Ensuring adequate access to clean water remains a major challenge throughout the world, particularly in rural areas of the Global South. Community-based management (CBM) has been a common policy response to this challenge, whereby communities gain decision-making power over their own natural resources, and are also responsible for financial and technical issues. Household water metering is increasingly proposed as a complement to CBM because it facilitates transparency of use and provides the option of pay-per-use pricing, both of which are thought to help support the sustainable management of water supplies. However, metering and use-based fees are controversial and their implementation across various contexts has led to strong backlash that can undermine the management of community water systems. Drawing on ideas of procedural justice, we conducted a survey experiment with 689 residents across 12 communities in Honduras’ “dry corridor” to examine individual perceptions of the decision process for choosing to implement metering, or not, within the context of CBM. Our results show that more inclusive decision-making leads to higher perceived fairness of the process and appropriateness of the metering decision, irrespective of whether the individual personally agrees with the final decision. While inclusion matters in general, whether that takes the form of voting or deliberation did not make a large difference. The effect of inclusion was stronger among those who already agreed with the decision outcome. Finally, inclusion also had positive spillover effects on more technocratic outcomes, namely ratings of how effective and sustainable the resulting management of the water system was expected to be. This research suggests that the backlash observed against water metering projects around the world may have more to do with procedural injustice in decision-making than with resistance to metering itself.

确保充足的清洁水供应仍然是全世界的主要挑战，特别是在全球南方的农村地区。基于社区的管理（CBM）是应对这一挑战的常见政策，社区可以利用其自身的自然资源获得决策权，并且还应对财务和技术问题负责。越来越多地提出家庭水表作为煤层气的补充，因为它有助于提高使用的透明度，并提供按使用量计费的选择，这两种方式都被认为有助于支持供水的可持续管理。但是，基于计量和使用的收费是有争议的，并且在各种情况下实施收费已引起强烈反对，这可能破坏社区水系统的管理。借鉴程序正义的思想，我们对洪都拉斯“干旱走廊”中12个社区的689名居民进行了一项调查实验，以检验对在CBM范围内是否选择实施计量的决策过程的个人看法。我们的结果表明，更具包容性的决策可以提高流程的公平性和计量决策的适用性，而无论个人是否同意最终决策。虽然包容性通常很重要，但是采用表决还是审议的形式并没有太大的区别。在已经同意决策结果的人中，包容性的影响更强。最后，包容性也对更多的技术官僚结果具有积极的溢出效应，即对预期的水系统管理的有效性和可持续性进行评级。这项研究表明，在全球范围内对水表项目所观察到的反弹可能与决策过程中的程序不公有关，而不是与对水表本身的抵制有关。