Giuseppe Pace, Italian National Research Council, Institute of Studies on Mediterranean Societies, Naples, Italy, Napoli, Italy, Tiziana Vitolo, ISSM-CNR, Napoli, Italy
Water governance in Maghreb Countries - a pattern matching analysis (assigned to theme
Water is a common resource to be used for providing well being for people, local production needs and ecosystems and, apart some special cases, it can be freely found in nature. Main costs are related to supplying it to the users and to operating maintenance, administration and management services for all aspects of water treatment and distribution system. Therefore, for long time this service was mainly considered in terms of the accountability of the public sector. Speaking about, it is different. In the recent years a vast body of literature has analysed new approaches to its management, differentiating public sector accountability, if public acts as entrepreneur or as a controller. Such literature has, however, paid not too much attention to the wider scenario where these processes were rooted, and in particular to institutional and economic changes that greatly transformed the public utilities market. Main objective of this paper is to relate water management to governance, defining so-called water governance, assessing the effectiveness of its strategies and the participatory involvement of intermediate institutions in its definition and implementation. Governance is an analytical and heterogeneous set of methodologies and practices, able to create multi-level models of collective actions that allow the interaction amongst a plurality of ruling actors that are neither all governmental nor public. Such system seems so disaggregated to be lacking of overall patterns and, on the contrary, marked by various structures of systemic cooperation and sub systemic conflict in different regions, countries and issue areas. Dealing with such complexity, the paper analyses the “business models” of organisational and operational aspects of utilities, defining mechanisms, processes and institutions through which collective decisions in the field of water management are taken and implemented, and elaborating three models of reference (Continental, Anglo-Saxon, and German). Taking into account the results of the project INGOMED (Intermediate Institutions for the growth of “Governance” processes in the Mediterranean Partner Countries), the methodology was based on two distinct activities of investigation: a first mainly qualitative conducted on-desk on varied sources of empirical material, and a second, on-field and empirical, based on interviews and questionnaires. Then, using a “pattern matching” approach, specific case studies in Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia were compared to above mentioned models of reference. The paper puts into evidence several actors and their relationships with other actors (public and private), the role of intermediate institutions, and level of territorial interaction (local/regional/national/international), with qualitative graphs identifying organizational system of the water services for every country as well as the degree of interaction among the various subjects involved in national, regional and local level.
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