Environmental Engineering Reference
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participation. Based on lessons emerging from the earlier wave of utility priv-
atizations public
private partnerships gained ground. Deregulation involved
retaining asset ownership with public agencies, but engaging with the private
sector through a variety of institutional contractual arrangements ranging from
Build Own Operate Transfer (BOT) to divestures and concessions. One of the
outcomes of such experiments with public
-
private partnerships has been insti-
tutional innovations ranging from budget support to Output Based Aid (OBA).
4.
Short-term versus reliance on long-term planning perspectives
: Centralized
government structures and processes have placed great emphasis on budgets as a
mechanism for allocation of public
-
finances. Conventional budget preparation
involves consolidation and aggregation of expenditure plans of several minis-
tries and line departments. The process of appropriation usually can take a year
and in developing countries, the links between disbursements and achievement
of public policy outcomes are seldom clear. As a result, there has been a dis-
proportionate emphasis on capital costs of infrastructure with little discussion of
costs related to operation and maintenance. In recent years, some have even
questioned the methods employed to compute capital costs and have argued
forcefully to take a longer term view of the life cycle of infrastructure projects to
ascertain the possible revenue streams that may be possible to
finance infra-
structure operation and maintenance.
5.
Ef
ciency versus equity
: The emphasis on infrastructure construction led to a
focus on utility and system ef
ciency. The subsequent interest in community-
based natural resources management led to an interest in issues such as equity in
bene
t distribution along lines of gender, age or ethnicity. In the case of water,
for example, both approaches generated their own set of metrics and methods
ranging from measurements of Non-revenue/Unaccounted for Water to per-
spectives on multiple uses of water services. While non-revenue water and
monitoring of physical systems emphasized quantitative data and measurements,
multiple use perspectives often highlighted qualitative data and participatory
data collection techniques.
3.1 The Nexus: Overarching Research Questions
on Governance and Institutional Structures
Based on the above discussion, we can identify three broad overarching questions
that can guide thinking on institutional arrangements and governance structures that
advance the nexus approach to management of environmental resources: water,
waste and soil.
(a) The question of intersectionality: What are the critical mass of factors at the
intersection of material fluxes, public
financing and heterogeneity and changes
in institutional and biophysical environment that can de
ne the scope and relevance
of the nexus approach to environmental management? (b) The question of
interactionality: How are feedback loops structured to capture both vertical and
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