It’s a weekend, and I’m actually on holidays until August 17th, but I’m going to do a thread on the water disconnections in Nairobi RCT on Monday. I’ve already explained the ethics of experimenting and intervening poor slums in a Global South country by taking away their water.

To those quasi-justifying this field experiment: water IS a human right. UN General Assembly Resolution A/RES/64/292 indicates that every human on this planet has the right to access water
https://undocs.org/en/A/RES/64/292  (timing on this RCT is IMPECCABLE: Resolution passed Aug 3, 2010)

People who justify this intervention as "being more efficient than a rights-based approach" (I'm paraphrasing the authors here) fail to really deeply understand the politics of how water utilities work. Kent Weaver's blame avoidance theory is useful here https://www.jstor.org/stable/4007281 

A water utility (and more specifically, a government agency tasked with providing water and sanitation) has incentives to CONTINUE providing water, not cut it off (as the authors themselves admit in their paper: City of Nairobi was RELUCTANT to strictly enforce disconnections).

IF a water utility becomes financially unviable they will seek other models of alternative service delivery (read Kathryn Furlong on this). There are ways to make water utilities more efficient and work properly https://groupesage.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/furlongbakker-contdnsasd-2010.pdf

Why not incentivize THE WATER UTILITY?

I can't believe I need to explain to people that water is a human right and that any intervention that denies this basic right is unethical, wrong and (worse for economists), actually inefficient (not that you need to use efficiency metrics in a study on vulnerable humans, JFC)

This is my (on-the-fly, off-the-cuff) other thread on the ethics of this field experiment https://twitter.com/raulpacheco/status/1292268870917595137

And now I'm really going to disconnect before I get angrier.