ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the specific challenge of monitoring and regulation of community management. It concerns the role of communities and their support environment in monitoring and regulating. A good monitoring system would give both the enabling support environment and the community service provider a set of indicators and the rationale for using those indicators. As a subset of monitoring, perhaps more of a short cut to action bypassing long lead-time monitoring, the water sector in India has a strong history of complaints recording. The Punjab water supply and sanitation department (WSSD) has set up a centralised public complaints system for community rural water supply in the state which both monitors performance, through the type of complaints being received, in addition to monitoring support environment response to those complaints. The introduction of state water regulatory authorities is more likely to lead to bureaucratic, prescriptive regulation by norms rather than incentive-based, light-touch facilitation and enabling of community service provision.
