The Finnish Experience

Water and wastewater services in Finland are, according to international comparisons, exceptionally well organised. In Finland, as in industrialised countries in general, the public sector and particularly the municipalities have played a central role in the development of these services. Although municipalities are legally responsible for water and wastewater service provision, they do not have to produce these services themselves, and there are several alternatives for the ownership and operational management. There is no single model for how water and wastewater services should be organised—not even within a single country. Water and wastewater services should be looked at as multi-dimensional activities within a wider institutional context considering the roles of all stakeholders.1 1 This paper is based on several studies, especially on case studies produced by the European Union-funded projects PRINWASS (http://users.ox.ac.uk/∼prinwass/) and WaterTime (http://www.watertime.net/), the UNRISD project on private sector involvement in water supply as well as the recent doctoral dissertation of the first author (Pietilä, 2006 Pietilä, P. 2006. Role of municipalities in water services, 226TUT. Doctoral dissertation no. 617 [Google Scholar])

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• Healthy competition and unsound comparison

  Søren Christensen•Globalisation Societies and…•2014

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