Access to affordable water and sanitation services is crucial for the realization of the human rights to water and sanitation. Where these services are available but not affordable, people will not be able to use sufficient amounts of water and adequately maintain latrines, or will turn to cheaper, unsafe sources or practices. Another consequence is that people, in order to support the costs of water and sanitation, might compromise the realization of other human rights such as food, housing, health or education. However, the issue of affordability does not always receive the attention it deserves. As people will go to great lengths to pay for water to ensure their survival and health, there is often an assumption that people will obtain the water they need even without the state support.

This chapter examines the nature of the obligation of states to progressively realize the human rights to water and sanitation, aiming at informing public policies on the operationalization of that obligation. Even with more than one decade since the General Assembly explicitly recognized water and sanitation as a human right, it is often not clear how to unpack the generality of the obligation of progressive realization of human rights, particularly in the era of the 2030 Agenda. Both the SDGs and the progressive realization obligation have been criticized for being aspirational goals, the former because of the significant margins of discretion given to each state to set their own national targets and the latter because it is viewed as vague, having no defined time frame or pace of implementation and therefore not imposing a clear positive obligation on states (Porter, 2015).

Focuses on the reform measures needed to improve payment collection rates and improve the financial viability of energy companies, in the context of the market-based reorganization of energy supply. Besides artificially low energy tariffs, non-payment of energy bills and theft of energy are major causes of the financial difficulties which the utilities face in Central Asia, and in transition and developing economies more generally. Chapter 7 examines the tools that Central Asian law provides to the energy companies to enforce the payment of energy bills and critically discusses judicial practice in the field. Surprisingly, the courts generally play an active role in the enforcement of payment claims. However, utilities find it much more challenging to enforce payment claims against enterprises of strategic interest (e.g., agricultural producers and aluminium and mining companies). The political sensitivity of the energy supply often predetermines the outcome of judicial decisions in non-payment cases.