ABSTRACT
Despite its pivotal importance to human health and well-being, sanitation has been at the bottom of the pile of international development concerns. This is despite the fact that around 4,000 people, mostly babies, die daily due to complications related to poor sanitation, hygiene and unsafe water. About 40 per cent of the population in the global South live without access to ‘improved’ sanitation – that is about 2.5 billion people around the world. 2 Still, sanitation is considered a highly difficult to reach Millennium Development Goal (MDG): it is today the most off-track of all the MDGs, and sub-Saharan Africa is the most off-track region. Water continues to grab more attention globally and nationally; and, historically, sanitation and hygiene have rarely been separated from water. 3 Politicians and policymakers are reluctant to prioritize sanitation and to make the link to wider health, development and poverty reduction concerns. In addition, the ‘sanitation issue’ has remained strangely outside many water governance conversations. Governing sanitation, though, sits at the intersection between environmental governance and the politics of scale, where one of the most personal and individual acts – defecation – moves beyond the governance of one’s own body and practice. In recent years sanitation has moved from being ‘the last taboo’ (Black and Fawcett 2008) and into the discourse of larger political arenas. For example, the United Nations declared 2008 the International Year of Sanitation and the British Medical Journal voted sanitation as the greatest medical advance in the last 166 years (BBC 2007).
