Household Water Insecurity: Uncertainty around the Tap

Water insecurity is a major global challenge. While often associated with extreme weather events and climate change, social, political, and economic circumstances also contribute to water insecurity. At the household level, water insecurity happens when people lack access to affordable, safe, reliable, and adequate water.1Wendy Jepson et al., “Advancing Human Capabilities for Water Security: A Relational Approach,” Water Security 1 (July 2017): 46–52. When people experience water insecurity, they often suffer social consequences, like shame, discrimination, and fear, as well as health consequences, like dehydration, waterborne disease, and anxiety or depression.2Amber Wutich, “Water Insecurity: An Agenda for Research and Call to Action for Human Biology,” American Journal of Human Biology 32, no. 1 (2020). Underlying all of these dynamics is a core—but poorly understood—dimension of water insecurity: uncertainty.

Uncertainty has long been recognized as an important factor in the meteorological and hydrological dimensions of water insecurity.3→Kelli L. Larson et al., “Decision-Making under Uncertainty for Water Sustainability and Urban Climate Change Adaptation,” Sustainability 7, no. 11 (2015): 14761–14784.
→Dave D. White et al., “Water Management Decision Makers’ Evaluations of Uncertainty in a Decision Support System: The Case of WaterSim in the Decision Theater,” Journal of Environmental Planning and Management 58, no. 4 (2015): 616–630. Droughts come without warning, and even our best meteorological models cannot clearly predict when they will end. Hydrologists have learned much about groundwater dynamics, but many water-scarce communities still do not know how long their aquifers will last at current rates of consumption. And climate change is making all of this even more unpredictable. Yet household water insecurity is as much a problem of how water is allocated and distributed as it is a problem of climate change, drought, or overconsumption.

Current scholarship on the topic explores how social, political, and economic systems create household water insecurity. For example, where water is privatized and sold on the market, people may not have enough money to buy the amount they need. When people are excluded from reliable piped water systems, water access may be uncertain and intermittent. Where water quality is not monitored or controlled, unsafe water may harm people’s health. And when water is preferentially allocated to industry or agriculture, people may not know if they will get enough water to survive. These iterations of water insecurity grow from and exacerbate people’s uncertainty.

Water uncertainty in Bolivia and Brazil

In our own research on water insecurity, spanning nearly 50 years of combined fieldwork and scholarship, we have repeatedly seen how uncertainty drives and exacerbates water insecurity. In Cochabamba, Bolivia, for example, the city’s unreliable and insufficient municipal water system produced uncertainty for its residents. Those who had a piped water connection experienced irregular and uncertain water delivery. Some days the water arrived, and some days it didn’t. Sometimes the water was clear and clean-looking; other days it appeared dirty and contaminated. People were often unsure if the water was safe to drink, or if they would even get any water at all.

People living outside the reach of Cochabamba’s municipal system, in the informal settlements at the southern reaches of the city, had even greater uncertainty to contend with. Most communities invested enormous time and labor in building community-owned tap stand systems, only to find that local groundwater sources were inadequate to support their populations or ran out entirely in a decade or two.4Amber Wutich, “Water Scarcity and the Sustainability of a Common Pool Resource Institution in the Urban Andes,” Human Ecology 37, no. 2 (2009): 179. Nearly everyone relied on privately sold water from tanker-trucks, but nobody knew when one would show up.5Amber Wutich, Melissa Beresford, & Cinthia Carvajal, “Can Informal Water Vendors Deliver on the Promise of a Human Right to Water? Results from Cochabamba, Bolivia,” World Development 79 (March 2016): 14–24. Many missed work (and lost income) because they had to spend hours searching the streets for a vendor who would sell them water. And for people living day-to-day as market vendors, it was also hard to know if they would have enough money to buy the water they needed.

Without reliable access to water from pipes, tap stands, or tanker-trucks, many households invested in rainwater collection systems to insure themselves against shortages, ranging from rusty metal barrels to enormous underground concrete tanks. Since the rain was seasonal and unpredictable, people who used these forms of household water infrastructure did not know when this major investment would pay off. Yet, inevitably, households ran out of water and resorted to their last-choice water source: borrowing water from neighbors. Borrowing water was seen as shameful and humiliating, and water requests were often unexpectedly rejected. In all these ways, uncertainty was shot through the experience of urban and peri-urban water insecurity.

Uncertainty similarly surfaces in Brazil’s semiarid regions, such as Ceará, where water insecurity increases for communities during times of severe drought. While residents in large coastal cities benefit from extensive infrastructure projects to enhance water supplies, residents in smaller interior towns lack such investment. Small-town dwellers in the interior are left on their own, deeply mistrustful of public utilities’ intermittent water supply and water quality. Urban residents see the declining reservoir day by day, noting the increasing uncertainty of water coming out of the tap. The water, when it runs, smells bad, looks funny, and tastes dirty. Daily news reports of reservoir levels and pollution further erode confidence in water quality. This uncertainty forces residents of small towns to negotiate the urban waterscape by any means necessary: seeking out alternative sources, borrowing water from neighbors, and waiting in long lines to access the few tap stands provided by the municipal authorities.

But adaptation to acute water insecurity reflects the chasm between the rich and poor. Most households diversify their water sources, but the burden of water insecurity profoundly affects everyday life for the poorest families, costing time and money they cannot spare. Buying bottled water from the store is beyond their means, and often, they are left to purchase drinking water from illegal or informal water vendors. Illegal or informal water vending fulfills an immediate need, filling the gaps of water provision with uncertain services.

These vendors, especially those using public taps, create their own demand by hoarding space in line with many containers, which increases waiting times. Perversely, this also increases demand for their services from vulnerable individuals and households that could not afford the extra effort to wait. Indeed, threats of violence among vendors create barriers for others to collect public water by reducing opportunities to use the wells. Lack of transportation also increases time to collect water—those with cars require less effort than those on bike or foot. Residents stay in line for water all day, uncertain of when the water will be available, while others change their daily routine to wait in line since dawn hoping to collect water. Others stay up at night to wait for the water, since that is the only time when water pressure is strong enough to run the taps. Or, in some cases, wealthier residents even hire homeless people (papudinhos) to haul water, or else leave buckets to hold their place in the water line.

Water insecurity in the Global North

Uncertainty is not restricted to the Global South. Disadvantaged communities—whether poor, Indigenous, minority, or migrant—often bear the burden of water insecurity. For many, the water flows, but uncertainty over water quality and distrust in the institutions responsible to protect water sources and distribution erode water security.6Wendy Jepson and Heather Lee Brown, “‘If No Gasoline, No Water’: Privatizing Drinking Water Quality in South Texas Colonias,” Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 46, no 5 (2014): 1,032–1,048. Evidence suggests that, for example, water-quality uncertainty increases the substitution of water with soft drinks.7For example, see Amber Wutich and Alexandra Brewis, “Food, Water, and Scarcity: Toward a Broader Anthropology of Resource Insecurity,” Current Anthropology 55, no. 4 (2014): 444–468; and Asher Y. Rosinger et al., “Disparities in Plain, Tap and Bottled Water Consumption among US Adults: National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) 2007–2014,” Public Health Nutrition 21, no. 8 (2018): 1,455–1,464. We need only to look at the ongoing water crisis in Flint, Michigan, contaminated groundwater in largely impoverished Latinx communities in Texas’s Lower Rio Grande Valley, or the chronic substandard service in isolated Appalachian communities to see how uncertainty leads to water insecurity.8→Wendy Jepson, “Measuring ‘No-Win’ Waterscapes: Experience-based Scales and Classification Approaches to Assess Household Water Security in Colonias on the US-Mexico Border,” Geoforum 51 (January 2014): 107–120.
→Wendy Jepson and Emily Vandewalle, “Household Water Insecurity in the Global North: A Study of Rural and Peri-urban Settlements on the Texas-Mexico Border,” The Professional Geographer 68, no. 1 (2016): 66–81.

The consequences of uncertainty in water (in)security—including unreliable access, unexpected price fluctuations, unforeseen time costs, unanticipated shortages, and unsuspected rejections from neighbors—are many. In low- and middle-income communities, these uncertainties have major economic consequences: people lose time and income, and can fall deeper into a cycle of poverty.9→Kevin Watkins et al., Human Development Report (HDR): Beyond Scarcity: Power, Poverty and the Global Water Crisis (New York: United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), 2006).
→Priti Parikh et al., “Infrastructure Provision, Gender, and Poverty in Indian Slums,” World Development 66 (February 2015): 468–486.
→Ben Crow and Brent M. Swallow, “Water and Poverty” in The Oxford Handbook of Water Politics and Policy, ed. Ken Conca and Erika Weinthal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 23–48. Uncertainties in water quality mean people do not know if their water is safe for drinking, cooking, bathing, and even washing. People may drink only bottled water (which is expensive) or switch to sugar-sweetened beverages (which increase a range of health risks). Underlying uncertainties regarding whether people will suffer discrimination from vendors, humiliation from neighbors, or shaming for poor hygiene puts people at greater risk of emotional distress, anxiety, and depression. Put together, uncertainty is a major but poorly documented underlying driver (and consequence) of water insecurity.

Curbing future water insecurity

What are the steps communities and governments can take to address these challenges? There is not one solution to address uncertainty, which is why silver-bullet solutions often work poorly. But there are ways to take positive steps: increases in technical training and hiring of water works employees, infrastructure improvements to raise the capacity to care for water systems, and enhanced support for water-quality monitoring. Most importantly, new pathways must be opened to encourage direct community engagement, empowerment, and partnership. Community engagement can advance water-source protection, drinking water monitoring, and participation in water governance. Public engagement with science, too, can help bolster the effectiveness of community-based efforts—but only when undertaken with a true commitment to shared knowledge production and priority-setting. Above all, any effort to decrease uncertainty in water systems must be guided by a commitment to the human right to water, an internationally endorsed principle that has yet to be realized.