Basic services under rapid urbanization: unpacking the interactions of sanitation with urban inequality
Authors:   , Heidler Andri 
Published: April 2024

This dissertation addresses the interaction of basic service arrangements with urban inequality. In the face of rapid and unplanned urbanization, one of the main challenges for public actors is to ensure that the expansion of basic services keeps pace to achieve a minimum level of services across the entire urban population to reduce inequality. However, as most basic services are delivered through extensive infrastructure networks, they tend to be capital and planning intensive and therefore lag significantly behind urban growth, especially where urbanization is informal. Against this backdrop, the unbundling of network infrastructures and decentralized basic service provision are seen as a game changer through increasing flexibility and decreasing investment volumes. As a result, the same basic service can increasingly be provided by different technological solutions, operating models, and actors. The conditions under which citizens gain access to basic services, particularly eligibility and cost, can vary greatly. In short, the processes for delivering the same basic service are becoming more fragmented, which makes the issue of inequality central. This thesis takes the example of sanitation to address how different arrangements of basic service provisioning interact with urban inequality from a territorial perspective. The thesis is based on three research articles, which form a chapter each. Chapter 4, studies Multilateral Development Banks' (MDBs) investment behaviour for water supply and sanitation. The chapter introduces a novel dataset comprising all water and sanitation investments between 1960 and 2020. Drawing on 3639 water and sanitation projects, the chapter assesses territorial trends, technology choices, distribution of financial burdens, and reforms to institutional arrangements to understand how MDB’s investment behaviour varies across space and time and how it responds to the global policy discourse and urbanization. Chapter 5 scrutinizes the development of the water and sanitation sector in Dhaka, Bangladesh, between 1990 and 2020. The chapter introduces the policy pathways framework (PPF) as a novel analytical concept to unpack the multiscalar negotiations involved in the deliberation over sanitation policies and investments. The chapter shows how donors link the ongoing introduction of citywide inclusive sanitation (CWIS) to the organization of sanitation through an economy, how the utility uses CWIS as an opportunity to avoid costly responsibilities in non-sewered sanitation, and how service co-production through community-based solutions is neglected. Chapter 6 introduces the territorial political economy framework (TPE) and the sanitation bargains typology to analyse the variety of sanitation systems that exist in cities. The TPE distinguishes three dimensions—security, production, and finance—to explore sanitation systems' generic distribution of structural power and their local-global interaction. The typology of sanitation bargains identifies five ideal types, namely the household, municipality, utility, cityworks, and enterprise, bargains. The TPE framework and the bargains typology are timely propositions for making research in IPE more territorially sensitive. For actors promoting CWIS the dissertation shows that the flexibility in technology must be extended to organization and financing. To this end, the systematic collection and synthesizing of existing financial and organizational arrangements for non-sewered sanitation is more promising than the current focus on promoting an abstract vision of a sanitation economy based on private investments and household demand, where safe sanitation is provided as a result of a functioning market.