Sustainable management of piped water supply infrastructure in developing communities

As the international development community continues to identify the sustainability of water infrastructure as an important development goal, the need for technical performance-monitoring is significant. A number of research initiatives have identified limitations with respect to current strategies for monitoring sustainability. These studies suggest that progress monitoring and proxy indicators used to evaluate the Millennium Development Goals, are not sufficient for measuring the Sustainable Development Goals. Whereas, progress can be viewed as a discrete and linear variable, sustainability is complex and continuous in nature. As a result, water development goals that call for “ensuring availability and sustainable management of water”, require research initiatives that use more objective and continuous monitoring to move the sector beyond progress monitoring. In addition, there is a need for research that employs performance monitoring methods that are intended to improve local management and inform utility operations.