Home / Policy areas / Social Development / Political Economy of Sanitation

Project Information

Oxford Policy Management has been contracted by the World Bank to undertake an analysis of the political economy of sanitation in four countries, Brazil, India, Senegal and Indonesia. This study takes a political economy approach to address the study’s key questions including:

• Why are sanitation investments and service provision not given adequate priority in lending and non-lending work?
• And when such efforts are undertaken, why are they not strategically targeted towards increasing access to sanitation for the poor?

In line with the Terms of Reference (TOR), the following five objectives will guide the study’s undertaking:

1. To apply and refine the existing World Bank’s Social Development Department (SDV) conceptual framework on the political economy of reform (building on earlier work OPM has undertaken with the SDV).
2. To analyse the political economy of sanitation of the selected Water and Sanitation Programme (WSP) and World Bank projects in Senegal, India, Brazil and Indonesia.
3. To generate lessons from actual operational experience and produce recommendations on how best to enhance support for evidence-based decisions in sanitation investment.
4. To contribute to raising awareness of sanitation and its policy debate through this work’s analysis and dissemination.

To contribute to the global policy debate, design and implementation of sanitation operations through documentation of an operationally tested approach to analyse the political economy of sanitation.