The Legitimacy of Private Intervention in a Public Service : The Renewal of Water Service Contracts in the Suburbs of Paris

Résumé 0

In France, the private management of water services has consolidated its position overtime and is now dominant in the majority of cases. This paper seeks to explain this specific situation in a country that has developed a contractual framework capable of making the reliance on private operators “political acceptable” and of finding a compromise between the defense of the general interest and the search for profit. These compromises, which are travailed by tensions and regularly called into question, must be renewed periodically. The paper examines one of these turning points, in this case the renegotiation of the contract between the Syndicat des eaux d’Île-de-France (SEDIF) and the Compagnie générale des eaux (CGE), during which both the public authority and the private company must restore a weakened legitimacy. The new contract signed in early 2011 and the preceding negotiations thus redefined the terms of the relationship and established new forms of association.