ABSTRACT
In terms of urbanization in the countries of the “South”, providing access to drinking water is a recurring problem. As the approach to the development of water distribution and sanitation systems based on the European model was implemented in Latin America, beginning in the twentieth century, the growth of cities, once associated with rural migration and recently with endogenous factors (Dureau et al., 2006), has become out of synch not only with local water resources but also with technical capacities for extending elementary services, particularly water and sanitation services. But while political and, frequently, scientific debate focused on the status – public or private – of the operators concerned (Bakker, 2010; Bauer, 2004; Swyngedouw, 2004, Franco et al., 2013), the technological pertinence and social effects of the universal distribution model – referred to as the “big system” – were rarely examined. The “big system” is an organizational approach (either public or private) that continuously produces large quantities of drinking water distributed to consumers via a network of pipes in the hands of an operator that manages the entire municipal water cycle, from the abstraction of the untreated resource to delivery in the form of potable water. It constitutes a model in the sense that a homogeneous service providing drinking water to a large number of inhabitants requires a high level of technical and commercial skills (Mayntz and Hughes, 1988; Tarr and Dupuy, 1988; Lorrain, 2009; Lane, 2012). This is the model that is currently being used in the agglomeration of the cities of La Paz, the seat of government of the Plurinational State of Bolivia, and El Alto, the working-class periphery that, located on the altiplano (high plateau), overlooks its older neighbour. The “big system” was the object of a concession contract signed by a major international group specializing in the water sector (Suez). However, in 2007, largely for reasons of political symbolism, the Bolivian government terminated the contract and the concession was returned to the public sector. However, the “big system” does not provide the only way of accessing water in the agglomeration of La Paz/El Alto. Many families procure potable
water by other means: they get their water not only from networks managed by small cooperatives, but also in carboys. We will refer to these alternatives as “small systems”. The process of local delegation of the big system has hidden the existence of other forms of provision likely to encourage differentiated social uses, which may be large and influential. Thus the distinction between “big” and “small” systems refers less to their importance in terms of water supply than to distinctive forms of management: while a big system is generally controlled by a single operator on a determined territory (Bakker, 2003), a small system is managed by the inhabitants of an area where the natural resource is transformed into a service for the community (Jaglin, 2003a). The objective of this chapter is to analyse how these forms of provision function, to examine how and why other models of water procurement exist in the agglomeration side by side with the big system, and to study the ways in which these systems potentially complement one another. While there is an important literature on urban water supply and the fragmentation of the large technical systems (Graham and Marvin, 2001; Bakker, 2003), the literature on water has produced very little research on the coexistence of the two systems. Small systems are generally considered informal water supplies and not as coherent forms of organization (Misra, 2014), meanwhile academic literature generally analyses cooperatives as a form of economic organization in a business perspective (Young, 2002; Mayhew, 2008), to evaluate their performance indicators (Ruiz-Meyer and van Ginneken, 2006) or as an alternative to privatization (Hall, 2000), but not as a utility orientated towards other socio-political functions. Moreover, the research presented in this chapter provides an original perspective on the social conditions of the possibility for collective selforganization of water uses, a concept suggested by Elinor Ostrom (1990, 2009) in her critique of the notion of the “tragedy of the commons” developed by Garett Hardin (1968). According to Hardin, collective ownership would lead to users exhausting resources, with everyone wanting to take advantage of the situation and serve their own interests: this would justify promoting individual property rights. For Ostrom, on the contrary, depletion of natural resources does not entirely account for the “ecological crisis”. This crisis may also be explained in reference to the modes of “governance” of the commons and, thus, to the capacities of auto-organization in the process of allocating the resource and monitoring the uses to which it is placed. The Bolivian case is of particular interest in terms of sociological perspectives upon technical systems, not only because of the country’s “water wars” (Cochabamba, 2000; La Paz-El Alto, 2007), which raised questions about the internationalization of private sector management of resources and services, but also because it highlights the way in which the emergence of new social uses transforms these technical systems and encourages the development of alternative modes of water management. The survey described in this chapter is based in several sources of information: geographic information system (GIS) analyses, and interviews carried out by means of questionnaires and observations.1 The database on risk management
encompasses the public network (elements of the big system: springs, treatment plants, water transports pipes, wells, etc.) and resources sometimes very different from those generally used in urban contexts. For example, the wells used by private firms, including drinks companies, small cooperatives and companies using tank trucks, can, in certain circumstances, replace the big system. The information collected was homogenized as research progressed, and tables of data associated with specific geographical areas were developed. Based on these data, various maps were elaborated to support the analyses. For example, defining the percentage of households connected to the big system makes it possible to create spatial representations of alternative systems in certain areas of the agglomeration. Some of the data were gathered from a public institution (the public sector drinking water production and distribution enterprise, the national census of 2001), and a number of private institutions (including water cooperatives). The information makes it possible, among other things, to establish, on a geographical basis, the population served by the big system and to match those data with factors such as age and housing conditions. These data were complemented by the results of a questionnaire-based survey about water cooperatives carried out by the World Bank, which were processed and integrated into the database. In addition to the database, research included a questionnaire and a series of interviews and observations carried out among a sample of users of the cooperatives, in order to study more precisely the organization of small systems. The questionnaire was elaborated in order to reflect as accurately as possible types of accommodation inhabited by the subjects (building materials, number of rooms), their social characteristics (academic qualifications, main job) and their social and political practices (involvement in the life of the neighbourhood or the cooperative), and to compare them with their uses of water and views about the service provided by cooperatives (opinions about water quality, rates defined by cooperatives, etc.). A twin two-stage approach was implemented, involving a selection of the neighbourhoods most representative of the diversity of the agglomeration’s inhabitants, and the replies to the questionnaire of 10 per cent of the households referenced (550 questionnaires were collected from the agglomeration of La Paz and El Alto, 50 of which from the cooperatives).
