Urban water and sanitation in Siem Reap, Cambodia: a transdisciplinary case study informing the inclusive and systemic planning of heterogeneous service provision configurations
- Publication Type:
- Thesis
- Issue Date:
- 2025
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Within cities of low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), the heterogeneity of demand for water and sanitation services contributes to persistent inequalities in how the benefits and costs of managing urban water resources are distributed. A need for planning approaches that accommodate the bottom-up, demand-driven provision of mixes of service provision models has long been evident. A more holistic understanding of the complexity of existing heterogeneous infrastructure configurations and the diverse perspectives from which they are understood is essential for planning a transition to citywide inclusive services. Conceptual frameworks supporting endogenous urban water and sanitation planning have been established and refined over several decades. This thesis aims to validate a practical methodology that frames urban water and sanitation planning as a flexible action-oriented learning process that may be adapted to be culturally feasible and context specific.
The thesis is structured as three transdisciplinary cycles of action-oriented learning. The first focuses on the problematical situation of applying comparative economic analysis methodologies to prioritise interventions in heterogeneous urban water and sanitation configurations. This research has scoped and synthesised fragmented least-cost economic principles from the related literature to devise evaluative criteria for appraising and enhancing least-cost methodologies, thereby addressing limitations experienced by water and sanitation professionals. The second learning cycle organised for the problematical situation of heterogeneous water and sanitation configurations to be observed from diverse issue-owner perspectives in a real-world case study. Knowledge was generated through a heterogeneous residential end-use water demand analysis, and various soft system models as learning devices, to explore their potential in shifting how societal actors and water and sanitation professionals think about service provision in Siem Reap, Cambodia, and prompt actions to improve it.
The third learning cycle sought to think through how the use of these models may be integrated and organised as a systemic planning approach for Siem Reap municipality, with relevance to other comparable cities in the Asia Pacific, and globally. Evaluative criteria from the first learning cycle were applied to strengthen this deliberation. This thesis presents a discussion to lead thinking on planning frameworks that embrace the complexity of heterogeneous urban water and sanitation configurations. It argues that the role of planners is to be genuinely curious about possible endogenous solutions emerging from within this problematical situation. Organising gentle, collaborative interrogation of such purposeful models for change is key to organising water and sanitation as citywide inclusive public services.
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