Sanitation-service conditions in water-supply licences: a comparative doctrinal analysis linking licence silence to regulatory enforcement standing for unserved peri-urban households

Water-supply licences in low- and middle-income jurisdictions routinely omit sanitation-service conditions, yet regulators and courts treat the resulting silence as though it were a neutral allocation of responsibility rather than an affirmative regulatory choice with distributive consequences. The analysis distinguishes three doctrinal mechanisms through which silence operates: expressio unius reasoning that confines regulatory duties to enumerated conditions; statutory gap-filling that imports sanitation obligations from adjacent water and public-health statutes; and standing doctrine that determines whether unserved peri-urban households can compel performance. Licence silence is not doctrinally inert but functions as a standing-allocation device: where the licence is silent, enforcement standing defaults to the regulator, and households in unserved peri-urban areas lack a doctrinal pathway to compel sanitation-service provision. The comparative analysis identifies a remedial asymmetry between jurisdictions that treat licence conditions as exhaustive and those that permit statutory implication, and proposes a doctrinal test for reading sanitation-service conditions into water-supply licences that preserves regulatory discretion while creating a justiciable pathway for unserved households. The contribution is a doctrinal framework linking licence drafting to enforcement standing, with implications for licence-condition design and for the justiciability of sanitation-service claims in peri-urban contexts.