Abstract
The right to water and sanitation has emerged from the penumbra of associated rights in the past few decades and now plays an important role in international debates. This right has emerged “from below”, through the efforts of social movements seeking transformation in the lives of the world’s poor, and it has been recognized “from above”, with major international actors such as the United Nations, international financial institutions, and even large corporate actors affirming its existence. As the obligations and entitlements inherent in this right are increasingly clarified, the role of interdisciplinary collaboration has never been more important. This short Commentary examines one such collaborative effort, led by the United Nations Joint Monitoring Programme, to devise post-2015 goals, targets, and indicators for water, sanitation, and hygiene. The Commentary calls for renewed partnerships to advance human rights-based policy among advocates, development practitioners, and water and sanitation experts from diverse scientific fields.
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Notes
There are ongoing debates over whether there are separate rights to water and sanitation. While I find the argument for two separate rights to be persuasive, this Commentary will treat the rights as a single unit for ease of reference. For a discussion of this issue, see Winkler (2012) and Meier et al. (2014).
While such collaborations are worth close examination, they are separate from the policy-focused collaborations discussed in this Commentary since they are aimed at directly assessing the status of a right as a legal matter, while policy collaborations are animated by human rights principles but do not purport to replace monitoring efforts or identify violations.
The author served as Rapporteur for the JMP Equity and Non-Discrimination Working Group.
This figure is reproduced from JMP (2012).
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Satterthwaite, M. On Rights-Based Partnerships to Measure Progress in Water and Sanitation. Sci Eng Ethics 20, 877–884 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-014-9514-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-014-9514-3