Partnerships for sustainable development have become the official UN
instruments to achieve the Millennium Development Goals. Among those working
on water and sanitation, many focus on technology transfer projects.
Transferred technologies are seen as tools not only to combat water scarcity
or poor sanitary conditions, but also to alleviate poverty, ensure gender
equality, improve health and environment. Yet, technological improvements
cannot fulfill all these functions on their own. Thus, technologies that
provide quick and easy access to water are not necessarily the most suitable
ones for sustainable development of receiving communities. Indeed, a number of
such projects fail at getting community support or ensuring their use of the
water provided. In these cases, improvements in water access remain
insubstantial, intentions of poverty alleviation are frustrated, and the
technology ultimately faces rejection. To avoid such results, assessment of
water partnerships and technologies should not be solely based on efficiency
calculations but also take social implications into consideration. To do this,
we suggest a technology assessment framework based on the social critiques of
Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Ivan Illich. While STS provides
numerous conceptual tools to reconsider technology in general, Illich's
concept of institutional spectrum is instrumental to examine the societal
impact of particular technologies. Building on these two sources, our
framework examines various contrasting characteristics that influence a
technology’s social acceptability and desirability, especially from the
perspective of the receiving communities. Hence, this framework creates a
scale to assess whether a technology preserves the autonomy, flexibility and
self-reliance of a community or has predominantly manipulative and
monopolistic tendencies that induce dependence. This framework is then applied
to the technologies transferred by water partnerships registered with the UN
Commission on Sustainable Development
