From the Blue Community Water Journalists Africa:
Transformation or talk? Study finds rhetoric gap in Africa and Asia water policies.
“Transformation” is everywhere in water policies. But is it happening? Without real investment and governance reform, transformation risks becoming just another word in policy documents.
- A new study analyzing 65 water-related policies in India, Bangladesh, Kenya, and Tanzania found that promised “transformations” are failing to materialize.
- Researchers used the SPIRIT framework to measure Scalability, Power sensitive Inclusivity, Reflexivity, Institutional flexibility and Temporality and found that South Asian policies remain trapped in a “techno-managerial” approach.
- In East Africa, policies are more inclusive but lack the long-term “temporality” needed to survive political cycles.
- The authors argue that true transformation in the water sector requires the “politicization” to include marginalized voices like fisherfolk and small traders.
