How We Are Made to Make Sense of the World Around Us
The structure of information flows
This article is part of a series of 12 articles about applications of 12 leverage points to intervene in a system. Systems thinking author Donella Meadows published Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System, a paper in 1997, in which she enumerated the 12 points in an increasing order of effectiveness.
The structure of information flows is the 6th in the order of 12 leverage points that are effective for systems change. I lifted her thoughts in the paper and have carried them across in a current context.
In the agglomerated metropolis of Manila, Philippines, in the labelled “Global South” in Asia, access to water by urban slum dwellers and low-income populations is a sociopolitical issue, as is everywhere else. After nearly 40 years of operation, the national state-run waterworks and sewerage system authority was spectacularly failing in providing water and sewerage services to the metropolis’ developing industries and population. The inability to maintain service was due to urban growth and development among many causes. But the authority’s lack of appropriate response to the growing water demand is largely because of the unplanned growth of industries within the metropolis.
By the early 1990s, pilferage, theft, non-payment of water utilities by industrial establishments, and low-income and urban informal settlers totally got out of hand. In a neoliberal approach, the national government opened the concession of its water and sewerage service to private sector partnerships.
In an Asian Development Bank publication by Deborah Cheng, in just over ten years, one of the two private concessionaires, despite the hurdles, performed exceedingly well and corrected the water problem. In 2010, this concessionaire reported that 99 percent of the population in its jurisdiction had 24-hour water availability, while non-revenue water (NRW), which is water provided as a free utility to low-income and marginalized populations, was down to 11 per cent from 63 per cent.
Furthermore, Cheng wrote, the concessionaire’s flagship programme “Water for the Poor” has garnered numerous national and international awards for its delivery of services to low-income communities, including informal settlements. Based on these accounts, it appeared that the national government has been able to address the water problem and many of the critiques of privatized water delivery — such as failure to serve the poor — that have been made of utilities in other “Global South” metropolitan areas in Buenos Aires, Argentina and La Paz, Bolivia, among others.
Quite a “success” story
What was not a scrutinized part of the “success” story was how the concessionaire was able to transfer the burden of providing service to its poor customers to the poor themselves.
A United Nations report describes the “Water for the Poor” programme as fostering partnerships that “…enhance the community’s sense of ownership and increase the willingness to pay, encourage residents to closely monitor and guard against pilferage, improve collection efficiency, increase transparency and expedite public consultations, all of which make the programme manageable, financially viable and sustainable.”
Although these characterizations may very well have some truth to them, they also mask the underlying reasons behind this newfound sense of ownership. Rather, as critiques of similar partnerships in other cities have demonstrated, these relationships can not only effectively transfer costs and responsibilities from utilities to low-income households but also paternalistically demand — force down — behavioural changes.
Various partnership schemes in sub-Saharan Africa demonstrated how such models have been used to offload some utility management risks onto low-income communities, describing this externalization as the “miracle of participation”. Likewise, attempts to “…empower customers to take ownership of consumption…” is being made through the forced calculability of prepaid water meters.
Cheng examined the increased visibility of urban water networks in both poor and non-poor areas. She argued that the concessionaires engage in such practices in part to reduce support for NRW, which at its head, is primarily increasing profits in the guise of public service.
In low-income areas, the techniques directed at curbing non-payment predicate access to water upon the increased policing of certain citizens and spaces, and that policing has partially been transferred from the concessionaires to individuals, community-based organizations, and entrepreneurs, thus shifting the politics — and the burden — of non-payment closer to the community level.
But while these processes increase visibility for the concessionaires and affected communities, a parallel process is at work — one that masks the imperfections of current modes of infrastructure expansion. As the concessionaires produce and propagate aggregate statistics in the national and international arena, households that are unserved or underserved remain obscured from the statistics.
Cheng also reported that a critique of some plans to meet the United Nations Millennium Development Goals cautions that an over-reliance on aggregate statistics can be problematic because it tends to underestimate the scale and particularities of urban poverty and inequality. More generally, it is found that numbers are politicized judgments that reflect what and how to measure as well as ways in which we interpret those results. In large metropolitan areas, the use of aggregate statistics simultaneously helps to clarify and obscure the complexity of urbanization. Arguably, the inflation of statistics can be tied to financial motivations, political success, or other perverse system incentives that detract from actual poverty and inequality alleviation.
This is a story that may best exemplify how information-flow — the power of information, how it is concocted or translated, where it is directed to, and who consumes such information — is a high leverage point in the information structure of the system.
Insufficient, adulterated, distorted, biased, or totally missing information is a set of the most common causes of system malfunction and abuse. Information — truthful or manipulated — stands center in our sense-making, our faculties for discernment. In the processes of sense-making — from data, to information, to knowledge, to decision-making, and finally to action — it is the dominant player who aggregates these processes and wields the power. Needless to say, the feedback loop in each of these processes can be corrupted to best serve those that create the system rules.
As Donella Meadows put it, we humans have a systematic tendency to avoid accountability for our own decisions and actions. That’s why so many feedback loops are missing — and why this kind of leverage point is so often popular with the masses, but unpopular with the powers that be, and effective, if you can get the powers that be to permit it to happen (or go around them and make it happen anyway).
Adding or restoring information can be a powerful intervention, usually much easier and cheaper than building or rebuilding physical infrastructure. But the tragedy of the commons that is crashing the world occurs because there may be no truthful — proper to say the least — feedback from any institution and its intervening entities.
So, is the Metro Manila water concessionaire able to sustain the system tweaks introduced to correct the water problem in the metropolis?
In a 2020 annual report of the current waterworks service authority, figures from the one concessionaire with national and international laurels 30 years ago stands at a cumulative 94.33% coverage in service areas, down from 99% after ten years of privatization. However, a staggering 46.75% non-revenue water — 30 years ago from 63% then down to 11% after 10 years of privatization and then, today, up again. So what gives?
The system, which in this case is water as a public service, is delivering information to a place where it was not going before, hence, causing players in the system (and interrelated systems) to behave differently from what was initially intended. Were goals met? Was the promise sustainably fulfilled? The repeated problem is being addressed today on one front — with more infrastructure by building dams in mountains and forest watersheds around the metropolis. But this is another case and story for another system intervention in another article.
For better or for worse, system feedback shall continue to emerge.
References: (In)visible urban water networks: the politics of non-payment in Manila’s low-income communities; Manila Waterworks and Sewerage System 2020 annual report
Related articles: Stop Interventions that Backfire; Self Organization: Our Behavioral Repertoires
