of selected high quality keynote presentations, parallel case study based sessions will address conceptual issues that have been identified in a background paper. During the morning of day three, factors for scaling up will be identified and discussed.

A red thread through the symposium will be the urban poor, their lives, their problems, their hopes and dreams.

Background paper
To enrich the background paper, six leading specialists will be invited to produce an essay around a theme or issue that is deemed to be relevant for urban sanitation for the poor. The following themes have been identified:

* Local urban governance - the intermediate level is of crucial importance for the delivery of sustainable sanitation services to the urban poor. Good governance is needed to ensure accountability, coordination, planning, gender and social equity and so on. This essay will seek to answer questions such as: Who are the urban poor? Which stakeholders play key roles in ensuring good governance for the poor? What is their potential to contribute to appropriate and sustainable sanitation services? What are their limitations?

* Partnerships for sanitation for the urban poor – urban authorities are unlikely to provide urban sanitation services at scale to the urban poor. Partnerships with small-scale service providers and communities show promise. However, partnerships and contractual arrangements are linked to the policy and legislative environment in general. The essay will focus on the question of how to formalise and regulate informal partnerships for service delivery, engage citizens, give equal chances to poor women who for practical and strategic reasons need employment near to their homes, and how to put by-laws and regulations in place and enforce them. Government has a key regulatory role to play. How successfully have they shifted from being providers to enablers and regulators, what instruments, approaches and mechanisms have been used and what can we learn from these?

* Dynamics of urban settlements – poor urban settlements are not static but changing continuously. People seem to move in and out in apparent chaos. However, hidden underneath are strong structures, including institutions and processes and a culture of patronage that link different groups of slum dwellers to their leaders, the urban administration, and local politicians. This essay will describe the socio-political, demographical and geo-environmental processes behind the dynamics of urban settlements, and explore how these dynamics can hamper or enhance the delivery of urban sanitation services to the poor, and what could be done better.

* Innovative finance – decentralisation of budgets is mostly lagging behind the decentralisation of authority and responsibilities. Small and medium cities struggle with financial crises on a routine basis. Given the low priority that is given to sanitation to the urban poor, innovative finance mechanisms are needed to mobilise the financial resources to provide them with sanitation services. This essay will outline the components that need to be financed in delivering urban sanitation services to the poor, estimate the costs involved and argue for innovative finance mechanisms to mobilise resources. It will also address ways to identify the very poor, the kinds of assistance that they need for services to be sustained and examine the related issues of solidarity, equity and accountability. Corruption in sanitation programmes and ways to reduce it will also be covered.

* Urban sanitation technologies – urban sanitation services for the urban poor demand technical innovations that are appropriate and affordable for different types of users and can be scaled up. Special attention will be paid to the lowest cost technologies, upgrading and self-build, with alternatives for those who cannot do their own construction. Different groups respond best to different technologies and designs and different information channels are needed to reach them. Amongst the problems that influence technology designs are high water tables, unstable soil conditions and lack of space. Toilets also need to be suitable for elderly and disabled people, for use by young children, and by women and adolescent girls. Eco-sanitation looks promising, especially in connection with urban agriculture, poverty reduction and environmental protection, but there have been many cases of resistance to scaling up this technology. This essay will describe the technical challenges of sanitation for the urban poor and give an overview of promising technical innovations and lessons learned on testing, piloting and scaling-up.

* The urban poor are at the heart of this symposium, but often their needs, hopes and dreams remain hidden behind dry academic papers. We will invite four or five young people from the South to share their image of the urban poor and the needs, demands and approaches for the different kinds of poor people in terms of age, sex, location etc. in their own way.

* There is room for one more topic – who has ideas? Partnerships, the urban periphery, legislation, gender and equity, etc.

Deadlines
The deadline for a first draft of the essay is the second week of December 2007. A final draft has to be submitted by the second week of January 2008. There is a fee of € 2,500 for each person or group who develops the final topic.

Contact: Joep Verhagen, e-mail: mailto:verhagen@irc.nl

http://www.irc.nl

- Location:

Delft, Netherlands

- Date:

19 Nov 08 - 21 Nov 08