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Paper short abstract:

This paper identifies challenges and opportunities related to sustainable partnerships around wastewater management in complex urban arenas, focusing on what the inclusion of a range of state and non-state actors means for partnership legitimacy.

Paper long abstract:

Sustainable water and wastewater management systems demand effective, rule based, and coherent relations and partnerships between a plethora of different statutory and non-statutory stakeholders across local, national, and even international levels. We present preliminary findings from ongoing work in urban Ghana where a range of existing socio-political and economic power relations and divergent institutional developmental trajectories present challenges as well as opportunities for the production of viable relations between wastewater users and providers. Existing literature suggests that the making of sustainable partnerships demands outreach to a broad spectrum of stakeholders to develop a sense of ownership and recognition of public infrastructure, and that viable partnerships depend on establishing and maintaining legitimacy. Building on these insights, the paper provides evidence from Tema, Ghana, and the experiences and activities of different state institutions and their interactions with different societal actors. Here, we see that, on the one hand, viable partnerships need to embrace a spectrum of stakeholders, but on the other, the inclusion of different, and increased numbers of stakeholders may undermine the ability of planners to establish broad based legitimacy. This may especially be the case in complex urban arenas where ambitious sustainability agendas are pursued by a plethora of NGOs, donors, government, and private sector interests.