Good Water Governance without Good Urban Governance? Regulation, Service Delivery Models, and Local Government
Bibliographic record
Abstract
‘State failure’ came to prominence in the 1980s to explain a range of challenges facing water supplies. Given the apparent problem, water supply was said to require organizational reform which would reduce government involvement in and influence over service delivery. Service providers, it was argued, should be independent from government. Among the associated reforms privatization has drawn the most attention, but alternative service delivery (ASD) has also proven important. Concomitantly, the regulatory role of senior governments was initially ‘rolled back’. Since that time, regulatory oversight at higher scales has been reasserted in many cases, yet the perceived need to circumscribe the role of municipal governments through organizational reforms like ASD persists. Using a case study of water sector reform in Ontario, Canada, I argue that such views conflate organizations with governance, thus ignoring underlying municipal issues affecting water supply. This, in turn, can limit the effectiveness of regulatory improvements at higher scales. Given the increased focus on institutions to resolve water-supply challenges, these findings have implications for other contexts. In Canada a municipality is a local government whose powers and responsibilities are defined by the provinces under their respective municipal acts. While these powers are typically limited compared with other jurisdictions, in keeping with trends elsewhere municipal responsibilities have been increasing.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.033 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".