Can you imagine trying to get from one side of your city to another, if all of a sudden traffic did not follow any rules at all? Depending on where you live, certainly sometimes it feels like this, but the reality could be much worse. What if there was no consequence for parking cars in the middle of the street, or trucks driving on the wrong side of the road? What if anyone could drive, even 5-year-old children? Certainly with no clear laws, responsibilities or enforcement the system would be much more dangerous and would not provide as much protection of public health. Following this module, you will have an overview of the importance of legal frameworks for regulating and enforcing roles and responsibilities. Be able to explain difficulties in implementation with overlapping or gaps in responsibilities, and understand advantages and drawbacks to different institutional arrangements. As presented in other modules, there are untold examples of ways that faecal sludge management service chain is not working. From the household level, when people cannot afford to have faecal sludge removed, manual and mechanical emptiers who dump faecal sludge throughout the urban environment because they cannot afford transport, lack of treatment plants, or failed treatment plants, and unsafe end use or disposal. Like the traffic analogy, this is because faecal sludge management and on-site sanitation are frequently not recognized in law with no one mandated to deal with it. So people are just doing the best they can by themselves, frequently with awful results. Even when there are adequate laws protecting public and environmental health, they're frequently not enforced and many projects only consider one aspect of the service chain. Subsidizing septic tanks or building a treatment plant but without considering the organizational or financial aspects to coordinate the entire service chain. To get where we want to be with a fully functioning service chain the system needs to be overseen and monitored by an entity with a clear mandate. This is why it's so important to have legal recognition with a specific framework that includes faecal sludge management. Laws are required for defining responsibilities of each stakeholder, regulation, enforcement, managing treatment plants. Basically, adequate functioning of the entire service chain. Another frequently encountered problem with incomplete, institutional and regulatory frameworks, is overlapping responsibilities or gaps in responsibilities throughout the service chain, resulting in a lack of ownership or incentive to fulfill roles. If jobs and roles are not clearly defined, how can people fulfill them? How can they be monitored for effectiveness? Or if two people are responsible for a job, maybe neither one does it or one rejects the authority of another? To illustrate, I'll give you a few examples. Imagine in your city, you're designing a faecal sludge treatment plant. You need to find out the requirements for the level of treatment required for use in agriculture. Where do you go? Ministry of Works? Water? Sanitation? Ministry of Health? Ministry of Agriculture? Environment authority? You want to use treated faecal sludge as a soil conditioner. You need to find out if this is allowed. Where do you go? Ministry of Agriculture? Ministry of Health? You are interested in starting a faecal sludge management company. You need to find out if you are legally allowed to start your own company. Where do you go? Ministry of Trade and Industry? Registrar of companies? Municipal Sanitation Department? So you can see the current reality in many cities is fractured, duplication and gaps in roles and responsibilities and a lack of incentives on behalf of decision makers to change the status quo. This figure from the faecal sludge management book represents a hypothetical example of the number of different stakeholders that could be responsible for aspects of the service chain. As you have more stakeholders involved, it provides for more operational flexibility to meet the needs at each step. But also is increasingly complicated in terms of enforcement, monitoring and coordination. For example, different stakeholders for collection and transport maybe results in more job creation, but complicates the delivery of collected sludge to transport. Or different stakeholders responsible for treatment and resource recovery, maybe results in more effective marketing and distribution, but then the treatment goals and end use goals need to be carefully linked and monitored. One entity responsible for everything could ease coordination but requires highly developed managerial skills and financial resources, and relies on regulation and enforcement to protect public health. This table, from the faecal sludge management book summarizes stakeholders and possible responsibilities in the organization of faecal sludge management. There are advantages and disadvantages. The optimal roles in different countries and cities, will depend on the local stakeholders and their intrinsic strengths and weaknesses. For example, a private company might be able to provide excellent design, build, and operation of treatment technologies. But obviously, should not be responsible for setting the laws regulations or enforcement regarding treatment standards. The private interest of a company is to maximize profits where sanitation and protection of public health are of public good. Enforcement needs to have clearly recognized authority and be impartial. Different arrangements also impact financial transfers which is covered in its own module. So what can you do? What are steps to take in your city or country to tackle this issue? First, you could get politicians interested in a previously unrecognized sanitation approach. Work on technical aspects to draft a content. Develop legal frameworks. Obtain approval from politicians. And enactment. This process is long but necessary and worth the effort for sustainable solutions. For example, based on the experience of my colleague working for the World Bank in Maputo, this was 1 year for step 1, 2 years for step 2, 6 months for step 3, and 18 months for step 4 and 5. What are further steps you could take? You could negotiate an agreement with the relevant authorities to legally make an exception to a project. This is called the moratorium. The success of the project could help eventually change the law or standards. For example, the law on dumping fees was lifted for small faecal sludge management operators, developing services for low income areas in Maputo. Critically review the law and regulations. Laws are not usually black or white. You can consult with key stakeholders to see if an idea fits into the legal framework. Other possibilities include thinking of ways to organize more efficiently. For example, if collection and transport is by private companies it's more efficient to organize if there's a strong association for engagement, outreach, education, regulation, and enforcement. Also important is to build trust with the emptiers and consult them on project design and solutions. For further guidance on action steps, a valuable reference is the World Bank's faecal sludge management tools which provide application, diagnostic, and decision support tools for achieving city-wide sanitation presented with case studies for how they relate to five different cities. This is where SANDEC's technical expertise on faecal sludge management is included. Tool 4, Service Delivery Action Framework explains what it means to conceptualize institutional interventions. This table from the Service Delivery Action Framework walks you through action steps for your city based on where they are in the development of services. It addresses the national and local levels, and citizens, the users of sanitation infrastructure. It highlights action steps based on current levels of basic intermediate, or consolidating service provision. It is useful to help you address the 'what next', build on what currently works, and identify areas to prioritize and focus actions. I recommend downloading the tools. For additional information, please refer to chapter 12 of the faecal sludge management book. The case study of Lusaka, presented in this module of the SANDEC Planning and Design of Sanitation Systems and Technologies MOOC for an example of a bottom up approach to incrementally improve service provision. What types of things can you start to implement now in your city? And this module, for the case study in Indonesia as an example of a national program starting up and going to scale. In conclusion, in this module you learned about the importance of legal frameworks for regulating and enforcing roles and responsibilities. Difficulties with overlapping or gaps in responsibilities. And advantages and drawbacks to different institutional arrangements. Thanks for joining. See you next time.
