The Challenge: Sustainable Water Services
Water is not only essential for survival, but also for environmental and physical health, social stability and economic growth. However, utility managers in developing and transition countries have to cope with other challenges:
- Fast-growing small towns and urban areas over-burden water services, leaving people without safe water. At a global level, more than one billion people are affected and more than 2.6 billion have to live without adequate sanitation.
The challenge is to provide sustainable water services for all.
- Where water supply is in place, infrastructure and services are often unreliable or even eroding; maintenance is sporadic. Large quantities of drinking water entering the grid are lost or otherwise unnacounted for.
The challenge is to make services reliable and efficient.
- Beyond basic availability, water scarcity is increasingly becoming a question of quality. In developing countries, 90% of the waste water from human settlements and industry are discharged into rivers and lakes without any treatment.
The challenge is to stop the deterioration in the quality of water resources.
Only a question of funds and investment?
Lack of funds and investment can be a barrier to improving and expanding services. However, often the real problem is that water scarcity is badly managed.
Attempts to manage water wisely are commonly hindered by operational inefficiency and lack of managerial accountability, political interference, overlapping institutional responsibilities and lack of appropriate legislation and enforcement. Such hindrances seriously limit opportunities to attract new investment.
Main elements of sustainable water services
Economic: Self-financing services, efficient and effective organisation
Environmental: Balanced water abstraction, efficient water use, sanitation considerations
Social: Equitable access for all, satisfied consumers, motivated workforce
Partnerships with the private sector: one option to cope with the challenges
Governments' endeavours to turn underperforming utilities into sustainable service providers may - as one option among others - benefit from involving local, national or international private sector expertise. However, experience throughout the last decade shows how difficult change processes in the water sector tend to be: friction between partners and stakeholders over priorities and means, lack of clarity about roles and responsibilities, or major concerns about private involvement often result in high transaction costs and hamper success.
Good governance is key
These critical lessons demonstrate the need to focus on governance as a decisive element for successful change processes and sustainable Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) for three reasons:
- Firstly, good water governance makes actors more accountable to water users. This will help to improve services and secure customers' understanding of the need for change and a PPP approach.
- Secondly, good governance clarifies roles and spheres of influence between policy makers, administrations and service operators during the life-cycle of PPP processes, and therefore strengthens service effectiveness.
- Thirdly, good governance makes an operator more reliable and predictable and therefore more attractive to investment capital.
In order to improve water governance and to support the design of effective PPPs, decision makers, actors and other stakeholders require clear and transparent guidance.