Water issues are a major concern for the mining sector and for communities living near mining operations. Water-related conflicts can damage a firm's social license to operate while violent conflicts pose devastating impacts on community well-being. Collaborative approaches to water management are gaining attention as a proactive solution to prevent conflict. One manifestation of these efforts is participatory water monitoring (PWM). PWM programs have the potential to generate new scientific information on water quantity and quality, improve scientific literacy, generate trust among stakeholders, improve water resource management and ultimately mitigate conflict. The emergence of PWM programs signals a shift toward greater stakeholder collaboration and more inclusive water governance within mining regions. In this article, we propose a new framework to evaluate the degree and extent of community involvement in PWM programs. This framework builds on citizen science literature. When applied to 20 cases in Latin America, notable differences in the degree of community and company participation between PWM programs are found. These differences suggest that companies and communities approach these programs from very different points of view. It is concluded that more attentive collaboration between firms and communities in the design of the program, the collection of data and interpretation of the results is needed to effectively build trust through PWM.

Utility managers must design rate structures that meet multiple objectives: full cost recovery, fairness, economic efficiency, and resource conservation. To reach these multiple goals, the design of an optimal rate structure would ideally include detailed information on cost of service, demand elasticity, and preferences of the customer base within each utility. However this information is often unavailable, especially when analyzing utilities at regional or national scales. In this absence, the comparison or benchmarking of rate structures across utilities may reveal insights regarding the features, management, or performance of one utility relative to another. We review the metrics and methods available to water utility managers for comparing rate structures with publicly available information. By presenting the full range of metrics available to utility managers, we aim to facilitate the comparison of water rate structures, and ensure that the analysts can select the metric that best fits their needs. To illustrate how these metrics may help generate insight, we use them to compare the rate structures of five municipalities in Canada. Despite the contextual differences, we find that the rates tend to converge at a single metric, the Canadian standard of 25[Formula: see text]m3/month, suggesting that there is a “looking over the shoulder effect” in which managers are probably cognizant of the metrics used to compare them to others. We suggest that the design or re-design of rate structures can be informed by the metrics that compare rates across utilities, despite the limitations of working with only publicly available information.

While access to drinking water has expanded worldwide, safely managed provision is still a challenge, and rural areas are specially underserved. To provide safe drinking water for these areas, water scholars and international organizations have advocated for community-based organizations or coproduction schemes. The literature often mentions that institutions and people play a key role in the provision of drinking water although the specific mechanisms through which they may affect the process of maintaining good quality water have not been reported yet. The article aims to fill this gap by providing a complex, local view on this process. In Chile, from 1960 onwards, the State has implemented cooperatives to provide for drinking water in rural and small-town areas under a coproduction scheme. In this scheme, the State provides the infrastructure, and the community is responsible for service provision. We analysed the water quality of six of these cooperatives and conducted interviews with water managers and leaders. Our research suggests that formal and informal relationships provide the links and motivation needed for the organizations continuous work. These results highlight how relevant it is to keep in mind the context and the public role of delivering safe drinking water.

We advance the idea of using percent billing changes as a simple measure of price escalation. This simple yet underused metric may help evaluate rate structure design in public utilities. We illustrate how price escalation may generate useful insight for utility managers by analyzing rate structures from water utilities in British Columbia, Canada. We observe that increasing block rates may send weaker relative price signals to users than a simple constant unit charge, and that low volume users tend to receive the strongest relative price signals. Measuring price escalation may also allow one to quantify the distortions generated by fixed charges. We conclude that analysts may find it useful to include measures of price escalation in their portfolio of metrics to evaluate rate structures in energy and water utilities.

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