Access to Water Resources in Belgium: Strategies of Public and Private Suppliers

Water suppliers adopt a variety of strategies to gain access to and control of water resources. In contrast to theoretical approaches which assert that the status of ownership determines water supplier strategies, we argue that supplier strategies depend on the activation of property rights and the specific public policies applied to the resource. These two components of the institutional water regime are thus factors that are more important in explaining the suppliers strategies than the intrinsic characteristics of the water operator. We thus present two case histories of aquifer exploitatio... Mehr ...