Theorizing the Internal Social Sustainability of Sanitation Organizations

AbstractOnsite household sanitation technologies such as septic tanks or latrines serve a large percentage of the world’s population. Unfortunately, they experience high failure rates after construction, with resulting environmental and public health consequences. Previous work has suggested that these failures are often a result of an inability to navigate the technology-society nexus. In other words, they represent problems of social sustainability. In order to address this urgent problem, theory is built regarding the social sustainability of infrastructure systems by leveraging established organizational theory. To do this, household level interview data is collected in four communities in rural Bangladesh. Virtually all households in this research population have constructed onsite sanitation systems, typically using their own resources. However, almost half of these systems have since fallen into disrepair, mirroring the high socially based failure rates cited globally from similar systems. Using cr...