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In the 1990s, low and middle-income countries experimented extensively with public–private partnerships (PPPs) in water and wastewater. Concession-based contracts were the favored form of PPP. Although these experiments produced promising managerial innovations, they suffered from high rates of failure. These stemmed from the ambitious scope and hasty design of many concessions, which made them susceptible to macroeconomic shocks and political opportunism. A key lesson from the 1990s' experiments is that PPP contracts combining long-term financing and exploitation should be avoided in country settings combining weak governance with a volatile economy.

The public administration literature asserts that autonomy is central to performance. In this article we develop a managerial autonomy index, which we apply to 22 water utilities in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. The 16 items that underlie our composite autonomy index display a high degree of internal consistency. This speaks for the validity of the autonomy concept. We find that the autonomy scores of the 22 utilities vary widely. We also find strong and positive associations between autonomy scores and six out of eight key performance indicators. Our results support the idea that autonomy is central to the performance of water service providers. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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This article assesses the past 15 years' evolution of Public Sector Benchmarking (PSB) research. We do so with a database of 147 peer-reviewed articles published between 1990 and 2005. Over this period PSB evolved into a mature and strongly international field of research. A theoretical and conceptual rift runs through the literature, with those advocating PSB as a tool for managed competition on one side, and those promoting benchmarking as a voluntary and collaborative learning process on the other. A first challenge facing future PSB researchers is that of closing the gap between the managed and voluntary benchmarking perspectives; a second challenge concerns empirical tests that capture the effects of different benchmarking regimes on the performance of public sector providers. Points for practitioners Benchmarking is widely advocated as a tool for enhancing the performance of public sector providers. This article reviews the academic literature on benchmarking. This literature suggests that public sector benchmarking can fulfill its promise if only policy-makers pay sufficient attention to benchmarking design, particularly the development of appropriate accounting systems and the balancing of collaborative and competitive elements. Dos and don'ts for PSB innovators are discussed in the concluding section. An extensive reference list is appended to the article.