Albert ARISTIDE MAMILLO

Thesis project

Provisional title: - Dynamics and essential components in the process of returning to public water management within the Montpellier intercommunality in 2014: sociology of an eminently political decision

Water resources have been managed and shared in a wide variety of ways, depending on the time, place, scale and social and cultural systems involved. Generally speaking, all these models of water governance have asserted and protected water's character as a public or common good.
In recent years, however, private water management seems to have become the dominant model. In France, the proportion of public service delegations is almost reversed compared to the rest of the world: almost 80% of the water supply is managed by Suez, Veolia and Saur, and since the late 1980s, there has been a general mood that private management of all goods is far better than public management, which is supposed to be bureaucratic and inefficient.

This vision of governance has been in crisis since the mid-2000s, when it came up against a movement advocating the remunicipalization of water. This has been demonstrated in a large number of cities in France and in the majority of European cities, highlighting the fact that public management involving citizens, politicians and public authority employees in the decision-making process can enable social and sustainable management that protects this natural resource (Le Strat Anne., 2010, "Paris : comment une collectivité peut reprendre en main la gestion de l'eau," article written for the French edition of Reclaiming Public Water).

In 2014, the report from the Observatoire des services publics d'eau et d'assainissement (SISPEA), indicates that, 69% of public drinking water services are under direct management, covering a population of nearly 25 million, or 39% of the French population. Delegated services, on the other hand, account for 31% of services, but cover almost 61% of the population, or some 41 million inhabitants.

The question of choosing management methods from ideological, political, technical, economic, environmental and other angles has been the subject of numerous studies, tending to demonstrate that decision-makers' choices are made from purely universalist angles. However, using the example of Montpellier in 2014, I would like to demonstrate that a study of decision-makers' mental models can transcend this debate and provide a better understanding of what is at stake when local authorities change the way they manage their services.

Under the supervision of Emmanuel Négrier, Director of Research, CEPEL - University of Montpellier.