ABSTRACT
Water and sanitation services (WSS) are a classical prototype of market failure, and economists have traditionally considered them as a prerogative of the state, with very limited options for introducing competition and market-based arrangements. The neoliberal agenda has reached the WSS sector much later than other network utilities, such as electricity, gas, and telecoms (Finger et al., 2006) – and with far less success (Castro and Heller, 2011). This is unsurprising, since most of the theoretical work, even at the apex of the political fortune of the neoliberal approach, has recognized the many sectorial specificities that characterize WSS and make it rather unfit for competitive markets (Kessides, 2004; Noll, 2002; World Bank, 2006).
