ABSTRACT
If the human right to sanitation (HRS) is incorporated within the human right to water, it will not get the special attention it needs for meaningful implementation (see 1.3.1). It is implied from the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights 1966 (ICESCR). It is also increasingly recognised in other legal instruments and political declarations at various levels of governance, both expressly and implicitly, as illustrated in Chapters 5 and 8. Nonetheless, over 4 billion people around the world lack access to safely managed sanitation facilities due to reasons that are not confined to sanitation laws and policy frameworks. Rather, the drivers of poor sanitation services also include economic, environmental and social factors that may affect access to sanitation services either directly or indirectly. Further, there are parallel sanitation governance principles operating alongside the HRS norm. In order to ensure that the HRS is not just rhetoric, especially for the people living without access to safely managed sanitation facilities, it is therefore important to go beyond a traditional legal analysis and explore the performance of the HRS and the drivers (see 3.4) which affect access to sanitation in practise; that is what I have attempted in this thesis. Given the potential contradictions between the HRS and other non-human rights instruments, including principles, for sanitation governance, as evident from the case study, it is also important for sanitation governance to be guided by an overarching norm that ensures universal access to sanitation without compromising on environmental sustainability. For this purpose, I selected inclusive development (ID) as the overarching norm for my analysis in this thesis, and my main research question is: How can the human right to sanitation be interpreted and implemented to promote inclusive development? I answer the main question based on my research findings on the five research questions already addressed in the previous Chapters:
What are the drivers of poor sanitation services and how are these currently being addressed in sanitation governance frameworks?
How has the human right to sanitation evolved across different levels of governance, from international to local; how do the human right to sanitation principles address the drivers?
247Which humanitarian law and any other non-human rights instruments, including principles and indicators, for sanitation governance promote the progressive realisation of the human right to sanitation, through addressing the drivers of poor sanitation services?
How does legal pluralism operate in sanitation governance, with the implementation of the human right to sanitation, alongside non-human rights instruments and principles?
How can the human right to sanitation institution be redesigned to advance ID outcomes across multiple levels of governance?
