Sustainable water management through user participation : a field study in rural Maharashtra, India

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This research project deals with the topic of drinking water provision in rural Maharashtra, where availability of suitable drinking water is a major difficulty for the rural population. The focus is on hand pumps. These resource systems have been provided as tax financed public goods by the central government. The central government has shown insufficient capacity to maintain this infrastructure. In this thesis decentralization of management of the resource system is discussed. The aim of this study is to compare two water management regimes, the centralized government regime and a community based management regime. The purpose is to identify the key determinants for establishing sustainable drinking water management in rural Maharahstra. The theoretical approach is a comparative institutional analysis of two management regimes based on common pool resource theory. The study is mainly conducted through focus group interviews with users and village level administration in thirteen villages. Thus, the empirical material is mainly qualitative data. The conclusion is that the NGO's approach is an example where social mobilization efforts have been successful in establishing a new institutional setting where local actors successfully manage their resource system. This management regime appears preferable if one look to rural communities outside larger villages. In order to achieve this, a wider social mobilization effort in order to build social capital of the community is needed to secure sufficient participation. In these communities one can find "social entrepreneurs", people with leadership capacity and ideas about the development of their village, that will keep the user group active in maintenance if the level of social capital is sufficient. Finally...