ABSTRACT
There has been significant progress in the past three decades in achieving equality in water supply delivery, with recent efforts driven by the new Sustainable Development Goal 6. Many such efforts, however, have tended to focus on expanding access, with more limited attention paid to what equality at the level of household supply, what this number means in practice, and the practical and philosophical implications in terms of service provision. This chapter explores the evolving policy landscape from the Mar del Plata UN World Water Conference in 1977 through to the present day, examining key markers such as the Human Right to Safe Drinking Water and Sanitation, and the broad focus on expanding low-cost community managed services. The authors review the emergence of theoretical debates on equality and the concept of a minimum standard of water provision, taking into account the multiple purposes to which water at a household level is allocated. Arguing that while the new SDGs address many shortcomings in previous efforts, more attention still needs paying to the drivers of wider inequalities, including localised power imbalances, and that the globalised nature of the discourse surrounding targets and indicators is often removed from practices and perceptions at a local level, with implications for long-term sustainability.
