Sanitation System Legitimacy In Bangladesh

In past decades, an extraordinary amount of effort and resources have been spent to extend basic civil infrastructure such as water, sanitation, and energy systems to developing communities. While the construction of this infrastructure is well intended, recent improved monitoring and evaluation of these projects has called new attention to the problem of unsustainable infrastructure. Specifically, an undocumented but large percentage of systems fall into disrepair or disuse as time passes. Past research into sustainable infrastructure systems has typically focused on environmental/technical or economic sustainability. However, as the onsite technologies typically used in developing regions function well in controlled settings, there is reason to suspect that social forces are instead causing the technology to fail. Unfortunately, we lack research that theorizes the social sustainability of infrastructure systems, understood here as the negotiation of the technology-society nexus. Focusing on onsite household sanitation systems, this project addresses this gap by applying legitimacy theory as a model for the social sustainability of infrastructure. In this project, we seek to understand how legitimacy supports and undermines the sustainability of onsite household wastewater treatment systems. Household interview data from two rural communities in Bangladesh were analyzed in a cross case comparison of communities with and without sustainable sanitation to describe how concepts of legitimacy impact sanitation system sustainability. Data was analyzed at both the household and community level in an embedded research design. While most legitimacy constructs from the academic literature appear at similar relative frequencies in both of our contrasting cases, qualitative analysis reveals that the content of these references vary. These results suggest a number of theoretical propositions that can be evaluated in future projects with the practical goal of enabling construction and engineering professionals to better design and manage sustainable sanitation infrastructure. More practically, we also suggest a change in the technologies currently included in the definition of improved sanitation.