Water and sanitation services in Europe: do legal frameworks provide for "good governance"?

Water is life – and yet not everyone has safe and secure access to this finite resource. Over 1.1 billion people worldwide lack access to safe drinking water and around 2.6 billion people have no access to adequate sanitation. This situation is estimated to cause more than five million deaths each year from water-related diseases, mostly preventable. The current global water crisis is widely considered a crisis of governance and not of scarcity: insufficiency of water, particularly for drinking water supply and sanitation, is primarily caused by inefficient management, corruption, and lack of appropriate institutions, rather than by water shortages. The United Nations and other relevant institutions claim that lack of governance is one of the obstacles to improve access to water supply and sanitation. Improved governance is argued to be essential to provide for better water services, especially in the current context of population growth, increasing water demands and global climate change.