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World Bank Toolkit: Approaches to Private Participation in Water Services
This resource from the World Bank provides a fit for purpose tool-kit to help majority world governments that are interested in using private firms to help expand access to safe water and sanitation services at reasonable cost. Some of the resources in this kit may prove useful for water planners in Australia.
About the Toolkit
Water and sanitation services have specific features that complicate their provision and management. They are essential services characterized by natural monopoly, and their assets are difficult and expensive to develop and monitor. This toolkit aims to assist governments in developing countries that are interested in using private participation to help expand access to safe water and sanitation services at reasonable cost. Instead of identifying a single approach, the toolkit illustrates policy design options to support arrangements that deliver good quality water services to the poor, discussing the main advantages and disadvantages of the several options. The toolkit includes:
- An overview and nine chapters that set out and analyze the government’s options for designing private participation
- Examples illustrating the choices made by governments in sixteen cases
- A spreadsheet-based policy simulation model that illustrates three issues discussed in the text:
- stakeholder analysis (Chapter 3)
- balancing of service standards, tariffs, and subsidies (Chapter 5) and
- the allocation of risk (Chapter 6)
- Many references, source documents, and other links designed to offer different perspectives and more detailed advice on certain points.
In doing this the toolkit also helps governments to see whether private participation might be part of the solution to problems in the water sector. This toolkit was prepared by the World Bank in 2006 with collaboration and funding from the Public-Private Infrastructure Advisory Facility (PPIAF) and the Bank-Netherlands Water Partnership and a long list of contributors: World Bank staff, academics, privatization advisors, government officials and water operators.
