Long regarded as transitional, these alternatives have gradually been promoted as potential solutions on an equal footing with centralised networks (Misra and Kingdom, 2019). The thesis was conducted within the framework of a CIFRE PhD agreement with the Agence Française de Développement (AFD), in the Water and Sanitation Division.
Two four-month periods of fieldwork were carried out in Dakar, Senegal, and Bandung, Indonesia. The qualitative case studies relied on several data collection methods: semi-structured interviews with sector actors, household surveys conducted using the transect method, direct observations, and the collection of documents. Although drinking water supplied through networks is usually intended to serve all domestic uses, an exploratory phase conducted in Senegal and Indonesia led us to focus on a specific segment, namely drinking water, understood as the water actually consumed by users. Indeed, a household may be connected to the centralised network without using network water for drinking.
This segment is crucial because it concentrates the public health stakes. To analyse these modes of provision, the thesis adopts a sociotechnical approach, and more specifically the field of sociotechnical transitions, complemented by the contributions of Van Welie et al. (2018). This framework makes it possible to analyse the reconfigurations of urban drinking water services through the concepts of sectoral regime and service regimes. The sectoral regime refers to the way household access to drinking water is organised in a city, while service regimes refer to the different ways through which this access is effectively ensured. The general research question of the thesis is therefore the following: in a context where diversified solutions for drinking water access are increasingly being legitimised, to what extent do modes of provision distinct from the centralised network develop in contrasting urban contexts, and what are their relations with network-based water provision?
The originality of the thesis lies in the comparison of two contrasting case studies: in Dakar, Senegal, the sectoral regime of household access to drinking water is organised around the centralised network, whereas in Bandung, Indonesia, household access is based on the institutionalised coexistence of several networked and off-network configurations. One of the main findings of the thesis lies in an original qualification of the sectoral regimes analysed. Bandung’s sectoral regime can be described as a polycentric regime, whereas, in the case of Dakar, we have developed a new category to account for ongoing processes: a supplemented monolithic regime. In both cases, service regimes specialised in the drinking water segment are stabilising, without replacing the centralised network service regime. They contribute to a reconfiguration of the sectoral regime, based on the segmentation of uses and the recomposition of relations between service regimes.
The thesis thus shows that households’ growing reliance on drinking water retailers contributes to a transformation in the organisation of household access to drinking water. It highlights a blind spot: an essential function of household access to drinking water, namely ensuring the distribution of safe water in order to contribute to public health, is performed by a plurality of service regimes, without this plurality being addressed as a public service issue.
Key words: Drinking water, Southern cities, Services, Off-grid, Socio-technical systems, Centralised network
