SUSTAINABLE WATER TARIFFS IN MEGAPOLES: HOW TO RECOVER THE FULL COST
Résumé
In Europe, the Water Framework Directive largely changed the picture of sustainable water and sanitation services, in particular in large cities: like other water users they are asked to initiate their governance from the aquatic environment recovery, i.e. from territorial approaches first, rather than end-of-pipe technology. This is translated into article 9 which requests to compare the price paid for these services with the full cost, including environmental and resource costs. But adding these external costs to the pricing of water in bills might make the result unaffordable and politically unacceptable. Considering that even OECD admitted the need of 3 T's (tariffs, taxes and transfers) for funding water services, we show how declining water consumption triggered them together with the 3 E's (triple bottom line, environment-economics-ethics) approach of sustainability in the water services sector; it calls in turn for new governance mechanisms for a global sustainability, addressing the potential divergence between the three E's and balancing their targets. We distinguish internal and external governance, each calling for new scientific approaches to support good decision making about sustainable tariff design. We then develop a specific analysis of the recovery of environmental and resource costs when water services face water resources considered as common pool: authorities in charge of water services should pay mutualized service fees like the other water users, and pass them on either citizens or customers. In France, the liberal state tradition makes this difficult to implement, leading to incoherent and unfair water tariffs.
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