Authors: Alex Fischer, Rob Hope, Achut Manandhar, Sonia Hoque, Tim Foster, Adnan Hakim, Md. Sirajul Islam, David Bradley
The drinking water sector is off track to reach Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6.1 with over a quarter of the world’s population lacking safe and reliable services. Policy approaches are shifting away from provision of access towards managing the multiple risks of water supply and quality. By considering how infrastructure, information, and institutional systems evolved in Bangladesh, this article identifies the unintentional consequences of reallocating management responsibility for rural water services away from government agencies towards individuals and households.