By Peter Diggs | MIT News
About 2 billion people – just under a quarter of the world’s population – lack regular access to clean drinking water And nearly 800,000 people die each year from illnesses linked to unsanitary water.
Access to drinking water is a fundamental issue for human and economic development. For example, the United Nations highlighted the issue in its 2015 Sustainable Development Goals, an ambitious 17-point agenda that specified safe drinking water as a fundamental global goal.
Past research shows that democracies, compared to other forms of government, are more successful in providing such public goods, which benefit a larger segment of the population. This is likely due to accountability mechanisms that include elections, greater transparency and more freedom in civil society.
But now a study led by an MIT professor finds that dynamic in nearly 100 developing economies has become more complex in the 21st century. While democracies are slightly ahead of non-democracies in providing at least some water, they lag behind in ensuring that there is safe water at the tap.
“Among low- and middle-income countries, which didn’t do as well economically, we found that there really wasn’t a big difference between democracies and non-democracies in the provision of basic drinking water,” said MIT political scientist Evan Lieberman, co-author of a new paper detailing the findings. “But for safe drinking water, we surprisingly find that democratic countries are doing less well at increasing access.”
While the research doesn’t pinpoint the exact cause, it does suggest a lens through which to view the problem. Democracies tend to be better at providing visible public goods, the kinds of things citizens can literally see — like infrastructure that provides water. But the distinction between safe and unsafe water is not necessarily visible and obvious, so government officials may not be as responsive.
“That’s probably a big part of the equation, that the invisibility of safe water makes it a less compelling public good for politicians,” said Lieberman, Total Professor of Political Science and Contemporary Africa and director of MIT’s Center for International Studies.
paper,”Beyond the Faucet: The Limited Value of Democracy for Providing Universal Access to Safe Water in Low- and Middle-Income Countries” published in the journal Global development. The authors are Lieberman and Naomi Tills, doctoral students in political science at Stanford University.
Seeing is believing
To conduct the study, scholars analyzed drinking water data recorded by the World Health Organization/UNICEF joint monitoring program. It provides information on basic availability of water, defined as access to an improved water source with collection time not exceeding 30 minutes; and access to safe drinking water, defined as an improved water source that is available on premises, available when needed, and free of potentially disease-causing contaminants, ranging from feces to harmful chemicals.
Examining 96 low- and middle-income countries, the researchers looked at various measures related to their democratic or undemocratic characteristics and ran 39,000 regressions to see how the form of government was related to water systems. Overall, Lieberman and Tiles find that democratic regimes are modestly associated with increases in basic water availability compared to nondemocracies. However, the effect is not particularly strong.
The good news is that between 2000 and 2024, 81 of the 90 countries with available data in both years achieved access to safe drinking water. However, democratic countries have been less successful than their non-democratic counterparts in progressing towards achieving universal access.
“Furthermore, the gap between democracies and non-democracies seems to be getting slightly larger over time,” Lieberman observes.
Because the study is focused on establishing overall empirical conditions, scholars do not claim to have determined why this trend arose. Many new democracies have struggled to establish high-functioning governance in some regions, which can affect their overall results.
More broadly, Lieberman suggests, visibility matters. Past scholarship has shown that democracies do relatively well in providing visible public goods, especially in countries with little public sector information. Water supply attracts attention of politicians in such a way that water is not kept safe.
“Politicians understand that they should act like citizens, to stay in office, like bringing water to an area,” Lieberman said. “You can have a ribbon-cutting ceremony, and people feel like it really happened. But water quality is often invisible.
Ensuring safe water is a more difficult challenge: you have to test, you have to prevent people from contaminating, and you have to treat the water.”
Regardless, Lieberman notes, “Given what we find, it’s clear that incentives are not aligned under the current system for advancing safe-water access in all democracies. This gives citizens, non-governmental organizations, and governments the opportunity to create incentives for human agency to do what is needed.”
Development for all
Lieberman comes to water access as an expert on African politics. His most recent book, “Until We Won Our Freedom” (Princeton University Press, 2022), examines changes in South African democracy. In the book and in general, he suggests that democracy is the most effective path to development with “dignity”, meaning economic growth with freedom and equal treatment under the law.
“I think democracy provides dignified development by giving people recognition and participation, and that’s a very valuable thing,” Lieberman said.
Still, when it comes to many countries’ performance on safe water, he says, “I think we need to have a clear view of the real problems.”
In some countries, he suggests, the time horizons of elected officials may be relatively short-term and they may be more oriented toward simpler issues than water security. At the same time, other members of society must find ways to make water protection a bigger issue in the public eye.
“There are important lessons for democracy to learn, and civil society citizens who are aware of this challenge need to find ways to make people care about it, recognize the connection between illness and unsafe water, and use political campaigns to advance their long-term interests,” Lieberman said.
Overall, he adds, “There is something inherently important about democratic government. Then the question becomes how to make it work better to deliver really important outcomes like safe water.”
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Reprinted with permission MIT News
Image: splash
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