Dear Guy,

I love small, doable actions! Your proposed changes were great, small and doable, so I have implemented them now.

The "grey" category is now called "Markets, finance and governance" and that one sub-section that you mentioned is now called:
Financing: tariffs, taxes, transfers, subsidies
- Includes discussions on subsidies, cash transfers, results based financing, tariffs and costs

Changing category and sub-category titles, as well as their short descriptions, is very easy to do (note that all the URLs to individual threads remain unaffected by such a name change). So if anyone wants to put forward an even better suggestion, please feel free.

I think for now we might postpone the split into two categories simply for practical reasons (not enough space for another category). Also I'd like for the categories to be roughly of a similar size. Our biggest category so far is the blue one on systems which has 10 sub-categories:
www.forum.susana.org/forum/categories/33-sanitation-systems

If we were to split off the category on "Market development" into its own category, it would be rather tiny with only two sub-categories. But of course this could change in future, so we could do such a split in future if the category continues to grow.


Regards,
Elisabeth

Hi Everybody!

I'd like to comment on the name of this forum. But I know how irritating it is when you do a public consultation and everyone gives you different advice 3 months after you asked for it! So feel free to ignore my comments!

1) Forum title: John Sauer is my very good friend! But I have to agree with Giacomo on this: it's weird and unhelpful that governance and public finance should now be subsumed under "Market Development". The icon is excellent, but I would argue that this category should be titled something more generic and less loaded, maybe "Financing sanitation” or “Finance, markets and governance” or “Markets, finance and governance”… perhaps the last one would keep everyone happy, I mean rampant capitalists like John and raging pinkos like me!

2) Title of subforum on financing: Within that, I think the subforums you suggest are good. Except the subforum title “Financing (supply- and demand-side), costs” is clunky: why not just “Financing” or “Financing: tariffs, taxes, transfers”?

Hope this is helpful, feel free to disregard... and many many thanks to the SuSanA team for keeping this incredible forum alive and kicking.

Guy Norman of WSUP and Public Finance for WASH

Thanks for your reply Elisabeth,

If it were up to me I would propose a split. My argument is basically what I wrote earlier. I see governance and markets both as coordinating mechanism, but for different purposes. Markets coordinate the exchange of goods and services, while governance includes also other issues of importance within society. There is certainly overlap between the tow, but there are also distinctions. We should also not equate government with governance and private sector with markets. Private sector plays also a crucial role in governance, as much as the state plays an essential role in markets and market development (as John rightly points out).

So if people do agree and a split between these two topics is carried out, I would include the following topics from the list that you sent (but I'm open to discussion):

- Financing (supply- and demand-side), costs
- Topics around sanitation in cities in particular with regards to appropriate planning, implementation, and management processes in cities
- Monitoring and evaluation (M&E)
- Government as a driver
- Global political processes

Best regards,
Giacomo

Dear all,
Thanks so much for your feedback about the icon (see in this thread here ). I plan to sit down with Kelly as soon as she has a spare moment and make a "final" decision about the icon (as many of the new proposals are for sure better than what we have right now, so I would like to move this forward quite quickly now).

KC: your points are very valid, I particularly agree with you on:

Although I like #2 a lot, I'm not sure about the hand. To me, the hand implies "giving" which is detrimental to markets.

Giacomo: You brought up the question again if the category should be split in two, one half for market development and the other half for governance topics. This is very valid and we've discussed this back and forth a few times. I can see both sides of the argument.
I was in the past arguing more for pratical reasons to keep them together in one category (due to the possible overlap, as you pointed out, and just to keep the number of forum categories manageable and of a similar size).

John Sauer had pointed out his thinking why they could stay together in one category (scrol to the beginning of this thread):

Market Development includes the core functions of supply and demand in the market (or the four P’s — Product, Price, Place, and Promotion), the supporting functions (Finance, Coordination, Information, Guidance, Incentives, Quality, Workforce), and the rules functions (Policy and Regulation; Taxes and Tariffs).

[...]

Oh and the question was raised how governance topics fit under this new category title? Governance topics (scaling up, budgeting, global political processes such as human rights, SDGs) are also included because government is a player in many of the supporting and rules functions and, for sanitation, ultimately needs to be a market player/driver in its own right for sustainability.

His line of argument kind of convinced me that keeping them together is OK. Does it convince you?

If you were to propose a split, which of the sub-categories would you put where? The first three into market development and the second three into "governance"?
Here you can see the sub-categories that we have so far:
forum.susana.org/forum/categories/68-market-development

On a side note, I am pleased that this category has recently expanded, regarding the number of threads and posts it's getting from SuSanA members. This is really nice and shows that SuSanA members are not only interested in technology and reuse issues (perhaps our original focus) but nowadays more and more also in the non-technical, market and governance orientated topics (as well as health and behaviour, see our "red" and "orange" categories). This is nice to see, as we had in the past been criticised by some for having too narrow a focus.*


Regards,
Elisabeth

* I have tried to capture some of these challenges here on the Wikipedia page about SuSanA and invite anyone to add to it or to modify it:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainable_Sanita...ges_and_difficulties

Dear John and others,

Great to see that there is a 'market development' category on Susana. However, I'm not so happy to see that this has come in the place of a 'governance' category. As I see it, these two categories can certainly co-exist. There will be some overlap, but there are also distinctions. Having 'governance' as a sub-category of 'market development' implies to me that governance is just existing to facilitate the market, something which I do not agree with.

For me governance is a process of interactions between a different actors and institutions. It's a process of tying to find shared solutions to common problems, and sometimes it's also a process of conflicting interests. In many parts of the world governance is equal to government, while in other parts the private sector and civil society is formally included in decision making. I'm not so interested in finding out which system is best, but what works where (and how it works). That's why I'd rather have a separate governance category on this Forum.

Questions that can be posed are who is the lead institution on sanitation in country X? Where does financing come from? How are feedback lops and accountability mechanisms organised. Why are certain issues being taken up but others not? etc.

I realise that sometimes there will be topics which overlap, but I'm sure that the great Susana moderators will find a way to sort this out I'll also gladly let others worry about the design of an icon for this

Best regards,
Giacomo

As you might have noticed, the “grey” category at the top in this forum was yesterday changed to the new name of “Market development” – it used to be called “Business, governance.” The reason why I suggested to the SuSanA secretariat to make this name change is in short because I felt we needed a category that encompasses the systems thinking, or systemic change, that many organizations are saying we need to apply in the sanitation sector to ultimately be successful. I hope the name shift will spark a rich conversation in the sector about our approaches to solving sanitation, so that we can have universal use of sanitation services and zero pathogens from fecal contamination in neighborhoods, drainage, and receiving waters.

They followed my reasoning and that’s why we changed it. Further explanations are below:

Market Development includes the core functions of supply and demand in the market (or the four P’s — Product, Price, Place, and Promotion), the supporting functions (Finance, Coordination, Information, Guidance, Incentives, Quality, Workforce), and the rules functions (Policy and Regulation; Taxes and Tariffs).

There are many market players across the production to use spectrum (Manufacturers, Importers, Distributers/Aggregators, Service Providers, and Consumers). There is a disciplined approach to understanding the market as it is and what the failures are so that interventions can be prioritized to address those failures with the ultimate goal of improving service delivery for the poor. Then as the market evolves, based on those actions, that discipline can continue to be applied and interventions can shift as needed based on new analysis. This market systems development approach, sometimes called M4P (making markets work for the poor) has been documented by the M4P community of practice for many years now, and there is a current push to build better evidence of success and failures and to see this approach expand more widely into health areas, including sanitation. For further information and resources please visit BEAM Exchange (www.beamexchange.org/en/).

Oh and the question was raised how governance topics fit under this new category title? Governance topics (scaling up, budgeting, global political processes such as human rights, SDGs) are also included because government is a player in many of the supporting and rules functions and, for sanitation, ultimately needs to be a market player/driver in its own right for sustainability.

I also see "Market development" as the main category addressing some of the concerns brought up earlier on the Forum about the Business, governance topic. I hope these explanations of what Market development is helps clarify and also helps us see that we need to address these issues as they interact with each other as sanitation is a complex adaptive system. We need to have frameworks, processes, and tools that help us work on and within that system.

Future posts under Market Development will include resources on implementing the Market Development approach. In particular, I plan to highlight and track a market development program in West Africa that PSI has just launched with partners PATH and WSUP called Sanitation Service Delivery. We might also work on a new icon soon. I look forward to questions and comments.

Regards,
John