Upstream or Downstream? The Limits of Community Engagement in International Development

Craig MacDonald
Nov 3 · 11 min read

In theory, community consultation clears up dilemmas and opens a path to action. In practice, things are never that simple.


Water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH), are a core part of international development. The Sixth UN Sustainable Development Goal is to “ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all”. But in the development world funds are always in short supply and “water and sanitation for all” ends up becoming “water and sanitation for some”. How do we make hard choices about who to prioritize, or whether to prioritize immediate public health issues or long-lasting environmental damage and indirect health impacts?

As the case study below of a small informal settlement in Delhi shows, this isn’t just a theoretical question, but a real problem that forces us to deal with not just public consultation and community engagement, but also with ethical decision-making.


Getting off at the New Ashok Nagar Metro station, the air smells faintly like burning popcorn. For a second it’s almost a pleasant smell, until you remember there’s no way whatever it is you’re smelling comes from anything even near as non-carcinogenic as burnt popcorn. Crossing the bridge from Noida back into Delhi, the air picks up the smell of stagnant water and you get your first look at the Shahadra drain. Just 5km downstream the Shahadra drain empties into the Yamuna, a river which provides water to 57 million people, and which is actively vying for the title of ‘India’s most polluted river’.

Looking south towards the Yamuna. Photo credit: Craig MacDonald.

Hopping on a motorcycle and ripping up the Ghazipur road, the community of Trilokpuri on your left and the Shahadra drain on your right, a hill rises up straight ahead out of the haze. It’s a hot, stagnant day, but when the wind shifts and blows towards you, the smell of garbage is more immediate than usual. Lined up directly with the road, the Ghazipur landfill looms over you.

The Ghazipur landfill — over 200 ft tall. Until recently, named “Delhi Garbage Mountain” on Google Maps (4-stars!). Photo credit: Unknown.

Pulling over onto a little patch of plastic-covered dirt on the side of the road, you’ve made it. A tiny informal settlement wedged in between Ghazipur road and the community of Trilokpuri. About 2–3 houses wide, but about 20 houses long, the community feels slender, if not cramped. The main ‘street’ is barely wide enough for two people to pass shoulder to shoulder. Not technically a legal settlement, and not acknowledged by local authorities, the community doesn’t benefit from government services. An open drain bounds the community on one side and the retaining wall between the community and the road on the other. The drain is what you’re here for.

The narrow main ‘street’. A narrow street, for a narrow settlement. All photo credits from here onwards: Craig MacDonald

Open drains cause all kinds of problems. They’re breeding grounds for mosquitos. There’s increased exposure to disease and toxic contaminants. Chronic exposure to raw sewage can stunt growth. When it rains, drains can overtop and spill over into streets and houses. And, never to be discounted as a part of human well-being, the constant, awful, smell of an open drain on a hot day. People living by open drains obviously want to address these concerns.

Some houses open right into the drain — to get into the house you need to cross a makeshift bridge over the drain. (There are 3 pigs in this picture — pigs have great camouflage)

All houses have tiny tributary drains leading to the community’s main drain, which empties into the Shahadra drain, which in turn empties directly into the Yamuna.

Tributary drains. Closed, semi-open, or open (left-to-right). These take human waste and cooking or cleaning waste to the main drain. Most homes in informal settlements in India either have pit latrines beneath them, or release water to tributary drains.

Open drains are often full of plastic waste. The drain in this community is especially bad. Plastic waste can block the flow of water, causing human waste to settle, contaminants to accumulate, and providing a great home for mosquitos who love slow-moving water. With no regular garbage collection services, open drains are popular dumping locations. During rainstorms even more plastic waste is washed into the drains, preventing the flow of water and further compounding flooding problems.

Plastic waste clogging up the drain.

A few more photos to illustrate the severity of the problem in this community.

A trap-door to the drain below a resident’s house. Contaminated wastewater can sometimes soak into masonry, rising up through the walls.

And the winner for ‘most impressively polluted drain’:

Food waste, plastic waste, and household waste like pieces of old clothing show that this part of the drain is used for dumping. Mix in household cooking and cleaning contaminants (notice the color/texture of water from the drainage spout, and the film it leaves, indicating oils or detergents). Plenty of leaves blown in for good measure, and likely more than enough human waste which drives up organics content of the water.

What to do? What are the problems and what tools do you have available to deal with them? It’s bad form to think about the tools before the problems to be solved, but we’ll make an exception right now. A common type of tool to treat water in developing countries are “decentralized wastewater treatment systems (DEWATS)”. These are micro-sized wastewater treatment systems. Their designs and their levels of treatment vary from system to system and are highly site-specific, but in general they usually have some form of primary treatment (a septic tank or sedimentation pond to settle the waste) and secondary treatment (some sort of anaerobic reactor or filter to break down the waste). But these cost money, and sometimes more importantly (as is the case here), need space. There’s simply no room to put a DEWATS anywhere but upstream or downstream of the community. Which do we choose?

A potential site immediately downstream of the community. This is before the drain reaches the Shahadra drain and the Yamuna (the drain can be a little hard to see in the bottom right).

Now let’s turn back to the problem. What are we trying to fix here? If it’s an immediate public health problem, the best option is to place the DEWATS directly upstream, treating the water before it passes through the community. But what if it’s viewed as an environmental problem or an indirect public health problem for people downstream? Then the best place to put the DEWATS is directly down-stream of the community where the most solid waste can be filtered out and the most wastewaster can be treated before it reaches the Yamuna.

A potential upstream(ish) site for the DEWATS. (Notice the well in the bottom-left corner. Groundwater quality is something that always needs to be taken into consideration, especially when it is being directly used as a source of drinking water).

The first thing to do is always to engage with the community. This helps tease out underlying problems and focus on what the people living in this community view as their primary concerns. Good consultation with community leaders and local women (who often spend the most time directly dealing with problems and their impacts within the community) is essential to understanding the problems, while also building the trust necessary to enable the acceptance, ownership, and maintenance of projects. Projects with poor community engagement are much less likely to be successful. It’s easy for well-meaning NGOs to come in and solve the wrong problems, or build a project but not get the buy-in necessary to maintain and sustain those projects afterwards. In this case, discussions with a local leader (the man with the trap-door under his home) and women within the community confirmed that public health issues, especially disease and smells, were the dominant concerns.

If you ask a community where the most preferable place for a wastewater treatment system to be built is, the answer is usually “right before our houses”. Where’s the worst place? “Right after our houses”. Build upstream and the community gets all the benefits, build downstream and the community gets none. Seems cut and dry. But we know that the community is going to continue to dump waste into the drain downstream of the DEWATS, and judging from the evidence above, it’s likely to be a substantial amount. All of that will flow right out of the community and into the Yamuna.

Maybe we should just extend the consultation outwards from the few hundred who live in the community. Should the downstream residents get a say as well? How do we weigh the voices of the 57 million who live along and make use of the Yamuna (maybe ‘just’ 40 million voices if we take out the population of Delhi upstream of the outflow to the Yamuna)? Should we weigh the voices of the future generations who will have to deal with the lasting impacts of a polluted environment as well? They would all certainly prefer that the residents of this community treat their water downstream of the community to ensure it will be cleaner when it makes their way to them. Why should they have to deal with the environmental and health problems while that community pushes those problems off onto everyone else?

Residents of the community may object that the wastewater and solid waste coming from their community is just a drop in the polluted bucket. However, there are likely thousands, if not tens of thousands of small communities making similar arguments. Those drops add up, even if it’s only very partially one community’s fault that the Yamuna is a dead river.

Residents of the community may object that they have to deal with the impacts of these problems more immediately because the drains are right in front of their houses. But residents downstream can easily reply that even if the problems aren’t as immediate to them as it is to the residents of the community, the indirect consequences still add up, especially given the number of people impacted downstream. Residents of the community may respond that the differences in quality between water treated upstream of their community and water treated downstream will be so slight, that the direct benefits to them might outweigh the collective harm to residents downstream.

Residents of the community may even argue that if their health improves, they and their children will be more successful and more likely to be able to fix these problems in the future. It’s much easier to turn your attention to the environment when you don’t have cholera.

We haven’t even looked at environmental concerns yet insofar as they don’t relate to public health. If we consult only residents we might miss out on arguments focused on environmental costs and benefits entirely. But is there value in protecting the Yamuna and its ecosystem independent of its impacts on human health, wealth, and flourishing, and are we confident enough that this is the case that we should consider this in the face of immediate human suffering?

Widening the scope of community consultation to downstream residents hasn’t given us any clear answers. Who else can we turn to? We could ask local elected representatives. However, they don’t have a very favorable view of informal settlements neighboring their communities (often in their words “illegal settlements”). We could consult the NGO building the system about their stated objectives, or ask the NGO’s donors who they prefer we help, but will that really give us a satisfying answer? There are real normative (ethical) problems here which can’t be solved with community consultation alone.


At the end of the day however, a decision has to be made. Upstream or downstream?

In a horrible cop-out for this piece, I didn’t end up deciding on either. It turned out that given the geographic constraints of the community, it would be cheaper and more effective for the community to convert the open main drain to a closed drain, install metal screens for plastics upstream of the community to prevent solid waste from entering and improve the flow of water, and try and organize maintenance to occasionally clear obstacles and remove sedimented human waste which would inevitably build up (an essential but unappealing job). This would help mitigate smells and disease to an extent. Not great, but better than before.

Perfect is the enemy of the good, and that seems even more true in international development than in other areas. Resources are limited, space is constrained, problems are immediate, and the complexity can be overwhelming. Getting a DEWATS system built and working, in either location, is preferable to not having one built or working. It’s often easier to get support from the community with concentrated benefits rather than diffuse costs (or in this case, smaller benefits). Needing buy-in from a community to build, and just as importantly, to maintain a system means that systems which benefit a community most directly are most likely to be successful. If a DEWATS system downstream may be more beneficial in theory, a maintained, functional system that the community has a stake in is more beneficial in practice. Sometimes in practice it doesn’t end up even being a DEWATS at all, and instead it’s a few metal grills, some concrete blocks, and the odd vent.

Is this just falling back on a kind of pragmatic decision making to avoid the ethical aspects of this decision? Not quite. I would argue this this is more a form of particularism, in which we make decisions not based on broad or clear-cut principles alone, but by taking all the morally relevant facts and circumstances into account. Whether a DEWATS has community buy-in and will be maintained and functional is certainly morally relevant. Basing our decisions on broad principles or on the theoretical best-case scenarios also won’t usually get us the results we’re hoping for. Building a DEWATS to get the job done and go home is certainly pragmatic, but not the way we ought to make decisions. Building a DEWATS (or in this case, covering the drain) because you have good reasons to believe it will lead to the best ‘not-great outcome’ out of many other ‘not-great outcomes’ may not always be satisfying (especially to someone who believes that we should act in certain ways out of principle alone), but it is effective. And if at the end of the day we’re not committed to being effective, we shouldn’t be in the business of solving problems.

Community consultation is an important first step in addressing issues, but when stakeholders’ interests are diametrically opposed we run into problems. Sometimes there’s room for compromise, but when faced with an impasse between stakeholders we need to turn to ethical decision-making to guide our actions. This may also mean coming to terms with unfortunate realities. Even if we are reasonably certain there may be greater benefits to residents outside the community if we build a DEWATS downstream, if the only way to get the DEWATS built and maintained is to build it upstream of the community, we need to pick the theoretically less-optimal choice and build it upstream. It’s also important to recognize that there is often a bias towards building things or implementing programs in the community being engaged with, both as a result of the community engagement process and as an outcome of practical ethical decision-making. This is something to be aware of when deciding which communities to start working with.

In international development, as in almost everything is life, things are complicated and nothing is ever easy. Knowing the limits of the tools we have available (whether social or technical) can help us discern how best to use those tools, and what to do when we hit the limits of their usefulness. When we have to make decisions all we can do is pick the best of the worst with the limited information we have available to us. Being less reliant on broad-stroke principles, being able to compromise on theoretical best-case outcomes, and becoming more comfortable wrestling with the tangle of morally relevant facts and circumstances can help us make better decisions, and in the process make us more confident about the hard choices we inevitably have to make.

Craig MacDonald

Written by

Working in the fields of disaster management and resilient infrastructure policy.

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