Critical systems thinking review on decentralised drinking water management in Nauli City1, Indonesia

Abstract

This paper is based on a PhD project2 that strives to assess the performance of decentralised drinking water management in the city of Nauli, 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 Nauli. Nauli 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: City PDAM, District PDAM, and Provincial BLUD. Furthermore, these governments and their 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?