The long-term reform of the water and wastewater industry: The case of Melbourne in Australia

Transformational change and the vacuum of performance measurement: How a story of success became a failure

“…The lack of competition is another important moderating external contingency when evaluating the performance of a water and sewage organisation. Both Abbott, Wang, andCohen, 2011 andTabi andVerdon (2014) raise the question of who actually wins from a restructuring of a supply of water and sewage monopoly. The use of PM to facilitate lower fees and enhance customer satisfaction may stand in the background of other stakeholders' interests.…”

Drawing a Line in the Sand: Valuing Regulated Assets of the Australian Water Industry

“…The past literature on reform of the water sector in Australia has tended to concentrate either on the changes to environmental management (see for instance Furlong, Gan and De Silva 2016) or on the restructuring of the water and sewerage authorities (see Abbott et al, 2011;Byrnes, 2013;Cooper and Crase 2016). Although some studies have explained that the aim of government reform has been to make pricing more cost-reflective and only a few have explained how this has worked in practice (see Crase et al, 2013;Pawsey and Crase 2013).…”

Australian Urban Water Reform Story

“…However, little contemporary scholarly work has been dedicated to a longitudinal account of the progression of urban water reforms in Australia, with the exception of a few historical analyses of large-scale utility expansions or regional adaptations to reform initiatives (see Abbott et al 2011;Crase et al 2000;Lloyd et al 1992), and critical interpretations of localized planning or infrastructure developments in response to increasing population density and resource demand (see Davis and Farrelly 2009;Evans 1994;NWC 2012).…”

“…A key focus of much of the existing literature discusses how the governance and institutional changes during the 1980s-90s reform era influenced the development of water policy and the restructuring of utilities and the sector. Largely, this literature frames the reforms as positive and the changes as successful (see Abbott et al 2011;Berg 2014;Saleth and Dinar 2005). However, in the last two decades, reports have been published that depict some of the reform efforts as counterproductive (in terms of price stabilization, demand management, or social cost), or not quite as influential in refashioning water management or water use as most studies depict (see Quiggin 2007;Sheil 2000;Syme 2008).…”

“…Another divide in the literature is an emphasis on particular targets of the reforms, in which many accounts typically are couched in terms of economic outcomes or efficiency dividends (see Abbott et al 2011;Carroll and Head 2010;Grafton et al 2015). This reflects an early and very important focus of the reform process, as water agencies and utilities-especially those major urban utilities in the economic reform vanguard of New South Wales and Victoria-responded to (or in some respects inspired) the national Appendix C…”