WATER MANAGEMENT IN EUROPE :
BEYOND THE PRIVATIZATION DEBATE
by BERNARD J. BARRAQUE
Bernard BARRAQUE completed the degree of Civil Engineering at the School of Mines, and the Master in City and Regional Planning as well as the doctorate in Urban Socio-Economics at Harvard. After several years spent in consulting and contract research for various ministries, he joined LATTS in 1988 on a CNRS full- time research position. He studies various environmental policies (mainly the water cycle and local government policies) from a science-technology-and society perspective, using both history and international comparisons. He also teaches urban environment socio-econo- mics in the joint Ph.D. program of the ENPC, ENGREF and the University of Pans XII, where he heads the Economics and Management sub-program.
After 20 years in existence, the six French agences financières de bassin (water-basin financial agencies) have become well known abroad, and are visited by professionals and economists from all over the world. French water companies have also suddenly emerged as what they have become: world leaders in water service operations, and also industrial empires involved both in delivering most urban services, and in public works and construction. The international move towards deregulation and privatization of public services seems to be in their favor.
A double process (concern for the water cycle, and modernization of water systems) has brought the water industry out of its traditional back seat while apparently encouraging a so-called "French model." But, on the eve of 1993 Europe, there are other models for the management of water; water policy in any country is embedded in history, in society and law, and of course in geography. There is indeed much to learn from the observation of other countries' situations at this very moment, when the French government and parliament are debating a new water management law. European countries should learn from each others' experience, after all.
The aim of our research is not to discuss the advantages of public management or privatization, but to show that this question is in practice never raised independently of two related questions pertaining to the centralization or decentralization of management, and to the separation or the integration of the different water services and other utilities. Moreover, water policy offers a good example of the transformation and the blurring of the very notion of operator: the traditional relationships between local government, the operator, and the public at large, seem to be changing. Even traditional notions of citizenship are being questioned: in other words, water policies elicit new modes of political participation together with a change in the territorial scale of management. In the various countries we studied, water was one of the important features of what we shall term "municipalism" early in this century. Municipalism consisted in bringing comfort and better health to all urbanités through a system financed by means of "solidarity", i.e., with the wealthy providing from their surplus to the local government, so as to provide the "equivalents of wealth" to the others. Roughly speaking, this led to concen-
