Dyson College of Arts and Sciences

installing the necessary sanitation facilities, including composting units, and working with the community to train members to operate and manage the these facili- ties as needed (Waste Concern 2011). However, private sector management of re- sources has the potential to present its own set of chal- lenges. At Waste Concern, one of the managers noted several issues with respect to managing the relation- ship between the municipalities which own waste and private operators that manage waste collection and composting: I am sure they told you, there are a lot of barriers with municipal waste. Who is the owner of the municipal waste for that mat- ter? e Municipal Corporation. Now, while the Municipal Corporation leaves the waste in the open and it is stink- ing, smelling, no one bothers. Everyone took it for granted that the Municipal Cor- poration behaves like that. Is that right? But when Waste Concern came up with a solution where waste is a resource, where waste is turned into compost to sell, we got a lot of people asking for the ownership of the waste. Not just the Municipal Corpo- ration but the Ministry of Local Govern- ment thought in that way, the Ministry of Environment and Forests thought in that way. en, you know, town improvement authorities also thought in that way. So that good number of contenders came up, turned up, emerged when they came to know that waste is also a resource. So from that per- spective it was not that very easy for Waste Concern to move forward because of lot of interested groups came up. A similar set of concerns may be present in the case of water systems as well. Introducing a private sector actor into an environment in which a munici- pal actor retains ownership has the potential to result in a clash between the commercial and public sector logics governing the actions of these organizations (Pache and Santos 2010; Pache and Chowdhury 2012). ough municipalities are bound by a public sector logic which focuses on delivering services to citizens, for private sector actors, a commercial logic dictates that operations must generate some profit or cost re- covery at a minimum. While part of this problem may be mitigated by introducing a social enterprise, NGO, or some other hybrid private sector actor, there is at a core a fundamental tension between public and private sector actors operating in the same domain of action. Whereas difficulties arose with respect to com- peting claims to potential "waste as resource" revenues at Waste Concern in the example cited above, more common are clashes between the competing respon- sibilities of public versus private sector actors. A clear example of this clash, which can be envisaged as one arising from differences between public sector and commercial logics, may be seen in the case of water privatization efforts on the Caribbean island of St. Lu- cia (Bliss and Bowe 2011). While the government, with the support of the World Bank, worked to dra legis- lation and regulations favorable towards generating in- creased revenues for the soon-to-be- privatized water utility, ultimately these efforts fell apart with respect to the provisioning of water supply to relatively isolated, poor, rural communities. No sustainable means of fi- nancing service delivery to these areas could be found under a private water management program. Ultimately, the St. Lucia government's plan to involve the private sector in water supply delivery and management was abandoned due to these envisaged gaps in service to rural areas under a privatized system. As noted in the World Bank's final report review on the St. Lucia water project, divergence between the public sector objectives and commercial responsibilities was an important reason for the inability to develop a suc- cessful public-private partnership (PPP) vis-à-vis the provisioning and management of water supply in St. Lucia: e financial situation of the water utility continues to deteriorate despite the proj- ect. How far this affected the potential for a successful PPP is unclear. Logically a deteriorating financial situation would reduce the potential for a successful PPP as it would send the wrong signals about government's concerns for commercial efficiency and impartial regulation (World Bank Group 2011). Private ownership/private management A fourth and final model for managing water resources is when a private entity, usually from the commercial 23

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