It is the birthplace of Apple and Google–companies worth nearly US$2 trillion–and this year overtook the UK to become the world’s fifth largest economy, yet nearly 2 percent of California’s residents suffer from the lack of safe, reliable and adequate access to water and sanitation.

True, precise numbers are elusive (which reinforces the larger point of uncertain access). Yet one recent survey estimates a quarter of a million people in tribal and community service areas have no clean water. That’s equivalent to the entire population of Bhutan, Guyana or Cyprus. The number may be higher, if officials could assess countless local, small and domestic wells that have run dry or been contaminated.

So what’s a sub-national government to do?

In October 2009 – a year before the United Nations adopted own Resolution 64/292 — California’s Assembly tried to enact a Human Right to Water. The draft legislation proudly declared that “every human being has the right to clean, affordable, and accessible water for human consumption, cooking, and sanitary\ purposes, that is adequate for the health and well-being of the individual and family.”

That might sound innocuous enough. Yet Bill 1242 emerged in the second year of the Great Recession and the third year of a crippling drought. The state capital, Sacramento, grew mired in debt with heated debate over how or whether it could afford to overhaul management and infrastructure of the fresh water on which it depended.

To be sure, no politician claimed to oppose water as a human right, per se. Yet the effort to codify it in a specific law raised uncomfortable questions: What would it cost taxpayers? Who would enforce it? Which office might be liable to prosecution in court for failure to uphold the right? How many litres would the right set aside? Did it overlap, extinguish, or interfere with other existing rights like irrigation, health and safety codes, or section 106 of the Water Code?

Lacking clear answers, (Republican) Governor Schwarzenegger terminated the bill with his veto pen, arguing that only money, not unfunded mandates, could ensure affordable drinking water for all who lacked it.

Almost exactly three years later – with economic recovery stirring – a new (Democratic) governor, Jerry Brown, signed into law Assembly Bill 685 to ensure affordable and universal access to safe clean water for “every human being,” then allocated resources to make it happen.

The second attempt learned lessons from failure. From the start, this statute not only placed the human right to water at the centre of policy, but it also shows how agencies can guide and implement it by “revising, adopting, or establishing policies, regulations, and grant criteria” that impact water used for domestic purposes.

As a pioneering law, California’s policy attracted attention from other states considering similar progressive efforts. A thorough assessment report from UC Berkeley’s International Human Rights Law Clinic showed how California “draws on domestic and international law to map when state agencies should consider the human right to water, what factors they should consider, and how they should advance the human right to water.”

Still, passing legislation is relatively simple and straightforward. What comes next matters more. A timeline by Circle of Blue shows that, while the initial law was a solid achievement, subsequent years proved equally important in giving it substance, direction, mass and meaning.

For example, an early important step was for California to transfer oversight of safe drinking water systems from the public health agencies to the state water board. That anchored responsibility, resources and accountability under one roof.

Later, under the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, the human right to water formed one of the cornerstones to ensure roughly a million residential wells across the state would be protected or restored to functioning health with reliable access to clean, shared aquifers.

In 2015 the Safe Drinking Water Plan reiterated the State’s commitment to the human right to water. A state-wide referendum, Proposition 1, authorized a US$7 billion bond for water projects, including – due to the human right to water – primary funds aimed at water provision to poor and disadvantaged communities. To ensure broad understanding, officials set up a human- right-to-water portal, providing data on drinking water systems that don’t comply with state and federal standards.

The state recognised that people lack water due less to ignorance or intentional denial than to incapacity or institutional failure. So California set up a “sustainable water solutions office,” to provide technical assistance to communities that struggle to provide clean drinking water. Another law forced “chronically incapable water systems” to merge with their better functioning neighbours. Still a third prevented incompetent and poorly run water systems from forming.

Three years into the law’s enactment, California’s Water Board was required to design a state-run residential water affordability program, again the first in the nation. Two years later it established a fund to assist poor communities with the operation and maintenance of water systems. It then established a tool to track implementation of the human right to water.

Even under a booming economy, gains have been slow, hard to measure and few will declare victory soon, if ever.

Yet California suggests both that pockets of unequal water access exist in even the richest economies, and that leadership and sustained will at sub-national levels can tip the scales in even the most divisive of polities.

The post For California, second time’s a charm appeared first on The Source.

Water scarcity may have become a global issue but the water demand- supply gap is most gaping, intense, and complex across the dry Arab region of the Middle East and North Africa. In these countries, according to the recent World Bank report, Beyond Scarcity, more than half of current water withdrawals exceed what is naturally available.

Arab water managers may feel constrained, even helpless, in their role to address the water imbalance. Yet by introducing a human rights-based perspective, along with a Basin to Consumer mindset, water professionals could transform the region’s challenges into opportunities for faster, more equitable and sustainable growth.

While SDG 6 and the UN Declaration on the Human Right to Water and Sanitation are relatively recent statutes, the code and norms they enshrine trace back many centuries to the heart of traditional Islamic water law. Indeed, as legal scholar James Salzman observed, sharia literally means ‘the way to water,’ and the Right of Thirst reinforced norms of governance and access, in which drinking and domestic use held top priority, and where “sharing water is a holy duty”.

Today, no single entity can be responsible for actualising such a rights-based transformation. Building a right to water and sanitation services is a multidisciplinary task, in which all stakeholders must collaborate. It also won’t happen overnight. Universal access is a step-by-step journey that could take as long or as short a time to achieve, depending on where it started.

In all cases, the geographical route starts in the basin, not at the tap, and may cross one or more countries in between. Collaboration across scales – basins, cities and utilities – must cover all the elements and challenges that will come up during this journey.

The lack of drinking water and sanitation services escalates risks of inequality, gender and racial or cultural discrimination. It also starts with those most at risk – the young, old, female and ethnic minorities. According to a recent report from the Stockholm International Water Institute, four out of ten people in the world do not have access to sanitation facilities and about two in ten people have no access to safe drinking water supply.

Lack of adequate water and sanitation services kills about 3,900 children every day. (Source: Health, dignity and development: what will it take?)

Also at risk are the natural infrastructure of streams, seasonal wadis, and aquifers on which human communities depend. Access is further complicated by rapid urbanisation. Whereas utilities once planned future expansion of delivery outward, recent analysts suggest they must now try reaching the unserved and underserved populations within the sprawling city itself.

“Most water programmes have focused on increasing access to water in rural areas, not cities,” argues Nazie Hussain in The Next ‘Day Zero,’ “But by 2050 most people in Asia and Africa will live in cities, where water supplies sometimes depend on violent entrepreneurs, criminal groups, and other informal or illegal service providers.”

Where to focus? One key early milestone is “acknowledgment and uptake of the mandate by duty-bearers before actual progress can be measured.”

That means States, as duty-bearers, must grasp their responsibilities using the human rights criteria to fulfil their mandate towards delivering water and sanitation services.

This matters most in politicised water sectors, such as Arab water utilities, where stakeholders are affected by the social, climatic and political factors in their region. For example, setting water tariffs can all too often be used for “political wins” instead of recovering costs or achieving sustainability. A human rights-based criteria can help, if translated into a user-friendly and culturally sensitive language.

In this way, the Arab region can embrace the human right to water not only as an important obligation to satisfy, but an opportunity to unlock. Utilities can explore how the progressive realisation of the human rights to safe water and sanitation imply an expansion of the customer base and opportunities to increase service levels.

The effort can also enable international knowledge exchanges, which clarify misunderstandings, and make the human right to water both achievable and tangible for local / regional stakeholders.

The post Why Arab governments must adopt a holistic approach to the human right to water appeared first on The Source.

By Catarina de Albuquerque

I came into this sector in 2009 as UN Special Rapporteur on the human rights to water and sanitation, new to the sector, a lawyer who had worked all my life with human rights. Luckily for me, I, and my sometimes challenging ideas, were welcomed, and given as much opportunity to learn as to preach.

I arrived in the middle of a time of self-questioning for the water and sanitation sector. The excellent analytical work of the JMP and GLAAS was starting to show us that while we were on track to meet the Millennium Development Goals target on water, we were not managing to make a difference in the lives of those people who were most disadvantaged, who were suffering poverty and discrimination in multiple areas of their lives.

My position as Special Rapporteur gave a voice and institutional substance to these discussions, and made it possible to lobby for human rights principles as key to resolving the lack of transparency, the corrupt practices, the discriminatory approaches, the terrible impact of deep inequalities on individuals as well as on society more broadly.

The water and sanitation sector has travelled a great distance in the last eight to ten years. I don’t believe that anyone, not even technocrats, still believe it is possible to ensure access to services through technology or hardware alone, or even through simply more financing. Solutions have to be grounded in economic, social and cultural contexts and realities. The IWA and its members are willing to move towards a more nuanced understanding of the challenge ahead of us. Ensuring universal access to water and sanitation means examining who does not have access to these services and why.

Since completing my mandate as Special Rapporteur in December 2014, I have had the opportunity of learning how to put these human rights principles into practice within the Sanitation and Water for All (SWA) Global Partnership. As the IWA knows, as a partner of SWA, we strongly support the spirit and essence of the Sustainable Development Goals, and we are particularly keen, in working with all our partners, from government to development practitioners and researchers to civil society actors to find ways to ‘leave no-one behind’.

This will still require service providers to consider the functionality of the services they provide – but also why people with disabilities or women with young children are not gaining access to services as quickly as those who occupy a more powerful social position. This may also require that service providers, together with the relevant local authority, identify the causes of unpaid water bills and find ways of ensuring that the poorest are not excluded from this fundamental service through lack of affordability.

We all need to consider how to overcome social practices that lead to women being responsible for bringing water to the home, and finding ways to alleviate this burden in ways that are productive for those women. It means searching for better solutions for ensuring sustainable solutions for sanitation in schools.

At SWA there is a strong emphasis on accountability, of putting together systems that lead to more effective processes, and to achieve this through our partners, SWA has developed four collaborative behaviours – to which all of you can and should contribute to support countries’ governments deliver on their obligations. These are:

1.    Enhance government leadership of sector planning processes

2.    Strengthen and use country systems

3.    Use one information and mutual accountability platform built around a multi-stakeholder, government-led cycle of planning, monitoring and learning

4.    Build sustainable water and sanitation sector financing strategies that incorporate financial data on all 3Ts (taxes, tariffs and transfers), as well as estimates for non-tariff household expenditure

SWA is a partnership, first and foremost, and these behaviours are central to achieving our goals, but are also key to cementing this partnership. As an organisation of 10,000 members, carrying out essential work all over the globe, I encourage you as IWA, institutionally as well as in your capacity as individual members, to engage more closely with SWA.

IWA members are delivering an enormous range of services, from designing public policy, to finding financing solutions, to delivering sanitation and water services to millions and millions of people in all corners of the world. I urge you to join hands with us, to strengthen the work of SWA in finding solutions that work, through the collaborative behaviours and through international, national and local cooperation.

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Catarina de Albuquerque is the Executive Chair of Sanitation and Water for All. She recently won the IWA Global Water Award for the exceptional role she has played as the driving force behind the recognition of the Human Rights to Water and Sanitation.

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