ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the evolution of water-based sanitation as the norm in the Global North and explores challenges to this model of infrastructure, including resource constraints and affordability. It presents developments in waterless sanitation and analyses the challenge of sustainable sanitation from the perspective of the five frameworks of urban water sustainability. The frameworks are sustainable development, ecological modernisation, socio-technical systems, urban political ecology and radical ecology. Development policy and practice recognises the need for a variety of technical options for sanitation, to meet the Sustainable Development Goal of safe, dignified, universal provision. The political ecology of sanitation helps to reveal the power relationships at play in the provision or failure of infrastructure. The domination of water-based forms of urban infrastructure is an outcome of particular historical circumstances in the rapidly urbanising cities of Europe and North America in the nineteenth century.
