HCES: a new approach to environmental sanitation planning for urban areas

This paper presents the Household-Centred Environmental Sanitation (HCES) approach, jointly developed by the WSSCC and Eawag/Sandec (Water and Sanitation in Developing Countries). The presentation explores its origins, theoretical foundations and the problems it seeks to address. HCES is a method which proposes to start the holistic planning process with household decisions on service needs, and then move outward from the household to the neighbourhood, town and upper levels of government. Thus, the link between community expression of needs and mobilization of resources to solve them and other inputs from higher up the line is assured. The second part of the paper explores a new approach to widening system and technology options for household-centred approaches by thinking as sanitation as a ’cradle-to-grave’ system rather than stand-alone technologies

Pre-selecting appropriate sanitation system options as an input into urban sanitation planning

Structured decision making (SDM) frameworks such as CLUES and Sanitation21 support urban sanitation planning by prioritizing decision objectives, identifying decision options, quantifying consequences, clarifying trade-offs, and balancing for opposing stakeholder preferences. However, current research focusses on the selection of a preferred option, assuming that the options to choose from are already known. Given the growing number of sanitation technology and system configurations, as well as the multiple criteria that those should fulfil, providing a good set of decision options is far from trivial. In this paper we present an approach for the pre-selection of locally appropriate sanitation system options that: (1) is systematic and therefore transparent; (2) is based on stakeholder objectives, thus increasing ownership; (3) can deal with a large number of both conventional and novel options opening up the decision space; and (4) considers uncertainties related to novel technologies and the local conditions

Environmental sanitation planning for cities of the south: linking local level initiatives with city-wide action

This paper presents recent developments in environmental sanitation planning for cities of the global South by presenting two approaches that provide a combined response for dealing with the complexity of sanitation problems in unserved urban areas. Both approaches presented; the revamped HCES guidelines (now referred to as Community-led Urban Environmental Sanitation – CLUES) and the Sanitation 21 framework are process-oriented approaches that aim to address socio-economic and spatial diversity and seek to overcome the limitations of blueprint approaches characterised by "one-size-fits-all‟ interventions. The paper highlights the fact that both approaches require close consideration of the "domain interface‟ which allows for the linking of localised community solutions and city-wide interventions

An overview of decision support methodologies applied in the sanitation sector

Recently-developed decision support methodologies (DSM) have been emerging in face of continuing sanitation challenges. As the success of a decision is also dependent on the applied methodology, the present work aimed at analysing: i) their objectives and area of application; ii) the way the decision processes are structured; and iii) the stakeholders’ involvement. It was found that the types of selection procedures vary, as well as the technologies under consideration. Used criteria are wide in terms of sustainability dimensions, being either predefined or defined during the decision process. Stakeholders’ involvement is clearly a priority in analysed DSM, although differing in range and in the way they are involved. In conclusion, it is believed that learning from experiences of applied DSM will help to better select and adapt them to other contexts

System-based decision trees for the selection of sanitation technologies

Decision trees, also called algorithms, provide a systematic and transparent representation of the decision process. Existing algorithms applied to the sanitation sector are either too simple, failing to consider the entire sanitation chain, or excessively complex, leading to counterproductive results. This work presents simplified decision trees to support the selection of sanitation technologies compatible with the local context while, at the same time, it helps to guarantee the required technical compatibility along the sanitation supply-chain, i.e., from the interface to the final destination of products