Dyson College of Arts and Sciences

municipally operated form. is system of operation is quite prevalent around the world and benefits from the fact that local systems, whether in the sanitation or water resource arenas, can be integrated into larger surrounding municipal systems in order to re- duce costs and improve operating efficiencies. Addi- tionally, cost reduction efficiencies can be obtained through lower transport costs due to pooling of resources with related municipal agencies, and econ- omies of scale obtained with respect to purchases of key inputs and infrastructure components (Waste Concern 2011). Importantly, even with municipal ownership and municipal management, where no built-in conflict presumably exists between public sector and commercial logics (Pache and Chowdhury 2012), having buy-in and support at the political level is also important in project implementation (Piperca and Floricel 2012). Waste Concern's co-founder and chief technical officer noted the importance of having such supportive political leadership in moving for- ward recycling and composting projects that were to be implemented by the municipality itself: In case of Matale [Sri Lanka] the may- or came to Dhaka and Quinon [Vietnam] and they were convinced that the plant will not create nuisance. So the plan in Matale is to build next to the mayor's house, now they are building, scaling up to five tons with their plant. So these are the critical issues and we always say that you have to get also environmental leaders, friendly mayors to establish the plants. We do not do it without involving the government, we get the environmental clearances to imple- ment the project. Beyond this, a municipal ownership/munici- pal management model allows for a degree of central control of water sources which can have positive and negative impacts on water resource distribution. While control of the system within a single entity can mini- mize the problems associated with inter-organization- al coordination (Faems et al. 2007), these same sys- tems may suffer from a lack of operational efficiency and limited responsiveness to end user concerns if the proper management systems are not in place. More- over, depending on the financial health of the munici- pality, if a situation of financial constraint or austerity is present, the municipal operation of the water system may suffer if water resource management is not priori- tized (Waste Concern 2011). On this last point, financial austerity, recent events in the USA demonstrate how resource-starved public water systems managers may end up making decisions with a commercial logic focus on short-term cost savings or profitability, thereby compromising the public welfare responsibility towards the citizens served by these systems (Battilana and Dorado 2010; Pache and Chowdhury 2012). e ongoing drinking water crisis in Flint, Michigan started to develop in 2014, when government officials, facing pressure to reduce costs in an environment of fiscal austerity, changed Flint's water source to the Flint River from Lake Hu- ron and the Detroit River (Nichols 2016). However, re- sulting water flow was not sufficiently treated, and lead from the pipes supplying Flint's households leached into the drinking water, leading to the declaration of a federal state of emergency in January 2016. At this point, the residents of Flint were advised to switch to bottled or filtered water sources instead of using the municipal water supply. Nearly 90 cases of Legion- naire's disease, resulting in at least 10 deaths, may be tied to the water crisis, as well as the exposure of up to 12,000 children to elevated blood lead levels which may lead to numerous health deficits (Hanna-Attisha et al. 2016). More than 100,000 Flint residents were exposed to lead in their water supply during the cri- sis, and while water quality has returned to acceptable levels as of early 2017, the replacement of all lead pipes associated with Flint's water supply is expected to be completed in 2020; residents have been instructed to use bottled or filtered water until this replacement has been completed (Muller et al. 2018). Municipal ownership/private management A third model of operation which emerged from the Waste Concern-Saiban case was one where the mu- nicipality owns the sanitation system, but where the operator is a private sector entity. In this setup, it is important that prior to implementation, a formal part- nership agreement is signed between the municipali- ty and the private sector operator. Such an agreement would clearly define the roles of any partners involved, including the local community benefiting from the provision of service. Importantly, in the sanitation case, the public entity would provide permission to the private operator to use publicly owned land as well as other infrastructure facilities such as water and elec- tric connection. In exchange, the private sector enti- ty would provide technical assistance with respect to 22

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