Water Services in the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Area: How Does State Regulation Work?

Abstract

This article deals with the State regulation of drinking water and sanitation services in the Metropolitan Area of Buenos Aires. Its main objective is to identify the continuities and ruptures in State regulation during the transition from private management (1993)(1994)(1995)(1996)(1997)(1998)(1999)(2000)(2001)(2002)(2003)(2004)(2005)(2006) to renationalisation and State management (2006 onwards). The concept of "State capacities" (both administrative and relational) is used to assess regulatory performance. For the administrative capacities, the correspondence between the design and resources of the agencies, as well as the differences between their formal functions and actual practices, is examined. For the relational capacities, the policies of the National Government and its interaction with both the water and sanitation companies and the regulatory and control agencies are considered. The analysis is based on official documents, legislation and statistics, company balance sheets and reports, newspaper articles and semi-structured interviews.

The Organizational Consequences of Politics: A Research Agenda for the Study of Bureaucratic Politics in Latin America

“…From a policy perspective, articles address a broad range of policy or sector-specific areas, including aviation (Monteiro 2008;Baird and Fernandes 2014), criminal justice and the police (Davis 2006;Dewey 2012;Nunes 2015), education (Soifer 2009), electoral bodies (Hartlyn et al 2008;Gehlbach and Simpser 2015), energy (Pírez 2000), the environment (Brockett and Gottfried 2002;Orihuela 2014), industry and the private sector (Montero 2001;Schneider 2002Schneider , 2009Duvanova 2012;Ponce and McClintock 2014), labor (Amengual 2011a), public health (Rich 2013), science (Alcañiz 2010), transportation (Palermo 2006), and water and sanitation (Regalsky 2010;López-Murcia 2013;Rocca 2014). Unfortunately, only three articles deal with the intersection of bureaucratic agencies, corruption, and politics, and research analyzing bureaucratic formation and evolution is absent, along with its intersection with party politics and democratic development in the rest of the region.…”

“…As in other subfields, many of the surveyed pieces seek to enrich existing theory by applying models developed under idealized conditions from the United States and elsewhere to a Latin American context. These analyses have yielded some understanding of political oversight of public agencies under weak legislatures (Siavelis 2000;Eaton 2003;Ferraro 2008; Arana Araya 2013), regulatory development and diffusion in places with weak states (Jordana et al 2011;López-Murcia 2013;Baird and Fernandes 2014;Rocca 2014), and bureaucratic responses to budget shortfalls (Alcañiz 2010). Still, a large chunk of literature is not that ambitious.…”