| Popis: |
This study excavates the experts, ideas and methods behind the earliest water utility performance benchmarking efforts initiated in the 1990s using archive materials and secondary sources. The results contend that benchmarking is public sector reform by other means. Quantification allows performance benchmarking to escape the scrutiny and controversy that follows market-led reform, even though both privilege economic efficiency at the expense of distributional equity. Benchmarking experts advance economisation, a process that, through economic reasoning, metrics and quantitative comparisons, transforms water utilities into calculative Pareto-maximising entities that privilege existing consumers to the detriment of the unserved. Economisation is not inevitable, however. Heterodox experts can choose different benchmarking methods to advance alternative values. Two professors in India, for instance, introduced explicitly equity-focused indicators into the country’s water utility benchmarking system, challenging the prevailing orthodoxy. Nonetheless, while fairer benchmarking systems have the potential to reduce resource inequities, they also risk domesticating power relations. |
