Institutional Configurations for Urban Water Management in Mexico

Abstract

"Since the application of a decentralized policy for urban water management in the nineties, it has been assumed that municipal authorities could choose between two arrangements: directly managing the service through the figure of a municipal utility or signing a concession contract with a private enterprise. However, looking closely to the real decentralization experience in several Mexican municipalities, we found out that in fact there exist four possible configurations that could be adopted to provide urban water: 1) municipal control by one municipality; 2) intermunicipal association, water management by several municipalities; 3) state control, water management by an organism depending on the state government; and 4) private control, water management by concession to a private firm. In this paper, we propose to discuss the normative framework and the contextual variables shaping the interaction between the actors involved in water management and how this dynamics could make possible governance arrangements based on social involvement for the definition of water management problems and solutions. For this purpose, we examine one example of each institutional configuration through the conceptual framework constructed by Elinor Ostrom and her workshop colleagues."