| Summary: | Universal access to sustainable and equitable sanitation is a Sustainable Development Goal on the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The South African government has taken strides to try and meet both international and domestic development goals with its Free Basic Sanitation policy, for which a national implementation strategy was developed in 2008. Although the policy was formulated at a national level, municipal governments are delegated the authority to ensure service delivery at the local level. Municipalities have adapted and interpreted the policy to suit their own contexts. In particular, they have attempted to address the challenge of providing sanitation services to informal settlements using different approaches with varying degrees of success and often without explicit consideration or guidance for how to incorporate sustainability and equity principles. The aims of this thesis are thus to explore how the concepts of sustainability and equity can be applied to improve municipal sanitation services in South African informal settlements and to explore how various dimensions of sanitation and equity relate to sanitation. A comparative case study method using the lens of sustainability and equity was used to critique the approaches to providing sanitation services to informal settlements in three of South Africa's largest municipalities: eThekwini (Durban), Johannesburg and Cape Town. Each municipal case study incorporated an embedded case study that was used to examine sanitation services in selected informal settlements at a programme, project or settlement level. Primary data was collected using interviews and field visits. Secondary data was obtained from national and municipal records such as water and sanitation department reports, census data from Statistics South Africa, and municipal geographical information system databases. Findings from the thesis indicate that there is a need to better incorporate multiple stakeholders' perspectives on what sustainable and equitable sanitation services should be like. Strengths and weaknesses of each municipality's approach to sanitation service provision were compared and used to identify factors relating to sustainability and equity. A major conceptual gap identified in sanitation service delivery approaches is the need to emphasise equity as a core tenet of sustainability, especially in a socio-economic context of extreme inequality. This thesis makes a contribution towards knowledge by highlighting the importance of equity to support sustainable sanitation service delivery in South African informal settlements, adding new perspective into different dimensions of equity in sanitation and a suggested framework for how they could be incorporated into M&E practices.
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