The Effects of Public Participation on Multi-Level Water Governance, Lessons from Uganda

Abstract

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Community engagement in water, sanitation and hygiene in sub-Saharan Africa: does it WASH?

“…Within sub-Saharan Africa, where the paper focuses, the literature advocates community participation in water access (Kamara et al 2017;Adams & Boateng 2018;Nastar et al 2018;Hovden et al 2020), water management (Tantoh & Simatele 2017;Kelly et al 2018;Tantoh et al 2021;Arimoro & Musa 2020;Hassenforder et al 2020;Nyam et al 2020;Zambrano et al 2020;Shields et al 2021), sanitation promotion (Crocker et al 2016), sanitation at school (Person et al 2016;Hetherington et al 2017), sanitation for community health (Kariuki et al 2012;Kema et al 2012;Banana et al 2015;Kefeni & Yallew 2018), waste management (Holm et al 2021) hand hygiene (Crosby et al 2020) and menstrual hygiene (Scorgie et al 2016). This indicates that when it comes to community engagement in WASH, hygiene is identified as a key area with more gaps and therefore potential for innovation.…”

“…The literature survey reveals that tradition and culture, cultural practices, social norms, formal and informal rules, routines and habits affect the disproportionately successful engagement of communities in projects and programmes aimed at improving WASH (Nastar et al 2018;Silvestri et al 2018;Arimoro & Musa 2020;Hassenforder et al 2020).…”

“…Community-based and participatory approaches have been proven effective in tackling WASH issues in sub-Saharan countries (Kariuki et al 2012;Bisung et al 2015;Crosby et al 2020;Nyam et al 2020). More precisely, they have led to increased water accessibility in Malawi (Adams & Boateng 2018); helped improve the effectiveness of multi-level participatory water governance in Uganda (Hassenforder et al 2020) and to identify solutions to WASH issues affecting rural communities in resource-poor settings in Uganda (O'Donovan et al 2020); helped solve problems related to water management and agricultural development in South Africa (Nyam et al 2020) and the development of more sustainable and effective interventions for the control of schistosomiasis in Tanzania (Person et al 2016).…”

“…For instance, community engagement in Kenya enhanced trust between the researchers and the community, as well as a sense of ownership over the research process, outcomes and collective actions (Bisung et al 2015), shared ownership and improved outcomes in Sierra Leone (Crosby et al 2020). In relation to this, it has been demonstrated that water management committees were more effective when the community determined their structures rather than them being imposed, when they have strong links to existing leadership structures and when they have the necessary skills (Kelly et al 2018;Nastar et al 2018;Arimoro & Musa 2020;Hassenforder et al 2020;Shields et al 2021). Especially as bringing the administration closer to the people, is making them more active contributors to the development process (Tantoh & Simatele 2017).…”

“…Especially as bringing the administration closer to the people, is making them more active contributors to the development process (Tantoh & Simatele 2017). Furthermore, community engagement has shown to generate trust, which in turn provides researchers with a better understanding of local vulnerabilities and increases the usefulness of projects to communities (Bisung et al 2015;Silvestri et al 2018;Hassenforder et al 2020;Tantoh et al 2021). In contrast, projects that do not consider local stakeholders, fail to deliver the promised benefits or mitigate the anticipated risks, attract resistance from community members (Holm et al 2021).…”