What is good WASH governance?

Published on: 03/11/2011

Good governance is about improving people's livelihoods, alleviating poverty and increasing the chances of sustainable development. One of the biggest challenges in the water and sanitation sector in developing countries is the significant gap between policy-making and implementation. There is no blueprint for good governance but there are certain elements that need to be addressed towards improving governance. This training programme is about improving WASH governance with a focus on water and sanitation sector policy, institutions and systems that are better able to respond to sector challenges and ensure good governance and sustainable services.

Water governance is much more than government and its policies and programmes.

• It is about the exercise of power in policy-making and whether or not to implement particular policies.
• Which actors were involved in influencing the policy in question?
• Was the policy developed in a participatory and transparent fashion?
• Can revenues and public and bureaucratic support be raised to implement the policy?

These are just some of the important questions involved, but they indicate that governance is about the process of decision-making, its content and the likelihood of policies and decisions to be implemented. To be able to understand why water is allocated in different ways, it is necessary to look into the dynamics of policy and decision making, informal and formal legislation, collective action, negotiation and consensus-building and how these interact with other institutions.