Are sustainable services the new paradigm?

A paradigm shift is a new way of looking at the world – a change in what Thomas Kuhn called “an entire constellation of beliefs, values and techniques, and so on, shared by the members of a given community”.

That is what the Triple S project is seeking in its drive for Sustainable Services at Scale.

Triple-S director Ton Schouten, told the IRC 2010 symposium that the life-cycle cost approach and the service delivery approach to water and sanitation services could be considered as a paradigm shift as they represent a move from uncoordinated, and unsupported system construction in some communities to coordinated planning and delivery of indefinitely sustainable services for the population of an entire district.

Currently in many developing countries districts have fragmented services dependent on haphazard NGO projects with a tiny team of ill-equipped people struggling to provide district government services for the rest.

One of the aims of Triple S is to bring together these disparate resources. “They have one approach for community contribution and service level. They have one approach to WASH. They use the same technology and the same manuals. Together they build capacities. Together they procure. Together they organise the funding. Together they plan for the whole district.”

Ton Schouten said that part of the new paradigm was that service delivery can only be done at the level of entire district – not at the level of a village. Services would be more professional, and would include asset management, information management, fee collection and regulation.

In this model services are coordinated and aid is part of the service delivery model – not a parallel system. Accountability shifts from counting water points to counting years of sustainable access.

Appropriate technology or community management are not answers in themselves – the whole system from policy and regulation to financial planning, capacity strengthening, service levels and technology needs to be resolved. Investment is needed in the learning and adaptive capacity of the sector to deliver sustainable services.

Asking whether this approach is really a new paradigm, Ton Schouten suggested it was a question of perspective.  One way to look at it was to say, no it is not a new paradigm because the pump still needs to provide water. The other ways is to say yes, because the pump is a device to deliver a service.

Promoting this as a paradigm shift will make people more aware of the current anomalies and inspire belief, new values and hope.