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direct service management and provision, but are often accompanied by a transfer of human and financial means incommensurate with identified local needs. There is no evidence of the superiority of any specific model of basic service management, either at the global or regional level. However, the politico-institutional and socio-economic environment of the metropolis allows for the development of common composite criteria for success. To be effective, the metropolis must have all of the key competencies to co-develop, monitor, and follow partnerships in the long term. In light of extremely complex procedures and a variety shared management models (mainly for PPPs), numerous gaps in roles and responsibilities can result from unbalanced information and mismatched jurisdictions between the delegating authority and the delegated provider. When the public organizing authority is not able to play a full monitoring and oversight role, contracts are often ineffectively implemented, with negative effects for service provision and sustainability. These shifts provoke social tensions and harmful and time-consuming litigious attitudes. Only cities with the power to negotiate, plan, and organize internally are able to create, with private partners, real conditions for provision that fit the initial, negotiated framework. Clearly, the delegating authority’s guiding principle of acting in public interest can be challenged by the market logic of the private sector. Mechanisms, and especially practices, of dialogue and safeguards to align the interests of stakeholders are essential. In the metropolitan experience, these governance and transparency mechanisms are unevenly understood and applied, and demand the invention of more tailored approaches. There are several examples of metropolises creating autonomous public enterprises, governed by private law and functioning as satellite agencies of the municipality (e.g.
Medellin or Shanghai). These managing and regulatory authorities aggregate several levels of government, or bring together resources at the horizontal, territorial level to respond to a demand for basic services on a scale too vast for a single metropolis or its partner cities. In this way, public authorities’ borrowing capacity and power to act, and more affordable financial, technical and technological innovation, are facilitated. Some metropolitan areas, after conceding the management of services to external partners, find that direct operation is more efficient. Other large metropolises have never ceased to provide services directly. Tokyo, for example, manages its water supply network (26,000 km of pipes, 3.6% leakage) for 13 million service subscribers and recovers 99.9% of bills. In this case, it would make little sense to transfer service management to the private sector. Instruments for allying with small private operators, CBOs and NGOs constitute, if not an innovation, at least a model to monitor. These mechanisms can be a valuable source of methodological, technical, and pricing innovation. Responding as closely as possible to unmet needs, these alternative and complementary forms of production, delivery, and maintenance of services are paths towards the invention of new models. They reach informal settlements at substantially lower costs than those required by traditional infrastructure networks. Strongly linked to cheap labour, these instruments render the city more ‘liveable’ for underserved segments of the population through a redistribution of revenue, however small. Yet, in doing so, they join the economically dominated mechanisms of urban poverty reproduction with the expensive formulas they offer to users. Service standards and quality may be issues, as well as resistance to reforms and change. Because they take a great variety of forms, their replication and scaling-up for