Politics and politicians are, perhaps, the two biggest hurdles to the implementation of appropriate waste water management and there is a real need to cultivate political interest in this area. As noted by Ingram (2011), systems are biased towards “business as usual” and only if political leaders see either threats or opportunities, and/or have vision and passion are real changes likely to occur. Laugesen et al. (2010) makes the gloomy prediction that “despite the past failure of most centralized systems,
it is likely that most new wastewater management
systems in developing countries will continue to be advanced, centralized and with a continued high probability for failure”. He suggests a number of reasons for this, with the most important being the political preference
for large, one-off investments (addressed in 7.1). Other reasons include inertia (“we’ve always done it this way”), the desire to have what seems to be an advanced, state-of-the-
art system, and the education and experience of wastewater
engineers. Hawkins et al. (2013), in their examination of poor-inclusive urban sanitation, also note the risk of considering
sewerage as the only ‘proper’ form of urban sanitation, which can then lead government officials to choose that option
even when it is not technically or financially viable. They also comment that “perverse incentives around contracting”
may also reduce the motivation to develop more cost-effective
and locally applicable solutions.