The STEPS [Social, Technological and Environmental Pathways to Sustainability] Centre at the University of Sussex has just published a working paper on CLTS: The Dynamics and Sustainability of Community-led Total Sanitation: Mapping Challenges and Pathways. Here’s a quote:
Even though CLTS has the makings of a development success story, many obstacles remain before it can truly be said to offer a viable route to meeting the MDGs. For example: How does CLTS accommodate dynamism and complexity inherent in social-technological-ecological systems? How are women’s, children’s and men’s often diverging needs accounted for? How can CLTS be scaled up to become a major force rather than an approach characterised through piecemeal, scattered projects? Are there lingering assumptions and power relations that hinder or obstruct the spread of CLTS? In short – how sustainable is CLTS, and in what ways is the notion of sustainability understood? This paper offers some perspectives that may help structure thinking around these questions.
Good down-to-earth stuff!
The list of all STEPS working papers is here. A few of the WatSan-relevant ones are:
Liquid Dynamics: Challenges for Sustainability in Water and Sanitation
Going with the Flow? Directions of Innovation in the Water and Sanitation Domain
On the Edge of Sustainability: Perspectives on Peri-urban Dynamics
About Me
- Duncan Mara
- University of Leeds, United Kingdom
- I'm an emeritus professor of civil engineering at the University of Leeds in England. I've been working on low-cost sanitation in developing countries since the mid-1970s, and also on low-cost wastewater treatment and reuse. I was a lecturer at the University of Nairobi, Kenya, 1970-73 and then a senior lecturer at the University of Dundee, Scotland, 1974-79 before moving to Leeds in late 1979. I was a visiting professor of sanitary engineering at the Universidade Federal da Paraiba in Campina Grande, northeast Brazil, during 1976-95, and since 1996 I have been a visiting professor of environmental engineering at the Instituto Cinara, Universidad del Valle in Cali, Colombia.