In 1994, the Italian Parliament passed a reform which aimed to radically change the economic regulatory institutions of the water sector in the country. The implementation of the reform, which lasted about twelve years, resulted in a new regulatory regime which combined selected features of...

Within the area of study of privatization, some attention has been placed on the emergence of mixed public-private ownership firms for the provision of public services. Mixed ownership firms may provisionally result during an intermediate stage within a process oriented towards full...

Within the field of regulation policy and politics, scholarly works have widely examined policy cycles to liberalize, re-regulate and privatize large-scale infrastructure-based public service industries. Relatively little attention has been placed, however, on the jagged and ineffectual...

Regulatory reforms are often made and implemented with the aim to introduce some competitive mechanisms in infrastructure industries which were previously regulated through public ownership. The impact of these reforms on the organisation and behaviour of infrastructure industries, however, may...

So far relatively few studies have explicitly addressed the issue of how are regulatory reforms implemented (Gönenç et al., 2001; Eisner, 2004; Durant, 1984; Hanf, 1982). In particular, little attention has been placed so far on how the multi-level governance systems – as the institutional and polity...

Water infrastructure regulatory systems are occasionally characterised by the combination of selected features of alternative models of regulation, such as public ownership, discretionary regulation, and franchise regulation. Issues arise regarding why these combined or 'hybrid' systems appear,...

Various critiques have been made of the analytic narrative, which is a methodological approach that combines historically oriented research with rational choice models. This paper discusses strengths and limitations of the approach and provides some suggestions for its inclusion in the...