Emuel Vassey Reflection Paper

7/31/2019 Emuel Vassey Reflection Paper

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Emuel Vassey Reflection Paper

Last weekend, I happened to hear a discussion on the WGBH radio show

Innovation Hub on global access to water (As Water Supplies Wane, What Next?). One

of the guests, Professor Shafiqul Islam of Tufts University, posed the question, Is water

a right or a property ? Last semester, I took an environmental health class and did some

reading about the Joint Monitoring Programme for Water Supply and Sanitation, which

is a joint program between WHO and UNICEF, so I thought that this would be an

interesting question to consider with regard to global governance.

The constitution of WHO states, The enjoyment of the highest attainable

standard of health is one of the fundamental rights of every human being (World

Health Organization), so because access to safe drinking water is an integral part of that

standard, it stands to reason that it is also a fundamental human right. Because of this,

the Joint Monitoring Programme was set up by WHO and UNICEF to track progress

toward meeting the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) with regard to access to

and improved water supply and improved sanitation.

The 2012 Update was released very recently and reports that the MDG for water

supply was apparently met in 2010. The report does, however, mention the caveat that

the JMP assessment is made only on the basis of access to improved drinking water

sources, defined as those that, by the nature of their construction, are protected from

outside contaminatio n, particularly fcal matter. It does not, however, mean that all

improved sources are truly safe from contamination (UNICEF and World Health

Organization, 2012).


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I have some personal insight into this from a 2009 trip to India, in which I stayed

with American friends living on a mountainside above a small pilgrimage town in the

lower Himalayas. My friends have what JMP would consider an improved water source,

as it is piped into the house, but their water supply is fed from a spring up the mountain,

which is subject to rationing in the dry season and increased contamination during the

monsoon. For drinking water, they have a large metal urn with a series of ceramic

filtration disks, because despite the JMP classification, the water coming from the tap

cannot be considered safe.

Open sewers are the norm, and these drain down the mountainside into the

same watershed that feeds the springs. In the town below, there is a municipal water

pump, so the entire town, even those without an indoor tap, has access to an improved

source according to JMP, but the town, being located in a small basin, receives runoff

carrying potential contaminants from all the surrounding mountains. An open sewage

ditch runs through the town, carrying wastes into the outflow of a sacred lake at the

center of town and from there to settlements even further down into the valley. And

yet, according to JMP, this is a level of development the international community can be

proud of.

A current article in the International Journal of Environmental Research and

Public Health tries to address the deficiency in the JMP methodology and estimate more

accurately the numbers of people still living without safe potable water. The authors

used data from WHO/UNICEF to try to determine the proportion of the population now


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designated as having an improved water source for whom that source is still likely

contaminated. Their determination was that approximately 1.2 billion of the people JMP

considers safe due to obtaining water from improved sources are still at risk of having

fecal-contaminated water, leaving approximately 2 billion people worldwide still

without access to safe water (Onda, LoBuglio, & Bartram, 2012).

The articles authors do admit that their model likely overestimates the risk, but

given that the JMP model most certainly underestimates, it is likely that the truth lies

somewhere in between. The end result is that upwards of a quarter of the worlds

population still does not have access to safe drinking water, and, according to the JMP

progress report, the bulk of these people are concentrated in Sub-Saharan Africa. But if

weve answered the question of water as a fundamental human right, these data stil l

leave us with the question of how to account for this ongoing deficit in access and

whether international governance has been a help or a hindrance in this regard.

Another recent article, this one by Iris Borowy in the Journal of the History of

Medicine and Allied Sciences , does not address the issue of safe drinking water

specifically, but it does provide a theoretical framework for understanding the forces in

international governance which have shaped efforts to address environmental concerns

such as clean water and air. In it, Borowy describes two essential competing theories of

development a localist and a globalist theory and gives a history and critique of

how they have played out within international governance structures and the resultant

effect on public health (Borowy, 2012).


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Briefly, the localist theory holds that improved health is a natural outgrowth of

economic development and that the burden for development of health infrastructures

is, then, largely that of the sovereign local government as its economy grows, essentially

absolving developed nations from any responsibility to redistribute their wealth or

resources to poorer nations. Borowys criticism of this view is that it fails to take into

account environmental degradation secondary to industrial development or that

developing nations often do not have the resources to develop public health

infrastructure concurrently with commerce-oriented infrastructure. The globalist

theory, by contrast, holds that, particularly with regards to finite resources such as

water, the wealthy nations have a responsibility both to curb consumption and to

ensure that economic development in poorer nations focuses on sustainability.

The localist theory was developed around the time of the birth of the United

Nations and it is this view that has traditionally predominated in financial institutions

such as the World Bank and in developed governments such as the US. The globalist

model is a more recent development, based on the concept that there are limits to

economic growth, particularly when considering finite resources, and on observations of

unmitigated environmental degradation in developing nations where the focus had

been on building industry, rather than on sustainable systems.

While Borowy does note that external pressure, largely from non-state actors

but also from the UN Development Programme, was the main force behind getting the

World Bank to begin looking at human development factors in the 1990s, the view of


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the World Bank, and by extension WHO, which relies heavily upon the World Bank and

the United States for funding, is still shaped largely by the localist model, albeit with

some modification. In the Innovation Hub broadcast, Dr. Islam also said that the

estimated cost to provide universal access to drinking water was between 70 to 100

billion USD less than 1% of U.S. GDP but that the political will to make it happen

simply doesnt exist at present. This fits well with Borowys explanation, since the

localist model assumes that these issues will be sorted out by each state as its economy

improves and, even given modifications over the past two decades, places less emphasis

on ensuring that human development of this sort is an integral and co-equal part of any

economic development plan. This, however, still leaves us with an unanswered

question: When will we muster the will to make it happen?

Bibliography As Water Supplies Wane, What Next? (n.d.). Retrieved June 26, 2012, from WGBH: Innovation

Hub: http://www.wgbh.org/articles/As-Water-Supplies-Wane-Whats-Next-6574

Borowy, I. (2012). Global Health and Development: Conceptualizing Health Between EconomicGrowth and Environmental Sustainability. Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences . doi:10.1093/jhmas/jrr076

Onda, K., LoBuglio, J., & Bartram, J. (2012). Global Access to Safe Water: Accounting for WaterQuality and the Resulting Impact on MDG Progress. International Journal of Environmental Reserch and Public Health, 9 , 880-894. doi:10.3390/ijerph9030880

UNICEF and World Health Organization. (2012). Progress on Drinking Water and Sanitation:

2012 Update.

World Health Organization. (n.d.). Constitution of the World Health Organization. Retrieved June26, 2012, from http://apps.who.int/gb/bd/PDF/bd47/EN/constitution-en.pdf

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