Symbolic implementation: Governance assessment of the water treatment plant policy in the Puebla’s Alto Atoyac sub-basin, Mexico

Abstract

During the last decades of policy reforms, new instruments have been developed and substantial economic resources have been invested to improve water sanitation quality in Mexico. Despite these efforts, pollution levels have increased in different parts of the country and very few studies have addressed this crucial situation. This paper focuses on Puebla's Alto Atoyac sub-basin, whose main river the "Atoyac" is now considered the third most polluted in Mexico despite being a priority of the national government since the last decade. This paper assesses the governance context of the water treatment plants policy in order to find how supportive the context is towards the implementation process. The assessment is conducted using the Governance Assessment Tool (GAT). It includes descriptive-analytical and semi-normative elements. Using four qualities of governance, namely extent, coherence, flexibility and intensity the assessment allows deeper understanding of the governance context and how this impacts the policy implementation. Data collection involved structured in-depth interviews with stakeholders from three governmental levels, the private sector and society. This inductive process is complemented with secondary data. The research concludes that the combination of the given qualities creates a governance context that restricts the implementation of the water treatment plant policy, favouring short-term outcomes.

Governance Assessment of the Flood’s Infrastructure Policy in San Pedro Cholula, Mexico: Potential for a Leapfrog to Water Sensitive

“…Unfortunately, this is a common situation in the Mexican context. For example, the implementation of the wastewater treatment plant policy is only symbolic [43]. Also, the concept of water basin management which was introduced in 1992 has not been fully implemented and the river basin institutions do not impact the water policy [70].…”

“…These characteristics will place the city in the early stages of the Urban Water Management Transition Framework (Figure 1). Actually, the city is part of the watershed that feeds into the third most polluted river in the country, the Atoyac river [43,44]. Figure 3 shows the location of the city.…”

“…Previous applications of the GAT have delivered valuable outcomes for the understanding of the Mexican water governance context [43,44,[70][71][72][73]. The GAT considers governance as "beyond merely government", it is a context for decision-making and implementation; which can be both supportive and restrictive for those processes.…”

Climate change mitigation in the transport sector and selected co-benefits in Bandung City, Indonesia

“…CIT has been used for various types of sectors including: water, energy, and health (Casiano & de Boer, 2015;Djellouli & Quevedo-Gómez, 2015;Gana & Hoppe, 2017;Jain, Hoppe, & Bressers, 2017). Knowing motivation, cognitions, and also resources (that provide capacity and power of the actors) one can predict or explain interaction processes in the implementation of projects (Bressers et al, 2016;Owens, 2008).…”

“…In addition to this essentially descriptive model, the GAT was developed to include four additional quality criteria. This tool has been used in several water governance fields to assess the supportiveness of the water governance regime for the realisation of certain policies and measures (Casiano & de Boer, 2015;Owens, 2008). More recently, it has been used in other fields, such as energy efficient buildings in India (Jain et al, 2017).…”