new information to improve targeting. Unfortunately, one of the common observations of analysts of the incidence of pricing and subsidies in the sector is that there is very little data on water consumption. Most of the data on WSS focus on expenditures and derive consumption from some assumption of the pricing structure even when there are various pricing options. If regulators are serious about helping the poor get affordable access to piped water in cities, this needs to be corrected. It is not a coincidence that when a private operator takes over the business, one of the first tools to be implemented is a cadastre of users. The data is then usually processed through relatively standardized (and overpriced) software which can be used to simulate any tariff structure. Why not impose open access to the tool to regulators at least?

# **_3.4 Impact on accountability_**

**_The problem?_** There are too many dimensions to accountability to be able to treat them fairly here, but they are all part of the characterization of water governance. Discussing governance is not any easier as it is a concept with many definitions.<sup>_42_</sup> But in the context of regulation and its institutions, the definitions tend to address a few clear dimensions. These include incomplete or unclear legal and contractual obligations and rights, the distribution of mandates and financing options across national, subnational and supranational actors, the relative importance of public and private, or small and large operators, as well as multiple process-related issues.<sup>43</sup>

We actually know very little about governance with sufficient detail for developing countries. Most of the information available comes from detailed case studies or cross-country studies in which governance is summarized into a number of limited indicators. They are, however, useful enough to realize the significant dispersion of institutional settings, even if key details cannot be quantified. Table 2 illustrates this diversity by focusing on the distribution of countries along two dimensions: the existence of a separate regulatory agency and some experience with PPP. But this fails to pick up the extent to which the regulatory bodies lack independence and/or capacity to manage economic and financial regulation—even when they are quite good at the technical level (Gerlach and Franceys, 2010). In Africa, for example, only half of the Sub-Saharan countries which introduced separate regulators in the water sector achieved significant improvements in their targets. Very few SubSaharan countries managed to protect those agencies from political interferences (Mande Bafua,

> 42 The Global Water Partnership (GWP) defines it as “the range of political, social, economic and administrative systems that are in place to develop and manage water resources, and the delivery of water services, at different levels of society”. It emphasizes transparency, inclusiveness, responsiveness, sustainability, fairness, coherence, integration and accountability.

> 43 OECD (2016) is a remarkable effort to provide a snapshot of the governance structure of city water regulation. The data are relatively new and hence have not yet been treated statistically, at least for external audiences.

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