Corruption and corruption reform in the water sector. Dirty water:Illustration of water corruption modalities from three Mexican regions

The authors discussed in a companion report how water professionals conceptualise, experience, and address (or not) corruption in their sector. This report grounds knowledge about specific water corruption issues by taking as an example a country with both endemic corruption and increasing water stress: Mexico. We chose this country partly because there are numerous and well-documented water corruption problems, and partly because the primary author is from Mexico and knows the regions well. The first section of the paper shows that, at the national level, Mexico has made important changes in its water legislation, and participated in a number of anti corruption initiatives. However, these being non-binding, implementation has often been patchy and half-hearted, and high levels of corruption persist. In the water sector, this translates into ambiguously defined responsibilities across agencies, opaque governance systems, politicised water agencies, a generalised lack of accountability, and poor supervision, all of which were deepened by the decentralisation of water and sanitation services in the last decades. The second section looked at three regional water systems in the country: the northern states of Zacatecas and Sonora, the Yucatán Peninsula and the central Estado de México. We argue that there are several critical corruption dimensions of the water crisis. In the northern states, we observe the over-exploitation of aquifers, the contamination of the water destined to urban consumption by mining activities, and the unjust distribution of water sources between the private sector and the public urban sector, between rich and poor neighbourhoods and within the agricultural sector. In the south of Mexico, water corruption is driven by magnates of the tourism industry (an important subset of the blue economy) taking advantage of weak regulatory frameworks and the limited capacity of government agencies to properly assess and monitor new developments. In the final section, the authors provide an example of how to use the water corruption typology - discussed in more detail in the first report - to analyse real-life situations and identify the specific corruption issues that were present in each of the cases examined.