Intermediaries
Work Packages
Work package 1
This work package delivers an overview of the current status of water market privatisation and liberalisation in the Accession States of the European Union. It has the preparatory function of providing the database for the subsequent comparative analyses of the emergence and operation of intermediary services and organisations. The objectives are:
- to fill a gap and document the current development and the diverse forms of water market liberalisation in the Accession States
- to provide a comprehensive database on all Accession States.
Work package 2
This work package has two objectives:
- to collect a variety of examples of intermediaries operating between providers of technical infrastructure and the users of these services
- to develop out of an initial assessment of these examples a working definition and preliminary typology of intermediaries for the project (contributing to Objective 2 of the project).
Work package 3
To meet Objective 2 of the project, this Work Package builds a conceptual and theoretical understanding of intermediaries by examining how different institutional and social contexts shape their emergence and function. Using Deliverables D1.1, D2.2 and D2.3 as a starting point, the Work Package will:
- explain the regulatory, economic, technological and commercial factors shaping the emergence of intermediary services and organisations across utilities
- examine the methods and styles of working that intermediaries use to introduce new technologies and changed social practices in the production and use of utility services.
Work package 4
To meet Objective 3, this Work Package will map the existence of intermediary services and organisations in the water/wastewater sector in case studies of seven city regions, examining how their spatial, institutional and economic contexts produce different styles of intermediaries. The specific objectives are to:
- map the social organisation and level of intermediary activities across different urban regions
- construct a typology of the styles of intermediary activities and their implications for user-producer relations across the urban regions
- identify innovative intermediary practices that have the potential to be disseminated and adopted in other urban regions.
Work package 5
To meet Objective 4 of the project, this Work Package evaluates and quantifies the impact of intermediaries on the eco- and cost-efficiency of urban water/wastewater networks. In this second phase of the case studies conducted under Work Package 4 the impact of intermediaries will be evaluated at three levels:
- the scale of water and wastewater savings facilitated by intermediary activities
- the economic savings to users of resource saving activities promoted by intermediaries
- the implications of intermediary-led resource saving activities on the management of water and wastewater networks.
Work package 6
The objective of this Work Package is to build and test a decision support module comprising a training programme with course handbook designed to provide regional water managers with the necessary comparative data, policy frameworks and dissemination tools with which to accelerate the development of intermediary services and organisations to facilitate resource saving in the water/wastewater sector (cf. Objective 5 of the project).
Work package 7
The objective of this Work Package is to accelerate the exploitation of the decision support module and dissemination of the projects findings, targeting different audiences within relevant policy, management and research communities at EU, national and regional levels. WP 7 also includes collaboration activities with other EU-funded research projects. Given the considerable practical applications of the decision support module as well as the innovative nature of the research, the dissemination strategy is designed to address both practitioners and the scientific community
