How to successfully govern community drinking water systems? Exploring the potential of the community management plus model in Southwestern Bangladesh.

More than 2 billion people in the world lack safely managed drinking water. The main question underlying this research is: how to successfully govern sustainable community drinking water systems? Pure public, private or self-governance arrangements do not always lead to optimal performance in the domain of drinking water delivery in developing countries. An alternative mode of governance, known as community management plus (CM+), is based on the joint responsibility for the operation and maintenance of drinking water systems (DWS) of users on the one hand, and government agencies or local NGOs, on the other. This dissertation seeks to explore the prerequisites for CM+ success, in the specific context of Bangladesh, but with the ambition to generate more general insights. Firstly, the study finds that peoples’ preferences and perceptions should be the point of departure, but having people reveal their true preference is a complex matter. Secondly, since DWS have the characteristics of a commons, support (i.e., the ´+” in “CM+”) must target the organization of collective action (rather than (only) transferring resources (i.e., money and materials) and information (i.e., awareness and capacities). Thirdly, it is shown that context matters, and there are no panacea solutions to drinking water delivery problems. These broad-stroke prerequisites are interrelated.