Community-Managed Water Services: The Case of Peru

• Published date: 01 December 2017
• Date: 01 December 2017
• DOI: 10.1177/1070496517734020
• Author: Alex Sanz,Joan Calzada,Susana Iranzo
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Community-Managed

Water Services:

The Case of Peru

Joan Calzada

1

, Susana Iranzo

2

, and

Alex Sanz

3

Abstract

Due to lack of economic resources and the geographical dispersion of the popula-

tion, state and private for-profit water provision is not feasible in many remote rural

areas of developing countries. In such instances, community-managed water systems

emerge as an alternative mechanism to provide safe water. Despite their importance,

little is known about this type of organizations. This article examines the Juntas

Administradoras de Servicios de Saneamiento (JASS), communal organizations that pro-

vide water services to more than 3 million people in rural and peri-urban areas of

Peru. We focus on two important and related dimensions of the JASS. First,

we empirically identify the factors associated to their exist ence (economic resources

of the municipalities, tradition of communal work, and ethnic homogeneity). And

second, we examine their organization and how they manage the water systems,

which is importantly affected by the socioeconomic characteristics of the commu-

nities. Using the Peruvian JASS as a showcase, this article sheds then some light on

the potential viability of this type of organizations. We conclude that the JASS might

be an important and effective alternative to organize the provision of water services

in rural and isolated areas. However, the consolidation of these institutions requires

adequate supervision to ensure that water systems are correctly designed and man-

aged and that internal governance problems do not compromise their sustainability.

Keywords

water, community planning, JASS, governance, rural areas, Peru

Journal of Environment &

Development

2017, Vol. 26(4) 400–428

!The Author(s) 2017

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DOI: 10.1177/1070496517734020

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1

Universitat de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

2

Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona, Spain

3

Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, Bellaterra, Spain

Corresponding Author:

Joan Calzada, Universitat de Barcelona, Av. Diagonal, 690, Barcelona, Barcelona 08034, Spain.

Email: calzada@ub.edu

The relevance of water for human development and the pressing need to reduce

water-related diseases were clearly highlighted in the United Nations

Millennium Declaration of 2000. Since then, most developing countries have

taken important steps to increase access to safe drinking water. For instance,

in Latin America and the Caribbean alone, the rate of access to drinking water

increased from around 85% in 1990 to 94.6% in 2015.

1

However, these rates are

not homogeneous within the Latin America and Caribbean region. In rural

areas, access to water stays at 83.9% while access to piped water stands at

just 67.9%. In the case of Peru, in 2015, only 69.2% of the rural population

had access to water, and just 48.1% had access to piped water.

In most countries, access to basic utility services such as water or energy is

guaranteed by the state. On one hand, the state can obtain the resources needed

to f‌inance the services and has the coercive power to enforce their regulation.

Moreover, the provision of basic services is considered to give legitimacy to the

state. On the other hand, the natural monopoly problem has provided an eco-

nomic justif‌ication for the provision of these services by the public sector.

2

Yet,

in many rural and remote areas of developing countries, the state fails to deliver

these essential services at minimum quality levels and af‌fordable prices. Some of

the dif‌f‌iculties that hinder the public provision of water are the lack of economic

resources and the poverty of the population living in these areas, as well as the

inef‌f‌iciency of public systems. Several strategies have been pursued to remedy

this situation including privatization, market liberalization, or the use of inter-

mediate solutions such as public–private partnerships, and a number of studies

have analyzed the impact of such policies in dif‌ferent countries (Clarke, Kosec,

& Wallsten, 2009; Gassner, Popov, & Pushak, 2008; Hailu, Guerreiro Osorio, &

Tsukada, 2012;McKenzie & Mookherjee, 2003; Tan, 2012). However, one cri-

tical aspect the literature has overlooked is that in many rural areas of develop-

ing countries where local governments fail to provide the service, private

provision is unlikely to be an alternative because it would be unprof‌itable. In

these instances, citizens might have no choice but to turn to their communities

for the self-delivery of services and create organizations to that aim (Alesina &

Zhuravskaya, 2011). As the literature on collective action and coproduction has

shown, citizens can play an active role in managing public services in poor and

unattended areas of developing countries, but building social capital for ef‌fective

cooperation and coordination is a dif‌f‌icult task (Ostrom, 1996). In this article,

we focus on communities in rural areas of Peru that use communal organiza-

tions to provide water services. We examine the factors explaining the creation

of these organizations and the governance problems they face.

Communal Communal water organizations are civil associations of users that

run the water service. These organizations are quite prevalent in Latin America

(Water and Sanitation Program, 2008). It is estimated that more than 77,000 of

such organizations provide water to around 40 million people. They are parti-

cularly important in the Andean countries where the tradition of communal

Calzada et al. 401