Critical Systems Thinking Review on Decentralised Drinking Water Management in Nauli City, Indonesia

Abstract

This paper is based on a PhD project that strives to assess the performance of decentralised drinking water management in the city of Kupang, Indonesia. The implementation of decentralised government system followed by decentralizing some functions including drinking water services, is unsatisfactory in providing access to drinking water for all residents in the city of Kupang. Kupang Municipality that has just split up as an autonomous local government under the decentralized government system in Indonesia, is facing conflicts in providing water provision to the society, since there are three public water companies in this region: PDAM of Kupang City, PDAM of Kupang District, and BLUD of the East Nusa Tenggara Provincial Government. Furthermore, these governments and water companies seem to forget the main objective of government in water provision as stated in the Indonesia Constitution: to fully control the water and manage it for meeting the people’s needs. The aim of this research is to apply Ulrich’s critical systems heuristics (CSH) to address the following research questions: (i) how effective is the current decentralized water management system?; and (ii) how the current system can be improved and what ought to be done?