Reconceptualizing Women's Participation in Water Governance

Jul 24, 2017 | Priyam Das
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There is growing emphasis on community-managed water supply and sanitation that embodies a new paradigm in water governance based on demand management. However, projects have struggled to motivate resource-constrained households to participate in community initiatives, underscoring the need for more nuanced assessments of the different dimensions of urban poverty.

Attempts to valorize community participation often gloss over local socio-political complexities. For instance, while the central role of women in water governance in the Global South has received much attention, there remains a lack of clarity about how or whether interventions maintain or resist social hierarchies of gender and power.