posted on 2016-06-07, 00:00authored byJessica A. Kaminsky
In
2016, the global community undertook the Sustainable Development
Goals. One of these goals seeks to achieve universal and equitable
access to safe and affordable drinking water for all people by the
year 2030. In support of this undertaking, this paper seeks to discover
the cultural work done by piped water infrastructure across 33 nations
with developed and developing economies that have experienced change
in the percentage of population served by piped-to-premises water
infrastructure at the national level of analysis. To do so, I regressed
the 1990–2012 change in piped-to-premises water infrastructure
coverage against Hofstede’s cultural dimensions, controlling
for per capita GDP, the 1990 baseline level of coverage, percent urban
population, overall 1990–2012 change in improved sanitation
(all technologies), and per capita freshwater resources. Separate
analyses were carried out for the urban, rural, and aggregate national
contexts. Hofstede’s dimensions provide a measure of cross-cultural
difference; high or low scores are not in any way intended to represent
better or worse but rather serve as a quantitative way to compare
aggregate preferences for ways of being and doing. High scores in
the cultural dimensions of Power Distance, Individualism–Collectivism,
and Uncertainty Avoidance explain increased access to piped-to-premises
water infrastructure in the rural context. Higher Power Distance and
Uncertainty Avoidance scores are also statistically significant for
increased coverage in the urban and national aggregate contexts. These
results indicate that, as presently conceived, piped-to-premises water
infrastructure fits best with spatial contexts that prefer hierarchy
and centralized control. Furthermore, water infrastructure is understood
to reduce uncertainty regarding the provision of individually valued
benefits. The results of this analysis identify global trends that
enable engineers and policy makers to design and manage more culturally
appropriate and socially sustainable water infrastructure by better
fitting technologies to user preferences.