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Ensuring the human right to water requires monitoring at national or subnational levels, but few comprehensive frameworks exist for industrialized contexts. This paper introduces a subnational-level framework - known as the California Human Right to Water Framework and Data Tool (CalHRTW) - developed by the authors at the California EPA's Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment. This paper has two objectives: (1) to present the theoretical foundations and methodology used to develop the first version of CalHRTW (CalHRTW 1.0) and (2) to showcase how results can be used. CalHRTW 1.0 measures three components of the human right to water: drinking water quality, accessibility and affordability for community water systems in California. Nine individual indicators grouped by component, and three indices that summarize component-level outcomes are used to quantify system-level results. CalHRTW allows users to: (1) summarize system-level conditions statewide and identify challenges, (2) explore social equity implications and (3) centralize information for planning. CalHRTW draws on approaches from existing international monitoring efforts and complements existing California efforts by being the first US effort to comprehensively and explicitly monitor the HRTW under one umbrella. This work offers other US states and countries a model to build monitoring efforts to realize the human right to water. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The global drive for universal drinking water security has faltered in rural Africa. Community management of handpumps, which provide water to over 200 million rural people, is the prevailing but increasingly embattled policy choice. A choice experiment is designed to test alternative maintenance models across competing attributes of maintenance provider, maintenance level, payment mode, and payment level. A sample of 3,540 observations is modeled from 118 handpump users in rural Kenya. Results identify community management of maintenance services as the least preferred option with water user payments contingent on an order of magnitude improvement in handpump repair times. Social choice heterogeneity varies by socio-economic status and water use behaviors indicating uneven adoption profiles within communities compounded by no acceptable payment mode. Policy responses to community choices need to address these institutional challenges through new monitoring platforms and acceptable payment systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]