Growing global scarcity of water is forcing a change in their management models and the need to implement good governance schemes, understood as the implementation of legal, institutional and economic mechanisms that enable the efficient organisation of the activity developed by all of the agents involved in water management. In this sense, one of the greatest achievements in Spanish hydraulic history is the organisation called Mancomunidad de los Canales del Taibilla (MCT), whose existence usually goes unnoticed in one of the most arid regions of Europe: the South-East of Spain.Therefore, this study will analyse the MCT management model, based on the good governance of water, as well as their positive socio-economic impacts on population and areas supplied as a consequence of the quality and continuity of the urban supply, which has been extraordinarily beneficial for resolving health and hygiene and comfort problems. This is all thanks to the continual search for new sources of supply, in addition to efforts to improve leakage control, modernisation of management, educational campaigns implemented and the efficient and sustainable use of resources without financial unbalances.

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Currently, water demands are increasing notoriously, spreading the pressure on available water resources around the world in both quantity and quality. Similarly, the expected reduction of natural water inputs, due to climate change, depicts a new level of uncertainty. Specifically, Southeast Spain presents water scarcity due to its aridity—irregular and scarce precipitation and high evapotranspiration rates—combined with the competition between several water demands: environment, agricultural dynamics, urban-tourist activities, and industry. The study area of this work is the most relevant functional urban area of Alicante province (SE Spain), where the administration of water management is carried out by a range of authorities at different levels as the consequence of a complex historical development of water governance schemes: at the national, regional, and local levels. This study analyzes 21 municipalities and proposes a conceptual model which was developed by including different origins of water inputs—surface resources, groundwater, desalination, wastewater reuse, or interbasin transfers—and water demands with information obtained from 16 different sources. Our main results denote a relevant water deficit of 72.6 hm3/year even when one of the greatest rates of desalinated water and reused wastewater in Europe are identified here. This negative balance entails restrictions in urban development and agricultural growth. Thus, presented results are noteworthy for the water policy makers and planning authorities, by balancing the demand for water among various end users and providing a way for understanding water distribution in a context of scarcity and increasing demand, which will become one of the most challenging tasks in the 21st century.

Actual cost of services of local entities (CESEL, in Spanish) is the name of a new official source of statistics in Spain, provided by Ministry of Finance and Civil Service, which intends to bring some transparency to a very obscure question: the real costs of local public services, in this case, the collection costs of municipal solid waste (MSW). The study analyzes the factors that determine solid waste collection costs in 2014, using a cross-sectional dataset of municipalities of the Spanish Mediterranean Arch and Madrid, with special reference to urban development. The results of the regression reveal a positive relation between waste collection costs and factors such as higher wages, coastal municipalities, tourist areas, population and separated collection; in contrast, the increase in urban population density contributes to lower costs of MSW collection, as well as indirect management of the service is cheaper than direct public delivery.

This paper addresses the impact of land use patterns associated with compact population on the costs of provision and maintenance of urban public services for local entities, controlling for other factors. The aim is to develop an econometric analysis using a panel data set of municipalities of the Spanish Mediterranean area and Madrid in the period 2006-2014. The estimations derived from the study confirm one main hypothesis and indicate that compact population impacts positively on the decrease of municipal costs of urban public services. This study suggests that municipal planning instruments of local entities could contribute to efficiently manage their budgets, as well as orients public policy in terms of its local land use decision-making.