Compliance or Defiance?

Whereas the global water community may have reached consensus on the need for water providers to operate on the basis of commercial principles, staff of water utilities are faced with the challenge of implementing these principles in their everyday work. In the everyday domain, these principles appear to directly conflict with the mandate of water operators to provide water services to all. Moreover, the socio-political, economic and bio-physical context in which these water operate may be ill-suited to implement commercialization. In pursuing commercialization these operators adapt, reinterpret, modify, deflect, alter or betray the original principles of commercialization during implementation. This research takes inspiration from the rich literature on policy implementation and policy translation, which argues that policy models need to be transformed and modified if they are to be successfully adopted or implemented. This research analyzes the alterations visible in the daily implementation of commercial models of water provisioning and, in doing so, present a better understanding of how water operators implement policy prescriptions of commercialization in practice. Based on the analysis of the adaptations and (re)interpretations of the implemented model of commercialization in the different cases, this thesis argues that a new way of speaking about commercialization should be developed.
About the Author:

Mireia Tutusaus Luque studied international business administration at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona (Spain) and holds a Master's degree in Water Services Management from IHE Delft Institute for Water Education (formerly known as UNESCO-IHE) in the Netherlands. She has worked over six years in several organizations in the private sector before she joined IHE Delft in 2014 as lecturer. Mireia currently resides in Kigali, Rwanda, working as a resident expert for an assignment with VEI Dutch Water Operators (former Vitens-Evides International) with the national water company WASAC. Her main area of expertise and interest in the field of water services management has been the development and analysis of business and governance models of the provision of drinking water services in urban areas and small towns, with a specific interest on financial sustainability and financial implications of infrastructural development. She has studied different forms of water service provisioning in different countries such as Indonesia, Uganda, Kenya, Mozambique and Tanzania.