Informe de trabajo Negowat Bolivia Nº 7. Relaciones entre las organizaciones comunitarias de abastecimiento de agua con empresas municipales y el Estado en zonas peri-urbanas de América Latina. Aplicación al caso de Cochabamba.
Abstract
In the periurban areas of Bolivia, because of the lack of capacity of water companies, drinking water often is managed by informal community-based organizations that do not manage the sewage systems. In the south zone of Cochabamba and Tiquipaya/Colcapirhua, different models of co-management between water committees and companies are proposed. The principal themes in discussion are technical, financial, legal, institutional and environmental.
In order to find interesting experiences from comparable situations, 13 periurban areas where there is communitarian management of water were studied in Latin America and Africa.
We can distinguish two types of organizations: the \"bottom up\", built by the communities autonomously and the \"top down\", often created by the international cooperation in order to build and/or manage one part of the service. We observe that the \"bottom up\" services are often blocked in a spiral of bad management, because of the lack of external aid. The performance of the \"top down\" services depends on the continuity of the existing support. Moreover, standards models of co-management with municipal firms that permit a good service with prices accepted by the populations do not seem to exist. However, good examples were met for the two models and could be useful for the cases of Cochabamba and Tiquipaya/Colcapirhua.
Citation
Centro AGUA, UMSS, Bolivia, 212 pp. In Spanish, with summaries in French and English.
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