Unequal Waters: Why water poverty is a problem of power, not governance failure
by Barbara Schreiner, Executive Director, Water Integrity Network; Aaron Salzburg, CEO, The American Water Resources Association; Nick Hepworth, Strategic Advisor, Water Witness International; Nchedi Moripe; Savrithi Sellapperumage; Christian Borja-Vega, World Bank; Reuben Akili, Director CHRA
Why aren't we moving forward?
Perhaps nothing is more important to health, wealth, and well-being than water. Yet today, we continue to struggle to provide for the more than two billion people who lack access to safely managed drinking water, and four billion that experience severe scarcity every year. It’s not because we can’t do it - we have the knowledge, technology, and wealth to provide safe water and sanitation for everyone – but because we lack the resolve to make the changes necessary to address the systemic and structural failures that underpin individual access to water for domestic and productive purposes.
For years, the story we've told ourselves is that the water crisis is a crisis of political will, a lack of resources, inadequate capacity, and poor governance. While all this may be true, a three-part seminar at the Stockholm Water Week argued that at the heart of the water crisis are drivers that exist outside of the water sector: that instead, the water crisis is the result of structural and systemically reinforced inequalities driven by unequal access to power combined with a failure Official Use Only of accountability. Water insecurity follows the distribution of power and financial resources. This makes the water crisis solvable. But only if we get the diagnosis right.
There are three underlying conditions that contribute to these structural inequalities.
Historical dispossession.
Colonial era water rights, access to and ownership of land, institutions and legislation that carry historical patterns of inclusion and exclusion are still shaping who has access today. Dispossession isn't history. It's an active, present tense condition.
Concentration of power without accountability.
Water becomes a patronage resource wherever judiciaries, the media, and civil society are weak, in autocracies and democracies alike.
An unequal global political economy.
Trade, tax and investment rules, including investor state dispute clauses that protect the water rights of private international capital over sovereign water rights, constrain the public investment needed to tackle inequality at national level. Countries lose an estimated $492 billion a year to cross border tax abuse. Four decades of market led reform have produced predictably inequitable outcomes for the poor, without substantive reforms to change the course.
These are reinforced through accepted practices that interact to keep these inequalities in place and, in some case, allows them to expand:
Political exclusion locks communities out of decisions through fragmented governance and token consultation, at local, national and international level.
Resource capture limits the financing flows to fragile utilities and marginalised communities, ensuring the poorest remain unserved and, when they do have access, often pay up to ten times more for their water than wealthier communities connected to serviced networks.
Corruption and mismanagement divert a further significant share of sector finance and drive up the cost of service provision.
Rights denial leaves informal settlements and Indigenous communities as, in effect, nonpersons in the water economy, with no legal standing to challenge the appropriation of their own water resources.
Knowledge suppression means vast hydrological monitoring gaps and marginalised local knowledge leave the most water insecure communities invisible in the data that shapes investment decisions.
Process capture operates inside the sector's own institutions: donor structures, "multistakeholder" platforms that legitimise decisions already made, and professional barriers of class and language that exclude poor and marginalize communities still further.
Social reproduction means insecurity follows gender, caste, geography and class with remarkable consistency. Poor women in sub-Saharan Africa are four times more likely to collect water than men. Around half of Dalit villages in India are denied access to public water sources.
A trap that tightens across generations
These six mechanisms don't operate in isolation. They form a self-reinforcing loop. Political exclusion drives underinvestment. Underinvestment drives poor performance and reinforces social inequality. Poor performance drives invisibility in the data. Invisibility reinforces exclusion. The loop tightens across generations, and path dependency locks it in.
The most insidious dynamic of all is normalisation: repeated, generational insecurity starts to look inevitable rather than political, the "there will always be poor people" mantra. The practical consequence is that single dimension interventions consistently fail, because the trap simply re-establishes itself.
And we're meeting this challenge in a precarious moment. Cuts to development assistance have stripped the safety net from aid dependent communities, climate change is deepening insecurity fastest for those least responsible for it, and shrinking political space for civil society makes structural reform harder just as it becomes more urgent.
What this means for how we respond
Forging a fair water future demands transformative change across all six domains. It also requires the water sector to engage with the bigger transformative issues that sit outside the sector: tax regimes, illicit financial flows, international trade rules. You cannot fix water inequality with water sector tools alone.
This thinking is set out in Forging a Fair Water Future, available here. Our goal is to build a shared understanding of what actually drives structural and systemic inequality in water and sanitation, tested against real case studies rather than treated as an abstraction. We invite you to engage with the paper by sending your comments to: nickhepworth@waterwitness.org
In the next blog we will deal with the eight principles that arise from the paper and the seminars, and that underpin a Just Water Transformation.
Comments