France: Public-Private Partnerships in Water-Sanitation and Public Transport

In this chapter, we consider PPP as all forms of ‘cooperation between public authorities and the world of business which aim to ensure the funding, construction, renovation, management or maintenance of an infrastructure or the provision of a service' (European Commission, 2004)1. In fact PPPs are very old in France (Bauby, 1996). Already under the Ancien Régime, some public services had been the subject of a first form of concessions, conferred by the royal power to many actors: officers, real agents, farmers, etc. A second form of PPP consisted in a direct delegation between the King and a man or a company to achieve the infrastructure and services (channels, bridges). A third was the fiscal and domainial delegation, consisting in selling or renting the recipe of the direct and indirect taxes and the income of the royal domain. A long experience of private participation exists especially in the water and public local transportation sectors, and there is a growing acceptance that public-private partnership arrangements can be used as an additional and complementary instrument to meet infrastructure and service needs in a wide range of sectors, from environmental services to health care provision or education. In this chapter we will focus on the water and public local transportation. France's political and administrative organisation is particularly complex. The country has 36,000 communes, 95 counties (départements), and 22 regions, as well as numerous structures designed to facilitate co-operation between its various administrative entities. France's communes vary considerably in size. Over 10,000 of them have less than 200 inhabitants, and over 30,000 communes have less than 2,000 (accounting for 25.3 percent of the country's total population). At the other end of the scale, 102 communes have between 50,000 and 200,000 inhabitants (14.4 percent of France's population) and 10 have over 200,000 people (8.9 percent). This diversity has important consequences in terms of the organisation and regulation of the water distribution and water treatment system.