Contenu du sommaire : De l'eau !

The Delegitimation of an International Operator
In 1993, the consortium Aguas Argentinas SA (AASA) led by the group Lyonnaise des eaux (LDE) was granted the concession of water and sanitation services for the city of Buenos Aires. This represented the most important concession ever granted to a private operator, and it was then presented as an example on the international scene. Yet, in 2006 the Argentinian authorities terminated the concession contract. The end of the concession is usually explained by the fact that the major economic crisis of 2001 put an end to the peso-dollar parity and made the economics of the concession untenable. This article shows that, beyond this important change in the economic context, the failure of the concession was the outcome of a deeper process of gradual delegitimation of the notion of private operator that unfolded over the entire duration of the concession. The paper sheds light on the economic, social and political dimensions of this process.

“The ballasted actor”: A Joint Venture for Water Services in Chongqing
According to the dominant organizational theories of monopolistic industrial networks, the joint enterprise model deserves close scrutiny even though it is heterodox. Its main principle is neither the separation between a principal and an agent, nor a detailed contract, but co-production. The partners involved cooperate at all levels of production: shareholders of the exploitation company; sharing of executive instances; network exploitation. This solution was developed in China. This paper focuses on a joint corporation operating in the field of water services created by the municipality of Chongqing and the group Suez-Environnement. It does so from a perspective that is both descriptive and empirical. Before addressing the issue of performance and results in relation to the contract, it starts with the purpose of the company and its policies. What is it seeking to achieve? Which proportion of its results is explained by industrial policies and not by creative financial engineering? The study sought to document these material dimension of corporate action – investments, intervention on the network, human resources policies, and new services delivered to end users. The paper presents two major results. First, this cooperative arrangement has improved the technical system and the level of service. Good practices circulate within and beyond the company, thus contributing improvements to the entire sector. The second result refers to the theory of regulation: the study suggests that the firm is not as free as the theory posits. Rather than a free and potentially opportunistic actor, what emerges is a constrained actor, “ballasted” by the materiality of things and regulations. It is thus a formatted problem that orients agendas and sets the frameworks within which the protagonists act

The Legitimacy of Private Intervention in a Public Service
In France, the private management of water services has consolidated its position overtime and is now dominant in the majority of cases. This paper seeks to explain this specific situation in a country that has developed a contractual framework capable of making the reliance on private operators “political acceptable” and of finding a compromise between the defense of the general interest and the search for profit. These compromises, which are travailed by tensions and regularly called into question, must be renewed periodically. The paper examines one of these turning points, in this case the renegotiation of the contract between the Syndicat des eaux d'Île-de-France (SEDIF) and the Compagnie générale des eaux (CGE), during which both the public authority and the private company must restore a weakened legitimacy. The new contract signed in early 2011 and the preceding negotiations thus redefined the terms of the relationship and established new forms of association.

A Constrained Partial Privatization
In 1999, the city of Berlin was facing an important budget deficit and ceded 49.9% of the assets of its water service company to a private consortium that included the electric grid operator RWE and the French operator Vivendi, for a duration of 29 years. Less than 15 years later, these two private partners have sold their assets and the company is now coming back to its municipal owner. By focusing on this episode, the paper seeks to compare two models of urban services: the “French model” of subcontracted management, and the German “strong local public model.” It emphasizes the major role played by secondary institutions (technical norms, legal regulations and accounting categories) in framing the cooperation between these different models as well as the use water operators make of them in order to create, maintain or call into question such a cooperation. It suggests that while partial privatization has been made possible by important interventions on these institutions (legal model, rates), they have been used a few years later in order to organize the return of Berlin's water company to the public domain.

Corporate Social Responsibility Meets Public Service
Since the mid-2000s, several successful public-private partnership pilot projects have contributed to establishing the subcontracting of water services as a model better adapted to the Indian context after the failures of the preceding decade. This paper focuses on the first contract between the city of Nagpur and one of the big French water multinationals. It seeks to answer two questions: can “privatized urban services” meet the challenges of sustainable and equitable development? Can they contribute to the development of local urban capitalism? The study is premised on the idea that power relations within the subcontracting company have an influence on the implementation of the contracts. The methodology thus consists in opening the corporate “black box” in order to better analyze the embeddedness of private action in relation to the state and civil society, as well as the implementation of corporate social responsibility by a multinational acting in partnership and within the framework of a public service.

The Self-organization of Urban Water Management
While the development of a water supply and sanitation network in the cities of the Global South has been mostly modeled after the template of European cities, with a city-wide system continuously providing important volumes of water through a network of pipes controlled by a private operator managing the entire water cycle, the purpose of this article is to explore alternatives to this system and to establish whether they can be complementary. It takes as a case study the urban aggregation constituted by the cities of La Paz and El Alto in Bolivia, where many families get their water from cooperatives. The Bolivian case is particularly interesting, first because the country has been through several “water wars” that have called into question the international diffusion of the private management of resources and services, but also because it sheds light on the emergence of social practices that generate new modes of regulation, about which still little is known. In order to establish the importance of small local systems, the survey has drawn on four sources (archives, spatial analysis through Geographic Information Systems, questionnaire-based interviews, observations) in order to develop a geo-indexed database and to analyze the social differentiations that operate in the field of water management.

A Commercial and Local Public Service
One of the major issues that the cities of developing countries face is to offer quality public services to an urban population that is not very solvable and increases very day. The extension of neighborhoods in urban peripheries, where demographic growth is concentrated, represents an important challenge for utilities operators, since they need to develop socio-cultural access and to implement specific modes of intervention. This article is based on the study of three African cities (Maputo, Ouagadougou and Kisumu). It analyzes pilot projects led by water operators with the support of credit institutions, aiming at subcontracting this public service to small, local private operators. It presents the first results of this arrangement and seeks to identify continuities as well as breaks in the commercialized supply of water in these three cities.

Access to Water between Urban Inequalities and Technical Constraints
By focusing on the case of drinkable water supply in India, this paper intends to shed light on the process of decentralization that has characterized the late 20th century and on the situation of small cities, too often neglected by researchers and public authorities alike. This level of analysis is key, since it concentrates most of the future urbanizing trends, between rural exodus and metropolization. The paper suggests that the subsidiarization of water supply is difficult to implement in small municipalities whose human, technical and financial capacities remain too weak, and whose specificities are not taken into account by water policies. The analysis of four small cities of Uttar Pradesh shows that the social distance between regional engineers and local plumbers, and the constraints related to the building of the technical system contribute to explaining the difficulties of decentralized service.

Conflicts over Water in South Africa
At the end of apartheid, in 1994, one of the main concerns of the new ANC government was to erase inequalities and generalize access to basic services. The realization of the right to clean water, which was recognized in the new Constitution, thus became a priority. The municipality of Johannesburg, which had already started redefining its water policy in the 1990s, launched the Gcin'amanzi project in its most important township, Soweto. Early on, it became the subject of controversies, and in 2006 it was at the center of a court case, the “Mazibuko case.” Supported by activist organizations, five residents of Soweto criticized two aspects of the project: the installation of prepaid meters, and the free water policy, the volume of which was deemed insufficient. By shedding light on the politicization of this water-related crisis, this case shows how the reliance on law has made injustices visible, to the point of transforming significantly the social policies of access to basic services targeting marginalized urban populations. More generally, the paper suggests that the technical and economic aspects of urban services conceal power relations in which the end user plays a prominent role.