Albert ARISTIDE MAMILO

Thesis project

Provisional title: – Key dynamics and components in the process of returning water services to public management within the Montpellier intermunicipal area in 2014: sociology of an eminently political decision

Water resources have been managed and shared in a wide variety of ways depending on the era, location, scale, and social and cultural systems involved. Generally, all of these water governance models have affirmed and protected the public or common good nature of water.
In recent years, however, private water management has become the dominant model. In France, the proportion of public service delegation is almost the reverse of the rest of the world: nearly 80% of water supply is managed by Suez, Veolia, and Saur, and since the late 1980s, there has been a general consensus that private management of all assets is much better than public management, which is considered bureaucratic and inefficient.

This vision of governance has been in crisis since the mid-2000s, coming up against a movement advocating the remunicipalization of water. This has been demonstrated in many cities in France and in most European cities, emphasizing the fact that public management that involves citizens, politicians, and employees of the Régie in the decision-making process can enable social and sustainable management that protects this natural resource (Le Strat Anne., 2010, "Paris: how a local authority can take back control of water management," article written for the French edition of Reclaiming Public Water).

In 2014, the report by the Observatory of Public Water and Sanitation Services (SISPEA) indicated that 69% of public drinking water services are directly managed, covering a population of nearly 25 million inhabitants, or 39% of the French population. Services managed by delegated operators, on the other hand, represent 31% of services but cover nearly 61% of the population, or approximately 41 million inhabitants.

The question of choosing management methods from ideological, political, technical, economic, environmental, and other perspectives has been the subject of numerous studies, which tend to show that decision-makers' choices were made solely on the basis of purely universalist considerations. However, in light of the example of Montpellier in 2014, I would like to demonstrate that a study of the mental frameworks of decision-makers can help to transcend this debate and provide a better understanding of what is at stake in local authorities that are changing the way they manage their services.

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