What Social Science Teaches Us About Reinventing Sanitation in South Africa

In the sprawling urban landscape of eThekwini Municipality, which encompasses the South African city of Durban and its surrounding settlements, one of the most ambitious experiments in global sanitation is underway. Engineers have spent years designing and refining non-sewered sanitation technologies, self-contained systems that treat human waste on-site without the vast networks of pipes that define conventional sewerage. These innovations promise to serve the billions of people worldwide who lack access to safe sanitation and for whom traditional sewer systems remain economically or geographically out of reach. Yet a new study published in PLOS Water argues that the success of these technologies depends not only on what happens inside their treatment chambers, but on a far messier set of questions about people, power, institutions, and everyday life.

The research, led by Catherine Sutherland and Mary Lawhon together with colleagues at the University of KwaZulu-Natal and beyond, documents six separate social assessment processes conducted on non-sewered sanitation in the eThekwini Municipal Area. Social assessments, as the authors describe them, are systematic efforts to analyse the context in which a sanitation technology exists and to understand how that context might shape the technology’s adoption, use, and long-term viability. While there is widespread rhetorical support for integrating social science into sanitation innovation, the team found that what social science should actually do, and what it can contribute, has remained strikingly unclear. Their paper sets out to answer that question with unusual specificity, drawing on years of fieldwork in communities where prototype toilets were installed, monitored, and debated.

Non-sewered sanitation occupies a peculiar position in the history of public health. The flush toilet connected to a sewer network has been the gold standard in wealthy cities for more than a century, but extending such networks to informal settlements, peri-urban areas, and rapidly growing cities in the global South has proven prohibitively expensive in many places. Innovative non-sewered systems, including urine-diverting dry toilets and container-based designs that process waste locally, offer an alternative path. eThekwini Municipality has been a global leader in this field, piloting various technologies across communities that range from dense informal settlements to established townships. But a toilet that works in a laboratory or a demonstration site can fail spectacularly when it encounters the realities of household routines, water scarcity, maintenance expectations, and municipal budgets.

The social assessments documented in the study were deliberately resource intensive. Rather than asking narrow questions about whether users liked a particular toilet, the research teams examined governance arrangements, gender dynamics within households, the costs of consumables and maintenance, the politics of service provision, and the historical relationship between residents and the municipality. This breadth was not accidental. The authors argue that sanitation is never merely a technical artifact; it is embedded in social relations and institutional structures that determine whether a technology is accepted, adapted, neglected, or rejected. Understanding those relations requires methods drawn from anthropology, political ecology, science and technology studies, and urban geography, deployed over extended periods and in sustained conversation with residents.

One of the most striking findings of the paper is that the six social assessments did not converge on a single standard methodology. Instead, what emerged was what the authors call ongoing experimentation, a process in which each research team adapted its questions and methods to the particular goals of its study and the specific characteristics of its site. In some cases the focus was on how households actually used the technologies day to day; in others it was on how municipal officials perceived and managed the innovations, or on how gender shaped who was responsible for operating and maintaining the systems. This methodological pluralism, the authors suggest, is not a weakness but a strength, reflecting the genuine diversity of contexts in which non-sewered sanitation must function.

From this body of work, the researchers distil five distinct contributions that social assessment can make to sanitation innovation. The first is that social science can directly improve the technologies themselves. When researchers document how people actually interact with a toilet, where it fails, which components confuse users, and which maintenance tasks prove burdensome, that evidence can feed back into engineering design. A technology refined through social assessment is more likely to fit the lives of its users rather than demanding that users reshape their lives around the technology. This feedback loop between social research and technical development is, the authors argue, one of the most underappreciated functions of social science in the sanitation sector.

The second contribution concerns participation. Social assessments can enable users to understand technologies and interventions more deeply, transforming what the authors describe as a shallower form of consultation into genuine engagement. When residents grasp how a system works, what it requires from them, and what trade-offs it involves, they are better positioned to make informed decisions, voice meaningful objections, and participate in shaping how sanitation is delivered in their communities. This deeper participation matters not only for ethical reasons but for practical ones: interventions that residents understand and help shape are more likely to be maintained and sustained over time.

The third contribution is perhaps the most conceptually ambitious. Social assessment broadens the framing of what matters for non-sewered sanitation, revealing the relevance of factors that narrow technical evaluations routinely overlook. Governance arrangements, for instance, determine who is responsible when a system breaks down and whether replacement parts or servicing are available. Gender dynamics shape who bears the labour of operating and cleaning the facilities, with consequences for equity within households. Resource costs, including the price of consumables, the availability of water or electricity, and the economics of waste collection, can render an otherwise functional technology unaffordable or impractical. By making these factors visible, social assessment changes the questions that engineers, planners, and policymakers ask.

The fourth contribution is specialist analysis of the relationship between technologies and their wider context. The authors emphasise that social scientists bring particular analytical skills to this task, tracing how a sanitation intervention interacts with land tenure, migration patterns, municipal finance, and the political history of service delivery in South Africa. In eThekwini, where the legacy of apartheid spatial planning continues to shape which communities receive which services, a toilet is never just a toilet. It is a signal of state presence, a marker of citizenship, and sometimes a site of contestation. Specialist analysis can anticipate how these dynamics will play out and identify points of friction before they become failures.

The fifth contribution is the most subtle: social assessments affect relationships. The process of conducting research, engaging residents, and bringing different stakeholders into conversation can itself shift power dynamics and build trust, or sometimes erode it. The authors note that these relational effects are rarely acknowledged or measured, yet they can be among the most consequential outcomes of a social assessment. When communities see that their knowledge is taken seriously and that their concerns influence design decisions, the relationship between residents and the institutions delivering sanitation changes in ways that outlast any single project.

The implications of this work extend well beyond eThekwini. As governments and philanthropists invest heavily in reinventing sanitation for the twenty-first century, the study offers a caution against technocratic optimism and a template for doing better. The authors conclude by urging more explicit attention to the diverse ways of undertaking social science and to the varied contributions it can make to non-sewered sanitation. There is no set process, they insist, no checklist that guarantees social robustness. What is required instead is sustained commitment to understanding context, willingness to let social findings reshape technical choices, and honesty about the fact that sanitation is as much a social and political challenge as an engineering one. For the billions of people still waiting for safe sanitation, the difference between a technology that works on paper and one that works in the world may depend on exactly this kind of patient, expensive, and essential social inquiry.

Subject of Research: Social assessments of innovative non-sewered sanitation technologies in eThekwini Municipality, South Africa

Article Title: Learning from social assessments of innovative non-sewered sanitation in eThekwini

Article References: Sutherland, C., Odili, A., Gqaleni, M., Buthelezi, S., Khumalo, D., Magwaza, F., Mazeka, B., Mtshali, L., & Lawhon, M. (2026). Learning from social assessments of innovative non-sewered sanitation in eThekwini. PLOS Water, 5(10), e0000527. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pwat.0000527

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pwat.0000527

Keywords: non-sewered sanitation, eThekwini Municipality, Durban, social assessment, sanitation technology, social science, governance, gender dynamics, community participation, PLOS Water, South Africa, urban sanitation