Dyson College of Arts and Sciences

Social entrepreneurship, water supply, and resilience: lessons from the sanitation sector Imran Chowdhury 1 Published online: 8 December 2018 © AESS 2018 Abstract In this article, I lay out some ideas on developing resilient local water systems by drawing from fieldwork in the sanitation sector. Specifically, I examine how differing configurations of water resource ownership (municipality, private sector) and water system management (municipality, community, private sector) can help to construct models of water supply management that are resilient to both local and global shocks and which can inform the development of sustainable water supply systems in communities of different sizes and divergent endowments of water resources. In doing this, I attempt to link recent work on organizational resilience and social enterprise to the broader field of water resources ownership and management as seen from a development perspective. Keywords Social entrepreneurship • Resilience • Partnership • Water supply • Sanitation Introduction Communities around the world depend on the avail- ability of safe, potable supplies of water, a fundamental requirement of human survival and a non-negotiable input for improved human health and economic de- velopment (World Health Organization 2017). While the world has made great strides in recent decades in providing improved access to water sources, much work remains to be done, particularly in regions such as Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, where many still lack access to safe, improved sources of water for their daily needs (see Fig. 1). Nevertheless, despite its importance, the issue of water supply and the organi- zations which work within the water supply sector re- main relatively unexplored by scholars of management and organization studies (Baudoin and Arenas 2018; Bothello and Salles-Djelic 2017; Kunz et al. 2013).With the present study, I seek to fill this gap by exploring how organizing models from the sanitation sector might be applied to understanding the management of water supply, and at the same time help program man- agers and other practitioners to develop water systems which are resilient to a range of environmental and so- cial shocks (Williams et al. 2017; Linnenluecke 2015; Adger et al. 2009; Pahl-Wostl 2009; Nelson et al. 2007). In recent years, "resilience" has emerged as a concept with wide application across a range of disci- plines. As environmental shocks and natural disasters such as the Fukushima nuclear reactor breakdown in 2011 and the hurricanes of 2017 and 2018 in the Unit- ed States and the Caribbean continue to multiply, the importance of developing operating systems which are capable of retaining fundamental structural elements as well as function in the face of similar challenges at both the organizational and system level takes on heightened importance (Booher and Innes 2010; Mees and Driessen 2010). While we are only starting to un- derstand the range of characteristics present in resil- ient systems, across a number of scholarly studies, two distinct foci tend to come to the fore with respect to the core elements of such systems: (1) the capacity to absorb shocks and still maintain function and (2) the capacity for renewal, re-organization, and develop- ment of organizations and broader organizational sys- tems (Folke et al. 2005). Recent work in the area of or- ganizational resilience—defined as "an organization's capability to absorb disturbance and reorganize while undergoing change so as to still retain essentially the same function, structure, and identity" (Ortizde-Man- dojana and Bansal 2016)—has examined how com- panies can build systems to survive both short- and long-term environmental disturbances that may im- pede their functioning (Kahn et al. 2018;Williams et al. 2017; DesJardine et al. 2017; Kossek and Perrigino 2016; Chowdhury 2015; van der Vegt et al. 2015; Hay- ward et al. 2010; Gittell et al. 2006). ese studies may have particular resonance for municipal and local au- thorities and other organizations operating in the are- 1 Pace University, One Pace Plaza, New York, NY 10038, USA 16

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