Building Bridges Between Regulatory and Citizen Space: Civil Society Contributions to Water Service Delivery Frameworks in Cross-National Perspective

This paper explores both the direct and indirect roles of civil society in regulation for service delivery of water services, drawing on examples from Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, France, New Zealand, and South Africa jurisdictions that have, in varying extents, involved the private sector was involved in the delivery of water services. The paper introduces the idea of building bridges between regulatory and citizen space, which captures the importance of mechanisms that respond to disruption and protest in ways that routinise their impact, while still remaining responsive to the concerns expressed by protestors. Additionally, even where no disruption is present the gulf between citizen concerns and the approach of regulators can still be wide; the role of the end-user can become displaced particularly when regulation is perceived as building a framework for stable transactions between government and service provider. Morgan traces the ways in which the problems caused by these ‘transactional regulation’ can be broken down and made more tractable by understanding key contrasts that underlie this gap between regulatory and citizen space.