Transition pathways of splintered regimes: Addressing sanitation provision challenges in informal settlements

The world`s rapid urbanization leads to a multitude of problems in the provision of urban basic services such as transport, water, sanitation, electricity in cities in low-income countries, especially in informal settlements. Sanitation is a particular challenging urban basic service: 60% of the global population still lacks safely managed sanitation. This leads to sustainability issues, such as environmental contamination and hinders a healthy and productive life in cities. The aim of the thesis is to analyse how innovations can contribute to fundamental changes towards sustainability in urban basic service sectors in low-income countries. To that end, insights from the field of sustainability transitions research are mobilized to analyse the interrelated factors that lead to obduracies in these sectors, as well as to identify challenges that innovators face when addressing the problems, and how their activities lead to potential transition pathways. The thesis focusses on the case of sanitation provisioning in Nairobi, the capital of Kenya. A city that is characterized by large inequalities between neighbourhoods in terms of sanitation provisioning. Especially the problems in informal settlements are severe. The findings provide insights in the provision and use of sanitation services in different neighbourhoods in Nairobi. The daily practices of users and providers are associated with particular well-established configurations of technologies, organizational forms, and user/provider routines, which are called “service regimes”. Five service regimes exist in Nairobi’s sanitation sector based on domestic sewer, shared on-site, public, and container-based services and coping strategies. This large variety of service regimes has developed over the years to cater for the different contextual characteristics in the city. Especially in informal settlements, a complex variety of service regimes is found. The sector is weakly planned and the different service regimes are not coordinated. This means that many services do not function optimally and effectively for users and providers: waste is not well-managed and users do not have 24/7 access to well-functioning hygienic services. The service regimes thus form a splintered regime at the sectoral level. Several actors in Nairobi pursue innovation strategies to improve this situation. The public utility recently started to extend its operations into informal settlements, after having neglected these areas for decades. Another innovation strategy is pursued by social enterprises and NGOs, which try to develop new on-site “sanitation value chains” in informal settlements. Sanitation chains consist of various interlinked activities that lead to the production of faecal sludge based products, while at the same time providing sanitation services. Not all resources for innovative activities can be mobilized at the local level. At the global level, several actors and networks in international development cooperation aim to establish a globally accepted paradigm of safely managed non-grid sanitation. As a result of these innovation strategies, Nairobi’s splintered regime will develop over time. The often aspired transition to a “monolithic regime” based on a centralized sewerage system seems unrealistic in the coming years, because it is difficult to expand the domestic sewer regime into informal settlements, and various other service regimes are well-established. Instead, a much broader set of possible end-points of transition pathways towards sustainability can be identified. All in all, the thesis provides conceptual and empirical insights in transition processes in basic service sectors in cities in-low income countries. It elaborates how sustainability transitions research can take into account a multiplicity of service regimes in which diverse innovation activities take place, which leads to the identification of a variety of possible end-points of transitions, other than a dominant monolithic regime. These conceptual extensions are also of relevance for transition research beyond the context of cities in low-income countries.