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1. Introduction
Over the past three decades, community management has become the accepted management model for rural water supply (RWS) in low and middle-income countries (Schouten & Moriarty, 2003; Harvey & Reed, 2006; Lockwood & Smits, 2011). During this period, the world has made great strides expanding access to improved water supply, with a further 25% of the global population gaining access between 1995 and 2010 (WHO & UNICEF, 2012). Yet evidence from both India (Reddy et al., 2010) and Sub-Saharan Africa (Baumann, 2006) shows that around a third of RWS systems are non-functional, raising serious questions about the effectiveness and sustainability of the community management model. Moriarty et al. (2013, p. 329) argue we are now at the ‘beginning of the end’ for community management, ‘not principally because community management has failed, but because it is reaching the limits of what can be realistically achieved in an approach based on informality and voluntarism’. From a policy perspective, the approach falls short in two main areas: lack of long-term sustainability and lack of scalability across large projects (Bolt et al., 2001). While this realisation is fuelling an examination of alternatives, including variants on public and private sector service delivery, it is also driving reform in the policies and practices of community management, shifting the paradigm from one whereby external agencies ‘hand over’ infrastructure to communities who take ownership and complete operation and maintenance (O&M) duties, to a more bipartite approach in which continued support is provided by external agencies to communities (Schouten & Moriarty, 2003; Baumann, 2006; Lockwood & Smits, 2011; Moriarty et al., 2013).
Baumann (2006) has labelled this transition as a move to ‘community management plus (CM+)’, although other terms have also been used, including ‘post-construction support’, ‘direct and indirect support’, or ‘external support’ (Kleemeier, 2000; Lockwood, 2002; Schouten & Moriarty, 2003; Jansz, 2011; Lockwood & Smits, 2011). Consistent across these approaches is the premise that sustainability and scalability can only be achieved if communities receive appropriate levels of institutional support, a ‘plus’ to sustain community water supply. By emphasising the bipartite responsibility between the community and the state (and/or other relevant agencies) throughout the service delivery cycle, CM+ challenges the existing model that had come to dominate service delivery presumptions. The conventional...