The implementation gap – Why good policies fail

I was honoured to be asked to give a "provocation" to assembled sector luminaries during the High-Level Summit on “Water for People” in Glasgow on Monday 5 October 2026.

The summit was part of IWA’s World Water Congress & Exhibition 2026. It was organised with the express intention of bringing a consolidated message from IWA’s members – water and sanitation practitioners from around the world – to the upcoming UN Water Conference taking place in December in Abu Dhabi. 

The focus of the summit was on what is known as "Interactive Dialogue A – Water for People".  Ensuring that linkage to the conference, we had with us Ghana (one of the two co-chairs along with Switzerland of the dialogue) represented by the energetic Honourable Ahmed Ibrahim, Minister for Works, Housing and Water Resources as well as Senegal's inexhaustible Sherpa for the overall conference - my friend Dr. Mohammed Diatta. 

I’m not sure my provocation (see the lightly edited text below) – really provoked many people in the room - indeed the overall consensus was of "violent agreement". An interesting and encouraging finding in itself.

That said, during a plenary panel on the last day of the congress we discussed why it is that, when sector professionals are so aligned, we still fail to see this reflected at the highest levels of political and financial decision making. For me, the broad answer is that while we focus on issues of critical importance to practitioners – like how to ensure sustainability of services through post-construction financing, tariff reform, regulation and so on – we spend insufficient time making the bigger argument for our sector which is this: That while water and sanitation are – indeed – critical human rights, they are not only that. They are foundational to everything it means to be a modern state, central to health, wellbeing and economic development.  Investment in these essential services should not, therefore, be siloed off into sectoral plans or strategies – but rather put at the heart of investment for national economic development.

Patrick Moriarty’s provocation to the IWA High-Level Summit in Glasgow

Every one of us in this room has sat in the meeting where someone says it. "It's a good policy. The problem is implementation." Heads nod. Nobody disagrees. We move on to the next item.  I'd like to open this session by disagreeing. There is no such thing as a good policy that was badly implemented. That phrase is just a polite way of saying it’s bad policy.

A policy that hasn't asked who will deliver it, with what money, what skills and what incentives, and what political backing, is not a good policy that failed later. It’s at best a vague vision – at worst a meaningless wish-list. 

We wrote the half about what we want. We left the half about how to do it to somebody else. Usually, a district engineer or utility director with no staff, and no budget.

And, before I go on - a digression!, I’ve heard a couple of times this morning that “we are doing systems strengthening – but not implementation”. To be honest, I’d say that means we don’t yet share a common understanding of what systems strengthening is!  To me, systems strengthening isn’t policy work; it’s not capacity building, it’s not finance, it’s not implementation …. it’s all of these – especially implementation. Because it’s only when it’s all there and working together that the service lasts!

So, what are the real constraints? They're rarely in the policy text. They're in the institutions that are supposed to carry it. 

• WHO's latest GLAAS survey found that almost two-thirds of countries have government institutions whose roles overlap, fully or in part. 
• Fewer than a third say they have enough people to deliver drinking water, sanitation or hygiene. 
• A quarter say they don't have the resources to pay their drinking-water staff. 

You can add whatever you like on top of that. It won't be delivered.

Where does the chain break? In my experience, in two places.  On the ground - close to the users. And after the ribbon is cut on the new infrastructure – with no realistic path to maintain the service it’s there to deliver.

A few years ago my colleagues looked at how the people responsible for rural water and sanitation in Odisha, India, are trained, from the state capital right down to the village. The finding was simple. Capacity declines steadily the further from the capital you go - or - put another way - the closer you get to the people who actually rely on the service! What’s more the training that did exist was about building things and hitting targets - not about delivering services. Very little on who maintains them, who pays for the major repair, what happens in five years.

Odisha isn't unusual. That's the point. The system was doing exactly what it had been set up to do. But Odisha is also where I'd look for the way forward. The state set itself a goal called Drink from Tap: water you can drink straight from the tap, twenty-four hours a day. 

In 2021, Puri, a pilgrimage city of a quarter of a million people, became the first city in India to get there, in all 32,000 households, slums included. What made the difference wasn't a better policy document. It was backing from the very top, and a senior civil servant, Mathi Vathanan, who stayed in post long enough to turn that mandate into a service. They built a public utility with clear targets and pushed budgets and decisions down to where the work was done. And they accepted this was never a job for engineers alone: for example, women from local self-help groups, the Jalsathis, were paid to read meters, collect bills and test the water. Non-revenue water fell from over half to fifteen per cent. 

Partners, IRC (now Riva) and UNICEF among them, had to keep pace with government, not the other way round. 

That's what a system can do when it's set up to deliver services, not just build things. So which capacity gaps matter most? Not, mostly, the engineers at the top. It's those thin, stretched, layers in the middle and at the bottom: district and local government, small towns technical services, utility operators - who keep schemes running. This is a critical gap – and one that is not closing: fewer than one in five countries tell GLAAS that their training institutions turn out enough trained professionals. But there’s also a leadership gap. In addition to competent engineers and managers, we need systems leaders - people who can work across ministries, across finance, health and local government, not just inside a water department. We don't train for that. And we certainly don't pay for it.

Now my second provocation. I'm afraid that, as we approach 2030, we're in danger of going back to the MDGs – and the mistakes of the MDGs. Many of you will remember. The enormous pressure to spend money and to show results. And we did! We built a great deal. We met targets, even if some of them only on paper. And we got what that pattern predictably produces: infrastructure that didn't last, institutions that were never built, services that failed.

That's not only my view, by the way. It's IWA's. In 2014, IWA looked at workforce gaps in fifteen countries and concluded that the MDG target had "prompted significant investment in infrastructure", but that this investment "has not been accompanied by the necessary focus" on the people needed to run it.

Twelve years on, the pressure is back. New coalitions, new compacts, big numbers, and a UN conference in December that will want big announcements. 

More money for water is good news. I 100% mean that. But if the incentive is only to mobilise money fast and count new connections, we will get exactly what we got in the past. We know how this film ends. 

So what would get more out of the capacity we already have? Three things, and none of them is expensive.

• First, design policy from the service delivery end.  Before a policy is signed, name who will run the service, and pay for its running once it's built, and who will fix it when it breaks - and how all of that will be paid for. If you can't name them, you haven't finished.
• Second, count the system, not just the assets. GLAAS again: countries track coverage and infrastructure far more than they track finance, people or governance.  Whatever we monitor becomes the job. So let's monitor whether the district or utility has the staff and the budget to keep the service going.
• Third, put the capacity where the service is. In the district and the utility, in the people who run things, and in the leaders who can hold a system together. And that means a workforce that draws on all the talent available. 

Now my third provocation. All of that is necessary. None of it is enough. Politics matters more than policy. The policies I've seen delivered weren't the best drafted. They were the ones a head of government cared about. Where water and sanitation were seen as part of how a country talks about its own future: its growth, its health, its jobs - the money follows and the institutions get built. Where water lives only in a sector ministry's plan, it waits. That was as true in Singapore, in the 1960s as it is in Odisha today.

So, the job isn't only to write better sector policy. It's to reach beyond the sector and put access to sustainable water and sanitation services into countries' own national visions for growth and renewal. That's what Sanitation and Water for All’s Heads of State Initiative is about. Political readiness first. Not as a by-product of a financing deal, but as the precondition for one.

Thank you.