Water scarcity & procedural justice in Honduras: Community-based management meets market-based policy

Ensuring adequate access to clean water remains a major challenge throughout the world, particularly in rural areas of the Global South. Community-based management (CBM) has been a common policy response to this challenge, whereby communities gain decision-making power over their own natural resources, and are also responsible for financial and technical issues. Household water metering is increasingly proposed as a complement to CBM because it facilitates transparency of use and provides the option of pay-per-use pricing, both of which are thought to help support the sustainable management of water supplies. However, metering and use-based fees are controversial and their implementation across various contexts has led to strong backlash that can undermine the management of community water systems. Drawing on ideas of procedural justice, we conducted a survey experiment with 689 residents across 12 communities in Honduras’ “dry corridor” to examine individual perceptions of the decision process for choosing to implement metering, or not, within the context of CBM. Our results show that more inclusive decision-making leads to higher perceived fairness of the process and appropriateness of the metering decision, irrespective of whether the individual personally agrees with the final decision. While inclusion matters in general, whether that takes the form of voting or deliberation did not make a large difference. The effect of inclusion was stronger among those who already agreed with the decision outcome. Finally, inclusion also had positive spillover effects on more technocratic outcomes, namely ratings of how effective and sustainable the resulting management of the water system was expected to be. This research suggests that the backlash observed against water metering projects around the world may have more to do with procedural injustice in decision-making than with resistance to metering itself.