Uganda’s Vision 2040 aims to modernize rural water supply through a transition from community-managed point sources to professionally managed piped water services. At the start of the transition period, a learning alliance established in Kabarole District participated in action research to develop scenarios predicting possible future development trajectories. The diversity of its membership, whose formal institutional roles spanned national, district and niche levels, increased the robustness of the strategies proposed for the adaptively managed transition of the public water service. The learning alliance has been facilitated by a non-governmental organization providing funding and expert advice; the effectiveness of this approach is demonstrated.

The drinking water services sector in Uganda is in the early stages of a nationally planned transition; it aims to move from a paradigm based on community managed point sources towards one of professional utilities of piped networks. The implementation of this transition was studied in Western Uganda’s Kabarole District between 2017 and 2019; a systems approach (building blocks) was used to assess the sustainability of the different service models. The level of services was assessed using household and infrastructure surveys; these were supplemented by a management assessment, key informant interviews and stakeholder workshops. The two utility models present in Kabarole outperformed the community management model, with the existing national utility demonstrating greater maturity and performance than the newer Umbrella utility. The community management model, while relatively well defined in policy and planning frameworks, was poorly implemented, with less than 20% of community management structures operational at water points. The water sector is undergoing a process of consolidation of service delivery under a smaller number of larger providers, a trend that has been observed in other countries as they progress towards universal supply. In this paper, the prospects and risks of the current sector trajectory are discussed, as are the implications for monitoring, regulation and planning systems across the urban–rural spectrum.

Behind headline successes in providing first-time access to water lie a number of pressing challenges to the dominant approach to rural water supply in developing countries, namely community management following a demand-responsive approach. These challenges manifest themselves in poor performance of service providers, high rates of hardware failure, and very low levels of service. The papers in this special issue argue that tackling these challenges requires a shift in emphasis in rural water supply in developing countries: away from a de-facto focus on the provision of hardware for first-time access towards the proper use of installed hardware as the basis for universal access to rural water services. The outline of the main actions required to achieve this shift are becoming clearer. Chief amongst these are the professionalisation of community management and/or provision of direct support to community service providers; adoption of a wider range of service delivery models than community management alone; and addressing the sustainable financing of all costs with a particular focus on financing capital maintenance (asset management) and direct support costs. This introductory paper provides an overview of these issues and a guide to the other articles, which demonstrate these points.

Monitoring of water services informs policy and planning for national governments and the international community. Currently, the international monitoring system measures the type of drinking water source that households use. There have been calls for improved monitoring systems over several decades, some advocating use of multiple indicators. We review the literature on water service indicators and frameworks with a view to informing debate on their relevance to national and international monitoring. We describe the evidence concerning the relevance of each identified indicator to public health, economic development and human rights. We analyze the benefits and challenges of using these indicators separately and combined in an index as tools for planning, monitoring, and evaluating water services. We find substantial evidence on the importance of each commonly recommended indicator—service type, safety, quantity, accessibility, reliability or continuity of service, equity, and affordability. Several frameworks have been proposed that give structure to the relationships among individual indicators and some combine multiple indicator scores into a single index but few have been rigorously tested. More research is needed to understand if employing a composite metric of indicators is advantageous and how each indicator might be scored and scaled.

Multiple-use services (MUS) have recently gained increased attention as an alternative form of providing rural water services in an integrated manner. This stems from the growing recognition that users anyway tend to use water systems for multiple purposes. This paper aims to characterise this practice on the basis of case evidence collected in eight countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America. The cases show that people almost universally use water for both domestic and productive activities at and around the homestead. Although seldom the main source of people’s income or food production, these activities are of considerable importance for people’s livelihoods. The extent to which people use water for multiple purposes is closely related to the level of access to water expressed in the form of a water ladder in this paper. The case studies presented demonstrate how access is created by different types and combinations of well-known technologies. Additional financial and management measures are required to ensure sustainability of services. Despite the practical feasibility of the MUS approach, it is not yet widely applied by service providers and sector agencies due to observed barriers in institutional uptake. A better characterisation of MUS, alongside a learning-driven stakeholder process was able to overcome some of these barriers and improve the consideration of multiple uses of water in policy and

This paper outlines the development of an approach (and a set of tools) for 'light' integrated water resources management (IWRM): that is, IWRM that is opportunistic, adaptive and incremental in nature and clearly focused on sustainable service delivery. The approach was developed as part of the EC funded EMPOWERS project in three middle-eastern countries: Egypt, Jordan and Palestine. Developed specifically for use at the intermediate and local levels (that is, sub-national and sub-basin) it is based on a facilitated process of stakeholder dialogue for concerted action supported by a strategic planning framework. The paper describes and discusses the justification for the approach, and sets out its main elements as well as experiences gained during its application. The main lesson of the EMPOWERS project is the seemingly simple – in fact, rather complex and time-consuming – work on facilitating dialogue, taking a structured approach to examining problems, collecting and sharing context-specific information, and helping to formulate a shared vision and strategies to achieve it all of which contribute to improved decision making. However, a major limitation to effective action is lack of appropriately decentralised finance, with local authorities reliant on financing from the national level that is often earmarked and over which they had very little control.

Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) has often been interpreted and implemented in a way that is only really suited to countries with the most developed water infrastructures and management capacities. While sympathetic to many of the criticisms levelled at the IWRM concept and recognising the often disappointing levels of adoption, this paper and the series of papers it introduces identify some alternative ways forward in a developmental context that place more emphasis on the practical in-finding solutions to water scarcity. A range of lighter, more pragmatic and context-adapted approaches, strategies and entry points are illustrated with examples from projects and initiatives in mainly 'developing' countries. The authors argue that a more service-orientated (WASH, irrigation and ecosystem services), locally rooted and balanced approach to IWRM that better matches contexts and capacities should build on such strategies, in addition to the necessary but long-term policy reforms and river basin institution-building at higher levels. Examples in this set of papers not only show that the 'lighter', more opportunistic and incremental approach has potential as well as limitations but also await wider piloting and adoption.

Over the past year, discussions have being going on within the water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) sector on the possible implications of climate change on services provisions, and the practical adaptation measures that could or should be taken by the sector. Although not conclusive, two important points of agreement have emerged as a result of these discussions. First, climate change predictions are characterized by high levels of uncertainty, particularly at the spatial scales at which most decisions on WASH services provision are made. Second, while it should be taken very seriously, climate change is not the only, and probably not the most important, factor to consider in the short and medium term. This paper argues that the most effective approach to adaptation is to strengthen governance of the WASH sector, for example by adopting principles of adaptive management and by using tools such as scenario building as an integral part of decision-making. In addition, it calls for better embedding of WASH ...