Behavior Change in Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene: A 100-Year Perspective
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The current methodological paradigm for addressing water, sanitation, and hygiene (WaSH) inaccessibility in rural sub-Saharan Africa is achieving insufficient progress. This essay evaluates WaSH-related policy, programming, and discourse from 1918 to 2021 to identify how this paradigm evolved and how it may reform. I argue that political–economic environments have strongly influenced existing sectoral praxis, shaping both programmatic methods and means. Colonial occupations generated rural–urban material inequalities, which were maintained and exacerbated during postwar reconstruction (1950–1970) and the proliferation of neoliberalism (1970–1990s). Meanwhile, modernization theory, a fundamental feature of colonial thought, has persisted discursively and practically. That is, rural resource limitations led WaSH practitioners to promote lower-cost appropriate technologies in the 1980s. Then, with challenges regarding technological disuse and misuse, behavior change–oriented methodologies responsively emerged in the 2000s and continue today. Yet, much like colonial predecessors, this latter turn presupposes that its programmatic benefactors must adapt to access WaSH services. Behavior change programs thus fail to critically consider the role of technological inadequacies and associated risk exposures in perpetuating existing inequities. Investigation of utility-style service models, where WaSH services adapt to the lives of its benefactors and behavioral persuasion is substituted for nonuser technological management, is recommended.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it