Bureaucratic Blockages : Water, Civil Servants, and Community in Tanzania
How do civil servants in district water and sanitation departments address problems of water access in rural communities in Tanzania? What are the bureaucratic procedures they follow? How do the bureaucratic procedures around formulating budgets, m...
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| Format: | Working Paper |
| Language: | English en_US |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2017
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| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/508431497274710180/Bureaucratic-blockages-water-civil-servants-and-community-in-Tanzania http://hdl.handle.net/10986/27303 |
| Summary: | How do civil servants in district water
and sanitation departments address problems of water access
in rural communities in Tanzania? What are the bureaucratic
procedures they follow? How do the bureaucratic procedures
around formulating budgets, managing money, and interacting
with communities impede or enhance their ability to manage
water projects? This report addresses these and related
questions by examining the social, economic, and political
contexts in which Tanzanian civil servants in the water
sector work. This research focuses on civil servants
employed by water and sanitation departments in district
offices, where infrastructure projects are initiated and
managed by engineers and technicians in coordination with
the private sector and community organizations. Using
qualitative research from two of these water and sanitation
departments, this report shows that the institutional and
bureaucratic contexts in which civil servants work redirect
their attention away from maintaining existing
infrastructure and towards building new water projects. The
focus on new projects corresponds to their efforts to answer
the objectives of higher levels of government. Improving
water access depends on the shared efforts of civil servants
and community groups to maintain existing projects. Civil
servants' focus on new projects therefore poses a
problem to ensuring that they work community organizations
and maintain existing water projects. |
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