Sanitation-service mandates versus water-utility procurement thresholds: a comparative public-procurement analysis linking framework-agreement silence to standing for excluded small-scale providers

Water utilities in low- and middle-income countries increasingly carry sanitation-service mandates that require them to contract with small-scale providers for faecal-sludge collection and conveyance. Public-procurement law, however, typically channels utility contracting through framework agreements whose selection criteria and call-off rules are designed for large civil-works contractors. Drawing on comparative doctrinal analysis of procurement regimes in Kenya, South Africa, Uganda and Zambia, and on the jurisprudence of the Court of Justice of the European Union on framework agreements and the South African Constitutional Court on administrative standing, the paper argues that framework-agreement silence is not a neutral gap but an allocation of risk that systematically disadvantages small-scale sanitation providers. The silence operates through three mechanisms: eligibility criteria that scale with turnover and bonding capacity; call-off procedures that exclude non-parties from competition; and remedial rules that deny standing to economic operators who were never admitted to the framework. The contribution is a procurement-law account of sanitation-service exclusion that connects the substantive mandate to the procedural conditions of access to justice.