Description
Policy-making in Vietnam, including Water Supply and Sanitation (WSS) policy, is dependent on the production of a significant amount and variety of policy documents to guide action at lower administrative levels. The policy framework largely responsible for ensuring the provision of rural sanitation is provided by the National Target Program in Rural WSS (NTP-RWSS).
Limited efforts have been made in the rural sanitation subsector in Vietnam characterized by a poorly financed, top down, supply-driven approach. This approach failed to achieve widespread coverage and failed to trigger sustained behaviour change in households.
Two problems are identified in addressing these issues. Firstly, the persistently poor performance observed in the rural sanitation subsector under the current policy paradigm, and secondly, the failure of a broad range of actors to scale up innovative approaches that have been piloted with donor support, aimed at redressing the disappointing outcomes in Vietnam.
This is particularly salient given the country’s overall development achievements and specifically given achievements within the sector in increasing access to urban sanitation and rural and urban water supply.
Action taken
A country case study on rural sanitation in Vietnam was set out to answer the conundrum of poor performance within the rural sanitation subsector and the incapacity to scale up rural sanitation in the presence of seemingly effective innovative approaches.
The Problem-Driven Governance and Political Economy Analysis Good Practice Framework (PGPE) was used as analytical framework in the research project and in the paper, and the research process was divided into the four following steps:
1. Problem identification
2. Outlining of the institutional and governance arrangements that provide the context for action in the sector
3. Identification of the incentives of actors involved, and developing an understanding of how they did or did not support scaling up of innovative approaches to rural household sanitation
4. Suggestion of a set of implications for donor programming based on the analysis.
Lessons learned
Scaling up innovative approaches depends not only on funds becoming available for sanitation, but also on whether or not innovative approaches are well-suited for implementation at scale in Vietnam, given the prevailing political economy of the subsector.
To pursue strategies for the rural sanitation sector requires follow through on a number of institutional reforms already underway at the central level to create the necessary enabling environment, including:
- Establishing policy space for budget allocation to critical elements of innovative approaches
- Minimisation of political risk for sanitation planners and others approving sanitation expenditure
- New actors, new challenges
- Good practice in support to pilot initiatives.
It is necessary to adopt and promote strategies that have proven critical in producing better sanitation outcomes, and which incorporate some of the key features of innovative approaches:
- Greater emphasis on demand generation
- Sequencing of software and hardware components
- A broader conceptualisation of software activities
- Involvement of private sector suppliers.
Importance of the case for IWRM
Water supply and sanitation are important features in water resources management and the case discusses the issues and possibilities of up-scaling rural sanitation through applying innovative approaches to improve performance in the rural sanitation subsector, given the prevailing political economy.