Decision-Making in a Water Crisis: Lessons From the Cape Town Drought for Urban Water Policy

The water crisis that gripped Cape Town over the 2016–2018 period gained global attention. For a brief period of time in early 2018, it looked as if the legislative capital of South Africa would become the first major city in the world to run out of water. The case of Cape Town has broad implications for how we think about water management in a rapidly urbanizing world. Cities in the global South, especially, where often under-capacitated urban utilities need to cope with rapid demographic changes, climate change, and numerous competing demands on their tight budgets, can learn from Cape Town’s experience. The case of Cape Town draws attention to the types of decisions policymakers and water utilities face in times of crisis. It illustrates how these decisions, while being unavoidable in the short term, are often sub-optimal in the long run. The Cape Town drought highlights the importance of infrastructure diversification, better groundwater management, and communication and information transparency to build trust with the public. It also shows what governance and institutional changes need to be made to ensure long-term water security and efficient water management. The implementation of all of these policies needs to address the increased variability of water supplies due to increasingly erratic rainfall and rapidly growing urban populations in many countries. This necessitates a long-term planning horizon.

La política urbana de agua potable en México: del centralismo y los subsidios a la municipalización, la autosuficiencia y la privatización

Resumen:Este artículo presenta la evolución institucional y legal del servicio urbano de agua potable en México durante la segunda mitad del siglo XX. Además de ofrecer un breve esquema de análisis de la política pública, en la parte principal se proponen tres etapas esenciales por la que ha pasado esta política. Dichas etapas se basan en el tipo de arreglo institucional que caracterizó a la prestación del servicio de agua potable en cada periodo. La primera es la etapa centralista de las juntas federales de agua, prevaleciente de 1948 a 1983; después viene la etapa de la municipalización, iniciada en 1983 en que el servicio se asigna a los gobiernos locales y, en tercer lugar, está la promoción de organismos operadores autónomos y manejados como empresas, iniciada por la Comisión Nacional del Agua a partir de 1989. Al final, se revisan las vicisitudes del impulso a la participación del sector privado en el servicio urbano de agua y el trastorno que éste tuvo ante la crisis económica de 1995.Palabras clave: suministro de agua; política pública; gobierno local; municipio; privatización. Abstract:This article presents the institutional and legal evolution of urban water supply services in Mexico during the second half of the twentieth century. It sets out a brief scheme for public policy analysis and, in its main part, proposes three main stages urban water policy has been through. These stages are based on the institutional arrangement that has characterized water supply in each period. The first is a centralist stage of federal water boards that prevailed from 1948 to 1983, later comes the stage of municipalization started in 1983 when the service was assigned to local governments, and, in third place, the article reviews the promotion of autonomous and business-like operating units undertaken by the National Water Commission in 1989. In the last part, the article reviews the troubles posed by private sector participation in urban water services and the mishap it faced because of the economic 1995 crisis.Key words: water supply; public policy; local government; municipality; privatization.