Editorial Improving water governance in Kathmandu: insights from systems thinking and behavioral science Available to Purchase

At the time this introduction to the special issue is being written (September 2019), the global water and sanitation community is wrestling with the policy implications of two important realizations. The first is that it is quite possible for cities to actually run out of water – for the piped network to run dry. In the spring of 2018, the world watched the unfolding water crisis in Cape Town, South Africa. The Cape Town water utility's website showed a countdown to day zero when the pipes would run dry in a modern global city of 3.7 million people. Cape Town was just weeks away from this calamity when heavy rains arrived to raise the reservoir level in the city's water supply system. While the rains offered a reprieve, the world had been given a glimpse of the challenges of this emerging era of water scarcity (...