When Cities Take Back Their Water, Who Really Gets a Say?
Vanessa Mascia Turri (University of Milano-Bicocca) & Tommaso Vitale (Sciences Po)
Cities that reclaim their water services from private operators tend to invite citizens into governance during the dramatic transition, then quietly push them out once serious decisions begin. This is the central finding of our comparative study of Paris and Naples, published in Urban Affairs Review: public ownership is not sufficient for public accountability, and participatory governance structures created to legitimize reform are routinely dismantled or emptied of meaning the moment civic actors start pressing on questions of budgets, hiring, and investment priorities. In other words, participation is welcomed at the margins, but becomes contested once it reaches decisions about how resources are actually allocated.
The research is timely. Across Europe, the governance of water utilities sits at the intersection of two converging pressures: the ongoing reversal of privatization, which has seen over three hundred services return to public control since 2000, and the growing urgency of the green transition, which requires massive investment in aging urban infrastructure. Who has genuine authority over these decisions is no longer an abstract institutional question.
Paris: participation managed through technical complexity
Paris brought its water services back into full public ownership in 2010, ending a longstanding duopoly between Veolia and Suez. The new utility, Eau de Paris, established a participatory body with genuine democratic ambitions. Citizens’ representatives sat alongside technical experts, overseeing a service contract that featured more than 130 performance indicators covering water quality, billing fairness, and environmental targets.
In practice, this architecture channelled civic energy toward managing metrics rather than setting strategy. As civic actors became more experienced and began to engage more directly with strategic questions, their role became more politically sensitive. When the president of the participatory body attempted to evaluate the utility’s relationship to the broader Grand Paris governance agenda, a politically sensitive question touching the city’s regional power interests, he was removed from office and the body was suspended. Participation persisted in form; its capacity to challenge executive discretion did not. The instrument constituencies that had provided legitimacy for breaking the private contracts were politely contained once that legitimacy had done its work.
Naples: a more radical experiment, a harder collapse
Naples pursued a different model. Following the 2011 national referendum in which Italians voted to keep water public, ABC Napoli was restructured as a genuine commons utility, with a Civic Council holding formal governing authority alongside elected representatives. Environmental lawyer Maurizio Montalto led this body with notable seriousness: scrutinising finances, assessing infrastructure, and resisting pressure to absorb liabilities that were not the utility’s responsibility.
That seriousness provoked the rupture. When the city administration sought to transfer ninety-nine workers from a failing municipal firm into ABC Napoli, a move designed to shore up a coalition that depended on patronage employment, the Civic Council refused on financial and governance grounds. The mayor dismissed the board and replaced it with extraordinary commissioners appointed by the administration. A company employee, watching the transformation, put it plainly: what began as a commons had become just another political apparatus. Here, participation was not contained but abruptly dismantled once it began to constrain executive discretion.
The pattern beneath the cases
Paris and Naples represent two distinct pathways. Paris used procedural containment: technocratic framing, agenda control, and the quiet exclusion of questions reaching toward metropolitan strategy. Naples underwent direct executive rupture, accelerated by fiscal pressure, infrastructure decay, and coalition politics. Yet both cities followed the same underlying logic. Participation was encouraged when it provided legitimacy for reform and technical competence for the transition. It was curtailed the moment civic actors moved toward decisions involving money, jobs, or strategic authority. The line between welcome partnership and threatening insurgency was precisely the line between symbolic inclusion and genuine accountability.
The article compares the two cases systematically. Paris maintained participation in a narrowed but stable form; Naples saw it collapse entirely. The infrastructural starting point mattered: Paris inherited upgraded networks from its departing private operators, while Naples faced severe decay and fiscal stress. The inter-organisational architecture mattered too, specifically who held veto power over the utility’s governing board. So did the political-strategic environment: the patronage pressures facing the Naples coalition had no equivalent in Paris. Taken together, the comparison shows that rollback does not follow a single path: it can take the form of containment or collapse, but in both cases it emerges when participation begins to affect decisions that governing coalitions treat as non-negotiable.
What the findings mean for reform
Remunicipalization remains a necessary step toward genuine public accountability over essential infrastructure. The evidence from these two cities suggests it is not a sufficient one. Without enforceable participatory rights protected from executive discretion and coalition pressures, public utilities risk reproducing, under new ownership, some of the same accountability deficits that originally drove privatisation.
For policymakers, the implication is concrete: the design of participatory bodies matters enormously, and their robustness needs to be built in from the beginning, not left to goodwill. For activists and civic organisations, the lesson is that the transition moment, not just the governance structure that follows, is when the architecture of accountability needs to be negotiated and secured. More broadly, participation appears most fragile not when it fails, but when it starts to shape the decisions that matter.
The deeper question the research raises is this: if participation is permitted only when it poses no challenge to those who already hold power, can it ever genuinely transform how cities are governed?
Vanessa Mascia Turri is a researcher at the University of Milano-Bicocca. Her work examines urban governance, the transformation of local public services, and remunicipalization, with a focus on water services and civic participation.
Tommaso Vitale is Full Professor of Sociology at Sciences Po, Centre for European Studies and Comparative Politics (CEE-CNRS UMR 8239), and Dean of the Urban School. He is scientific director of Cities Are Back in Town, the permanent interdisciplinary seminar in comparative urban studies.