Financing Universal Sanitation Regulation, Investibility and the Political Economy of Water Infrastructure

Abstract

Sanitation is difficult to finance for reasons that have little to do with the availability of savings. Networks absorb sunk capital, revenues are set politically, assets outlive the governments that authorise them, and universal service obliges providers to reach households whose capacity to pay is weakest exactly where unit costs run highest. Four literatures have grown around these facts and rarely speak to one another: public health and human rights, concerned with access, affordability and accountability; utility regulation, concerned with commitment, tariffs and administrative capacity; infrastructure finance, concerned with risk allocation, bankability and creditor protection; and critical political economy, which follows the financialisation of water through debt, ownership and valuation. This review integrates them around a single object: the claim on future tariff revenue, and the institutional work that manufactures, prices and enforces it. Financeability, on this reading, is produced rather than discovered. Territorial design, revenue rules, project preparation, regulatory credibility and enforceable creditor rights make an asset investible; public development banks shape that outcome through preparation and standardisation at least as much as through lending. Because the same arrangements redistribute risk and authority among users, governments and investors, the volume of capital mobilised tells us almost nothing about universalisation on its own. Brazil supplies the sharpest available test. A statutory deadline of 2033, a drive towards regionalised provision, national reference norms and a fast-growing market in infrastructure debentures now operate in a sector still marked by deep territorial inequality and uneven regulatory capacity. The review sets out what a credible research agenda must measure, and why ownership is the wrong variable to measure it with.