Risk narratives and institutional responses: charting the evolution of unregulated drinking water services in rural Bangladesh, 1972-2016
Keywords: Water Security
Sustainable Development Goals
Bangladesh
Cholera
Media
data and information
Risk
infrastructure
Drinking Water
Arsenic

Progress towards achieving safely managed and reliable drinking water services in rural geographies is increasingly reliant on risk-based governance approaches and private finance. This thesis argues that by framing risk as the outcome of previous decisions, institutions can be redesigned to more effectively confront the unintended consequences of past actions and balance responsibility between pooled and self-governed structures. Explored in the context of Bangladesh, the thesis questions how the construction of overlapping public risk narratives render problems visible in manners which facilitate institutional transitions through the reallocation of blame and responsibility.
As with other social-ecological systems framed by the Sustainable Development Goals, the rural drinking water sector is at an inflection point of multiple risk logics. Public mandates are shifting from ones structured around provision of services, specifically improved infrastructure access, towards ones focused on managing supply resilience, water quality, system reliability, and equity of access. Adopting a risk-based perspective challenges previous narratives of hard-won infrastructure gains by redefining sector performance gaps and efficacy of service models.
Several interconnected themes are at the centre of how these service models evolve in geographies characterized by minimal data, changing infrastructure preferences, and institutional transitions through a consideration of multiple epistemological perspectives debating uncertainty, danger, and decisions. A set of risk discourse filters are proposed in order to identify the construction, contestation, and limits of self-critical public narratives. These filters, applied to an inventory of newspaper articles and academic publications specific to drinking water issues in Bangladesh between 1980 and 2016, reveal three distinct periods of drinking water concerns directly linked to national and international development agendas and the shift between cholera, arsenic, and environmental pollution concerns. By delineating the grammar of risk debated by social theorists, the thesis challenges existing sector narratives and identifies an overlooked problem, and opportunity, linked to unregulated self-supply infrastructure.
These findings are further explored in the context of national infrastructure growth, changing investment patterns, and design of information systems. National tubewell infrastructure data estimated using village-level inventories in three regions merged with national demographic data to estimate that for every new public water point installed between 2012 and 2017, forty-five unregulated tubewells were installed through private market suppliers. This explicitly defines the proportion of household investment relative to public financing, suggesting that households now contribute upwards of one third of the total sector expenditure. This growth unintentionally reallocates risk-responsibility to self-managed systems beyond the devolving mandate of public services provided by central governments or community collectives.
These institutional arrangements, reinforced by public risk narratives, have neglected to clearly establish reflexive regulatory authorities over individual and private enterprises in order to mitigate water insecurity. The shift in risk logics, new information technologies, and growth of private capital implies an opportunity to leverage blended finance with pooled-risk structures, thus addressing performance gaps identified by the Sustainable Development Goals.