In March 2000 Bucharest entered into a concession contract for its water utility with the aim of turning around the utility's faltering performance. Under the private operator the utility has raised service quality above Romanian standards and toward Western European levels. By 2008 efficiency...

This report discusses the key findings and recommendations emerging from a pilot Citizen Report Card (CRC) on water, sanitation, and sewerage services in Karachi. This initiative comes, on one hand, in the wake of deteriorating services, weakened community interfaces and accountability...

In post-apartheid Johannesburg, South Africa, the city water authority had fallen into disarray (a common situation with urban services). In 2001, a Public-Private Partnership (PPP) emerged as a way to bring new expertise and efficiency to the delivery of public utility services, where a...

This review of the water sector in Albania was prepared as a background paper to the World Bank s Country Partnership Strategy for Albania for 2011-2014. It draws on past analytical work on decentralization in Albania as well as relevant World Bank-financed operations such as the Water Sector...

"Being a utility regulator has perils because the independence of the regulator necessarily removes power from politicians, operators, and others. Furthermore, regulators are sometimes scapegoats for unpopular policies and unavoidably become involved in shaping the policies that they are...

"The authors review a number of studies on the effectiveness of utility regulatory agency and governance arrangements for the electricity industry, particularly for developing countries. They discuss governance criteria and their measurement, both legal frameworks and surveys of regulatory...

Regulating infrastructure utilities can be extremely complex and fraught with risks of political interference and capture by interest groups, especially in countries with little tradition of politically independent government agencies. To deal with these challenges, policymakers and regulators...