This is the last video for this first lecture on the role that ancient instincts play in the water and sanitation sector. In the previous video, I argued that when our ancestors settled down into permanent communities, they brought with them a set of ancient instincts from their time as hunter gatherers. That these ancient instincts still pose obstacles for water policies today. Part of the reason that these water related instincts pose obstacles for solutions to our current water and sanitation problems is that they're more complex than our love for sugar or our fear of snakes. Our ancient instincts about water are conflicting, pulling us in different directions. Water has both positive and negative associations. It can be productive and destructive. In this figure on the left, there's a list of good things that water does for us. On the right, a list of risks and dangers. Pictures such as this arouse positive emotions in most of us. Drinking water is absolutely essential for life, and water provides us with opportunities for bathing and swimming. Even seeing water makes most people happy and more relaxed. Globally, a house with a water view or alongside water commands a 65% premium compared to an identical house that is not near the water. This is a huge price premium. But water can also be dangerous. Human can be hit by floods and droughts. They can drown or become ill from contaminated water. Carnivores can lurk in water holes. Pictures such as these arouse negative emotions in most of us. Today, water still presents us with both risks like floods and droughts and disease, and opportunities such as water for irrigation, hydropower and recreation. Investments or policies can reduce some risks while increasing others. For example, some dams may reduce flood risk but increase health risks. On the other hand, some investments can reduce downside risk and at the same time, increase upside opportunities. It all depends on local conditions and context. Some ancient water related instincts in Iraq. Others play out in sequence. Often these ancient instincts present themselves as a series of hurdles that policy initiatives must get through. How are these ancient instincts affecting our ability to tackle 21st century water problems? From my perspective, ancient instincts present planners with a complex obstacle course. Sensible economic policies have a hard time making it past all of these water related ancient instincts unscathed. Let me give you some examples. Consider our fear of being denied access to water. We are quickly aroused by the threat of losing access to basic drinking water supplies. It seems to me that this leads to intensely emotional debates about privatization, debates we don't have about cell phones, roads, or electricity. Different parts of our brain get aroused. We also need electricity and telecommunications but they do not activate the same kinds of fears. Of course, people also dislike losing access to food and lots of other subsidized goods and services. But I think there's a difference between the dislike of losing subsidies, say, in the fuel sector, and the fear associated with losing access to water or losing subsidies to water. Our hunter gather ancestors were unable to trade water. And we are still unwilling to price drinking water at rates close to the cost of service. This remains a problem today in many parts of the world. The UN declaration that water is a human right is now widely used as an argument that municipal water and sanitation services should be free or heavily subsidized. And it feels good to declare that water is a human right. Who wants to object to this? There's support among many people for NGOs to bring legal action against governments of developing countries for failure to provide improved water and sanitation services to households. But the UN declaration that water is a human right has had a chilling effect on what, from my perspective, are sensible efforts to reform water prices and tariffs. This reluctance to use price instruments has created a wicked set of interrelated problems in the wash sector. First, there are few incentives to innovate because services are so cheap. Second, most utilities in low income countries are for all practical purposes bankrupt. They have no cash to adapt to a changing climate or to improve or expand services. Third, when piped water services are very cheap, people tend to waste water, using it for frivolous, nonessential purposes. And utilities don't bother to find and repair leaks in their networks. It's just not worth the time and cost involved. Fourth, heavily subsidized water services send the signal to overbuild network capacity, raising the capital costs higher than they need to be and misallocating capital to the sector. Fifth, without pricing tools, utilities have to find other ways to control wasteful water practices. This usually involves non-price conservation measures. These are not all bad but they're often a blunt, imprecise policy instrument. Six, few governments or water professionals want to submit water and sanitation interventions to rigorous economic or financial evaluations, except possibly for the purpose of demonstrating a conclusion reached a priori that the benefits far exceed the cost. As we saw, there are 1 billion open defecators in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. This is a huge public health problem. It is our ancient instinct about feces and defecation that make it so reluctant to discuss policy interventions about such sanitation problems. Open defecation away from settlements made sense in a world of hunter gathers with very low population densities. It doesn't make sense today in the density populated rural areas and villages of South Asia, or especially in megacities. We are reluctant to discuss defecation or for example anal cleaning practices. How can we solve a problem we are reluctant even to discuss? We also identified an ancient instinct regarding water for relaxation and pleasure. This is an ancient instinct that is too often ignored today in urban design and land use planning. Our need for water for relaxation is not thus conceptualized as an obstacle, but rather as a need or desire that's being largely neglected in the megacities of the developing world. In fact, our ancient love of water was also neglected in many cities in the industrialized world in the 19th and early 20th centuries during periods of rapid industrialization. I'm speaking to you today from Manchester, England, which is a classic example of a city that neglected the use of water for recreational aesthetic purposes in the 19th century, and still bears the consequences today. But even here the ancient instinct was not completely buried. It pops up in the bath houses in the Victorian Era where people would go to swim. We have several here in Manchester. This one is now under reconstruction. But if by chance you come to study with us in Manchester, it might be finished before you arrive. There's strong path dependency in urban design and land use, and a failure to plan for water based recreation and aesthetics can be very expensive to correct. In part, this path dependency arises from the extremely capital intensive piped water and sewer networks and the costs associated with changing urban land use decisions. But another aspect of the problem is that most cities are treating all their water to potable water standards or at least trying to do so. This means that they are often few non-potable supplies that can be easily delivered for recreational and aesthetic uses that do not require drinking water standards. Many cities have thus inadvertently locked themselves into urban designs and land use patterns that make it very difficult to incorporate our ancient instincts for water, for recreation and aesthetic purposes. The Wadi Hanifa project in Riyadh illustrates the complexity and expense of adding water-based recreational opportunities for citizens in the middle of a large city. But this project also shows that it is possible, and it also shows how much people like it. To be clear, I'm not saying we should put recreational aesthetic uses of water ahead of public health, but treating all municipal water to potable standards had an unforseen side effect. It discouraged the used of non-potable water in urban design. This has economic consequences in a high tech services economy because people want to live in interesting, beautiful cities. And it will be increasingly hard to recruit highly educated, skilled people to work in megacities devoid of parks and opportunities for water recreation, such as shown in this slide. To summarize the main points of this lecture, where do we stand with respect to these ancient instincts and water policies? We are still pricing water far below cost and it is difficult to have a serious civil discourse about tariff reform. In most cities, we are still locked into a 19th century water supply and sanitation complex that uses potable water for feces removal. And we're treating water to drinking water standards and then mixing it with feces to remove it from our homes and neighborhoods. In most megacities of the global south, we're not using water effectively in urban design for relaxation and aesthetic purposes. In the remainder of the lectures in this course, we're going to look at some of the water policies that have been tried in developing countries. And try to draw lessons about what policies, or sets of policies, are needed to improve baseline conditions that exist today. I have devoted this first lecture in the course to the idea of ancient instincts in the water and sanitation sector because I think it's important to reflect carefully about where our ideas and reactions to various water policy proposals come from. I don't want to imply these ancient instincts are all bad. Nor do I believe that they're locked in stone and can't be changed. But to deliver sound, sustainable water and sanitation services to people in both industrialized and low income countries, I believe we need to be cognizant of these ancient instincts. We have to refocus on our cities where an increasingly large proportion of humankind lives, and we have to talk about and recognize how our behavior is still shaped by these ancient instincts. We need new visions for our water and sanitation technological complex and then we need to nudge these new visions along. We have to think deeply about how to slowly change some of our spontaneous behavioral responses to policy reform. There are no shortcuts to this work that I know of. It requires both patience and persistence. These ancient instincts have been with us a long time. Let me conclude with a quote from Albert Hirschman, who is a renowned economic development theorist who spent much of his career at Harvard and Princeton. Professor Hirschman said, it is where one faces the most resistance that one should press one's pursuits. It is where one faces the most resistance that one should press one's pursuits. This is just the opposite of the currently popular idea in the development field of picking the low hanging fruit, or doing the quickest, easiest projects with high returns. What Hirschman is saying is that sometimes you have to tackle your most difficult problem first, and then the rest will fall into place. This was actually the military strategy of Alexander the Great. He used his elite troops, his Greek phalanx, to attack his enemies' strongest point. When he destroyed his enemies' best forces, the others typically collapsed. The analogy here is that, from my perspective, water related ancient instincts are often the point of most resistance. As we start to study different water and sanitation policies, we have to be ready to direct these policies toward ancient instincts, which are likely to be where one faces the most resistance.
