Integration of water and wastewater utilities

Abstract

The concepts and principles associated with Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) have been around for many decades. The IWRM approach of merging water and wastewater utilities into a single organization has several advantages, particularly for larger urban areas. Not only can pipes for both services be laid in the same excavation, but human resources can also be conserved through cross‐training of water supply and wastewater services personnel. Although there are advantages, for a variety of reasons the concept has been slow to gain acceptance. Some of these reasons have to do with the approach to utility services in different countries; for example, in Germany wastewater services fall under the purview of the roads department. Utility services in Finland, and to a lesser extent Sweden, provide opportunities to study the implementation of IWRM on a wider scale. Certainly the mergers of water and wastewater utilities in these two countries have had their challenges. There has sometimes been little cooperation, and even a culture of rivalry between staff of the merged utilities. But more significant, there has been very little documentation about how the processes of separate utilities providing different services were actually merged. This article looks at what is known and what information is lacking about these types of mergers and suggests areas for additional study. The authors suggest that the lessons learned from the implementation of IWRM in Finland and Sweden have wider global applications as countries search for ways to incorporate greater efficiencies while working with increasingly limited resources.

Trends in integrated water resources management research: a literature review

“…The ISI Web of Knowledge has been widely used to perform scientific literature reviews, such as in the works of Huang et al (2011), Arcas et al (2010, van der Zaag et al (2009) andTrabucchi et al (2012). The time period analysed spans the years 2000-2011 because it was during this period that IWRM gained prominence as the predominant paradigm in water resources management (Katko et al, 2010). Within the ISI Web of Knowledge, paper selection was restricted to the Scientific Citation Index Expanded and Social Science Citation Index citation databases, bearing in mind that these databases are indexes to the most popular journals.…”

Assessing Regional Cooperation in Water Services

“…However, in case of a regional water and wastewater company (third level), the organization is in charge of the whole chain of water services and owns the entire infrastructure it operates with. Thus, the third cooperation level integrates water supply and wastewater management sectors, which has also been a common practice in municipal-level organizations in Finland since the 1970s (Katko, Kurki, Juuti, Rajala, & Seppälä, 2010).…”

Water Services Management and Governance

“…In 2009, 14 of the utility's staff members were interviewed about the effects of the merger and their related experiences. Their stories are presented in the following sections (Juuti et al 2010). Although the annual utility reports mention the merger in 1987, there is no discussion of the integration process in subsequent years.…”

“…For long water supply and sanitation services were managed by separate organisations, but since the 1970s and 1980s many of them, particularly in urban areas, have merged into a single entity, at least in Finland and Sweden (Katko et al 2010). According to a comparative study on the evolution of water and sewerage services in 29 European cities in 13 countries, mergers of water and sewerage utilities are quite uncommon in the European context.…”