par Moretto, Luisa ;Rosati, Federica ;Ilito Boozi, Jean-Pierre ;Teller, Jacques
Référence IIAS Study Group on ‘Coproduction of Public Services’ (6-7 June 2017: Maxwell School, Syracuse University, Washington DC, USA)
Publication Non publié, 2017-06-06
Communication à un colloque
Résumé : This contribution aims at investigating a possible new framework for the coproduction of water and sanitation services, with a particular focus on the cities of the Global South. Today, basic service coproduction has fully entered into the international discussion on service delivery models. Article 117 of the United Nations “Policy paper 9: Urban services and technology” (prepared for the Conference Habitat III) affirms that “Local governments should … promote co-production of basic services with local communities, particularly in informal settlements and slums” (United Nations, 2016).As water and sanitation services convey materials product of processed ‘natural resources’, both management and environmental dimensions of their delivery processes have to be simultaneously taken into account to understand their coproduction options. However, theoretical research on possible conceptual frameworks integrating both management and environmental dimensions of conventional service coproduction is very limited. Theoretical conceptualisation of service coproduction has actually mainly concentrated on social, not conventionally networked, services – such as education, health facilities, and policing. Coproduction of these services is analysed under a variety of public administration, management and governance perspectives, exploring the organisation of service coproduction and the institutional systems and normative frameworks favouring this provision option. As services such as education, policing and health care do not directly lie on the use of a specific natural resource (although they can have environmental consequences), ecological considerations are generally not pertinent to this branch of literature.Despite the limited literature trying to conceptualise the environmental implications of service coproduction, few attempts deserve a specific attention. First, a study on decentralised storm water systems in Australia has investigated how coproduction can influence the design of governance arrangements for these systems (Yu et al. 2011). Relying on diverse fields of literature, such as public administration, public sector governance, and environmental sociology, they contend that coproduction in the water sector implies four variables: 1. Provider and form of provisions, 2. Resource, 3. Technology, and 4. End user. This framework deserves a particular value on explicitly integrating environmental variables related to resources and technology into the understanding of coproduction of services based on natural resources. Second, more recently, Moretto and Ranzato (2016) have proposed a reinterpretation of Tjallingii’s work (1996) on the “Ecological Condition Strategy” strategy, to explore conventional service coproduction. A threefold framework, based on the actor / flow / area dimensions has proved to be successful to combine a public management and governance perspective in understanding service coproduction, with the more environmental and spatial sides of water, energy and waste service coproduction. This research contribution has the merit to link accessibility, environmental sustainability and spatial considerations in the coproduction of conventional services. Our paper wants to illustrate a proposal for a new theoretical framework to understand water and sanitation service coproduction. This new framework aims at integrating the stakeholder dimension of coproduction (coming from the literature on public administration and management), and the environmental one, while joining coproduction spatial concerns based on Moretto and Ranzato’s work (2016) and technological considerations (Yu et al., 2011). A first test of this framework, based on the coproduction of water and sanitation services in Kinshasa and Addis Ababa, will be presented in this paper.