Globalization in Water Infrastructure: A Network of Public-Private Strategic Alliances

Water is a key sector with major repercussions on health, the natural environment, and the economy. Public ownership and control of water infrastructures are the norm in most countries. Yet some private water companies emerged as early as the nineteenth century. In the last few decades, many governments, especially in developing countries, have sought the involvement of the private sector. This work contributes to the extant literature by developing a multi-disciplinary framework to look at private participation in the sector in terms of the overall trends of governments and companies' tendencies to form strategic alliances on water projects. In this study, the World Bank database on Private Participation in Infrastructure (PPI) is used and Social Network Analysis and GLM are implemented as analytical tools. This study finds that alliances between governments and companies on PPI projects are positively impacted by positional and relational embeddedness. Furthermore, governments and companies with a shared language and those that are geographically proximate are more likely to engage in PPI projects. A key policy finding is that on average, countries engaged in more PPI projects have a higher Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6 (Clean Water & Sanitation for All) category score.