Fixing the Institutions that Fix the Pipes: Four Decades of Water Sector Reform

Drawing on four decades of direct experience across countries and regions, Saltiel traces how the global water sector has repeatedly fallen into the same trap: investing heavily in infrastructure while treating institutional development as secondary, something to be addressed after the pipes are laid, the plants are built, the ribbon is cut. The result, documented by evaluations across every major multilateral development bank, is a persistent and costly gap between what gets constructed and the service people get. Treatment plants that sit idle. Distribution networks that deteriorate. Utilities that cannot pay their staff, collect their bills, or maintain their assets. And always, disproportionately, it is the poor who pay the price.At the heart of the book is the Policy, Institutional, and Regulatory (PIR) framework, an analytical tool developed with colleagues at the World Bank's Water Global Practice, but forged in practice long before it had a name. The framework's central insight is both simple and consistently underestimated: for water sector reforms to last, positive incentives must be embedded in the policies, institutions, and regulations that govern the sector. When these three elements are coherently aligned, they create synergies capable of transforming entire systems. When they are misaligned they produce predictable failures, regardless of how much money is spent or how sophisticated the engineering becomes. A compelling call to put institutions, not just infrastructure, at the center of delivering sustainable water services for all. Read more