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Contribution short abstract

Bad feelings are instrumentalised to shame people into using toilets, yet unacknowledged disillusionment and frustration pervade the wider affective life of WASH work. Attending to this contradiction allows failures to be reframed as generative spaces for learning, critique, and rethinking Progress.

Contribution long abstract

Water, sanitation, hygiene or WASH has been a prolific part of the Development machinery for almost four decades, both through research and projectized interventions. This paper examines where and how bad feelings are permissible and what this affords in terms of thinking and learning around failures and its imaginaries within the WASH sector.

Behavioural change programmes are a foundational corner stone of WASH a programmatic respons; wherein ‘bad feelings’ of shame and disgust are instrumentalised to stop people from openly defecating and practice ‘good behaviours’ through using toilets. This has been exported through various versions of Community Led Total Sanitation and other community led behaviour change programmes over the last two decades, using shame and disgust in projects and programmes and seemingly permissible because of the WASH sector’s inherently positivist commitment to expanding sanitation ‘coverage’. However, broader ‘bad feelings’ of disillusionment, frustration and critical reflection that centrally underscore and envelop the official record of our work, are left to dissipate in the margins of unfulfilled commitments and slipping sanitation coverage.

Recognising such contradictions provides an opening to ask deeper and richer questions around how pervasive bad feelings of disillusionment and frustration may be generative for a broader, more honest and representative conceptualisation of failures within WASH and development. Attending to these affective undercurrents within development work allows failure to be understood not as an endpoint to be corrected, but as a generative site of learning that challenges how knowledge is produced for Progress in WASH and development practice.