The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, as articulated in Target 6.1, aims to achieve universal and equitable access to safe and affordable drinking water, using the proportion of population using safely managed drinking water services as the associated indicator (UN, 2015). Despite the progress in increasing "access" to technologically improved sources as part of the Millennium Development Goals (MDG), as of 2017, over 2 billion people lack safely managed drinking water and 785 million do not even have "basic" services (WHO/UNICEF, 2019). Progress to improve water security is most challenging in contexts where financial and institutional resources are limited and where water resources are threatened by chronic (e.g., groundwater contamination) and acute (e.g., floods and cyclones) threats. Bangladesh typifies these chronic and idiosyncratic water security risks, particularly in the coastal region, where around 20 million people live precarious lives with uncertain futures (M. A. Hoque et al., 2016;Shammi et al., 2017).The financial resources that are available for investment of water supplies are inevitably scarce, so governments and development organizations face difficult prioritization problems. Should they adopt a utilitarian approach to maximize for the greater good for the greatest number of people or a Rawlsian social justice approach which prioritizes the "most in need" (Sen, 1974)? The question is complicated by the interaction between public works to provide water supplies and private actors who are willing and able to pay to satisfy their own water needs. In this case, actions by the state may actually crowd out private investments. These competing policy choices are not irreconcilable but present a sequencing and prioritization problem compounded by identification and measurement issues. Without information on the welfare or infrastructure distribution, information asymmetries can lead to perverse outcomes in the spatial distribution of infrastructure, as has been documented in arsenic affected areas in Bangladesh (van Geen et al., 2016). New
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