Abstract:
For the past 30 years the dominant approach to managing rural water services
in low and lower middle income countries has been the community
management approach. Yet there is increasing evidence the model is not fit for
purpose as too many services fail. The next generation ideas for community
management emphasise the need for continuous on-going support to
communities – an approach known as the community management plus
approach. This thesis tests and develops this next generation community
management plus paradigm. It analyses field data from twenty case studies of
‘reportedly successful’ community management programmes across seventeen
states in India. Bringing together data from 2,355 household surveys, 272
interviews and 130 focus groups it provides a synthesis that assesses the type
and level of support found in successful examples of community management.
The evidence from these case studies demonstrates that communities receive
significant recurrent subsidy covering between 7-48% of operational
expenditure. This is in marked contrast to the conventional principles of
community management whereby communities cover 100% of these costs.
Analysis of organisation types also shows how community management has
been shaped by the devolution of governance in rural India. Many community
management programmes involve a structural overlap between the local self-
government institution of the Gram Panchayat and water committees. The
thesis argues this represents a shift to the ‘institutionalised co-production’ of
rural water services, involving both the state and private citizens in public
service delivery. Overall, the research shows that successful community
management in India involves continuous on-going support as per the
community management plus paradigm. However this has required the nesting
of the model within the broader system of local self-government which blurs the
lines between public and community management.
