ABSTRACT
Contemporary urban water governance focuses on advancing water infrastructures, including re-regulation reforms and calls for sustainability developments. This raises questions about the “right” scale of water governance, such as the degree of organizational consolidation and autonomy. On the one hand, the regional level is emerging as a focal area within which water governance occurs, as regionalization reforms propose to widen the scale of water governance from the local or municipal to the catchment level. On the other hand, reforms pushing for organizational autonomy – to increase economic efficiency – have led to parts of the water system being consolidated, while others have been decentralized. Governance reforms thus can stand at odds with each other, as some focus on the centralization of water management with horizontal coordination across municipal governments, while others emphasize flat hierarchies and increased autonomy, which may involve fragmentation of water management and organization. In this chapter we investigate the arguments for and against regionalization and organizational autonomy as two governance reforms. We address this question by reviewing the governance literature and by looking at how these reforms work in practice, taking a detailed look at the German model of water governance, where we find differing degrees of resistance toward both regionalization and organizational autonomy reforms.
