The EU and The Human Right to Water and Sanitation: Normative Coherence as the Key to Transformative Development

The year 2015 is supposed to be a seminal moment in the international sustainable development agenda. World leaders are negotiating the Sustainable Development Goals Agenda and the European Union has declared 2015 to be the ‘European Year for Development’. The Post-2015 agenda is supposed to be characterized by more ‘transformative’ development strategies. Policy Coherence for Development (PCD) is considered to be an important tool for the establishment of ‘transformative’ development. This article examines EU development programmes in the field of water. It contends that even though the EU is a world leader in global water and sanitation programmes, its approach to development is not coherent with transformative change because these strategies employ PCD as a technical policy tool. Instead, the article contends that transformative development requires ‘normative coherence for development’ defined as coherence between strategies in development and non-development policy arenas and core democratic norms, such as human rights.