Water, Politics and Money ― A Reality Check on Privatization

This book analyzes the privatization and the public management of water and sewer utilities in twelve countries: the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, the Philippines, Cambodia, Egypt, Jordan, Uganda, Bolivia, Argentina and Cuba. Having a private water company take over a local water supply system brings up elementary fears. Will private water companies overcharge their customers? Will they cut off those who cannot afford to pay? Will they cut corners, compromising water quality or service quality, letting infrastructure deteriorate for the sake of higher profits? But besides fear there are also other questions: Can private companies perhaps bring about improvements, beyond and above what publicly managed companies have achieved? And do publicly managed water utilities perform better than private companies when utilities are “remunicipalized”? In short, this book is a reality check on privatization and its alternatives.

It covers very different forms of “privatization”, from the outright sale of companies to various forms of “public-private partnerships”, each tailored to the objectives that governments were trying to achieve at the time of their introduction. The book also analyzes publicly managed water utilities that failed and succeeded, including those in Uganda and Cambodia, two of the poorest countries in the world, where they substantially increased access, became more efficient and improved service quality.

Manuel Schiffler has worked for over twenty years on water management and water utilities in more than a dozen countries in the Americas, Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia. He worked as a researcher for the German Development Institute and as a project manager at the World Bank. He now supports water projects in developing countries at the German Development Bank KfW. He holds a diploma and a doctoral degree in economics from the Free University in Berlin.