Click on these links to download recent publications: The Partnership Paperchase: making tripartite partnerships work Vulnerability of the Urban Poor for Water and Sanitation Review of Rural Water and Sanitation at the World Bank Budget Support and Water and Sanitation Sanitation Policy and Practice Business Development Support for community-managed rural water supply
Other Resources on the web (a very brief introductory selection): Building Partnerships for Development in Water and Sanitation: http://bpdws.org/ IIED Human Habitats (and see also Environment and Urbanisation): http://www.iied.org/HS/index.html WaterAID: http://www.wateraid.org/international/default.asp Water and Sanitation Program: http://www.wsp.org/ WELL Resource Centre:  http://www.lboro.ac.uk/well/ International Water Association: http://www.iwahq.org/templates/ld_templates/layout_632897.aspx?ObjectId=632922 Stockholm International Water Institute: http://www.siwi.org/
Water sector policy There are a wide range of pressing policy concerns in the water sector, all of which need to be addressed if we are to make progress towards the MDG targets, and importantly beyond these targets towards universal access.  The issues relate both to increasing access to services through new investments and improving those investments so they result in sustained services of high quality at affordable prices.  It seems increasingly clear that the levels of service which can be delivered to the the world's population cannot reach levels currently provided in some areas, and indeed the sustainability  of these services is in doubt; but with the right policies universal access at a more appropriate level is still attainable. Some of the recent policy debate has focused perhaps unhelpfully on a public versus private provision argument.  Despite the heated debate, much of the real work on this topic in the past years has focused on providing practical assistance to policy makers who are seeking to develop relationships between public, private and civil society actors in the various tasks relating to water service provision.  Two of these are linked above; the first, The Partnership Paperchase, looks at how tripartite relationships between actors can be structured and documented, while also providing pointers towards identifying when a partnership is a partnership and when it should more properly be treated as a contract.  The second, older document, Pro-poor transaction design, looks at structuring private sector contracts so that they generate incentives to provide services to unserved and low-income communities. Another interesting current debate pits straight-forward development projects against more systemic budget support to national programs of governments.  Two documents of interest here were both commissioned by the World Bank.  The first is a review of lending by the World Bank in the rural water supply sector over the past 25 years, while the second looks at how rural water supply can be better represented in Budget Suport operations.