Hidrológiai Közlöny, 2018 (98. évfolyam)
2018 / 4. szám - FÓRUM - Szabó Iván: Integration, a key to sustainable development in water utility services
52 Hidrológiai Közlöny 2018. 98. évf. 4. sz. they criticise the lack of regulations and the non-establishment of the appropriate institutional framework, and they demand integrated public water services171. The term “good water governance has become one of the cornerstones of the papers on sustainable development. If we translate the Hungarian translation back, it often reads “goodwater management”. It means, however, much more than this: it would be better to use the word-for-word translation and speak about “a vizek jó kormányzása” (which is something like the “good governing of waters ”), because, as I have pointed out in the foregoing, the operation of public water services is in fact part of the concept of water management, but it was the appearance of the code-like regulation in 2011 that has specialised it much more in comparison to the original concepts. The aim of this paper is to point out the fact that, during the reforms of Hungarian public water services between 2011 and 2016, it was the integration, as the means, that established the protection of the interests of sustainable development in this sector. In this paper, I use the term “integration”191 in the public water services sector as follows: Integration is the process in which undercapitalised operators employing a few professionals and providing their services in relatively small geographical areas are combined into larger, more capitalised, well-equipped operators with an optimum scale of plant or merger, i.e. they integrate[l01. I, of course, analyse the process from a legal point of view, not only because I am a lawyer myself, but also because there are only a few areas where a major transformation was based on the relevant legal regulation to such an extent. This base is Act CCIX of 2011 on Water Utility Service (hereinafter referred to as Water Utility Services Act), then Government Decree No. 58/2013. (II. 27.) on its implementation (hereinafter referred to as Implementing Decree) and, last but not least, the case-law of the Hungarian Energy and Public Utility Regulatory Authority (hereinafter referred to as MEKH)1"1. The fact that the integration process outlined in this paper could end without any major conflicts and successfully might be due to the fact that there had been only a few reforms which would have applied the principle of “In the beginning, there was the Word” so clearly than during the reform of public water services. The significance of the Water Utility Services Act was, amongst others, that it finally raised the regulation of public water services and the supply of drinking water and sewer services to the level of acts of Parliament. It put the ownership structure, the relationship between service providers and those responsible for the supply, and the relationship between consumer and service providers to order. It established the high authority for public water services within the Hungarian Energy Authority (MEH), then the MEKH, it specified the rules of procedure of the authority and, finally: it integrated public water service providers. It is a publicly known and often mentioned fact that, between 2012 and 2013, so in a year, the number of public water service providers and other organisations engaging in the same activity, reduced to one tenth in Hungary. Public discourse calls this single moment, process as integration. If we, however, consider the definition given above, then integration during the reform of Hungarian water utility services does not only mean that the number of providers decreased, but the application of the various requirements did make the services integrate as well. Services have become more efficient, which means that, from another point of view, they have become more environmentally friendly, which otherwise supports the values of sustainable development, often cited by the Water Utility Services Act. The aim of this paper is to prove the hypothesis that the integration efforts of the Water Utility Services Act served the interests of “good water governance" in Hungary in the end, and through this, they contributed to the ensuring of the goals of sustainable development. HOW INTEGRATION, AS A GOAL, APPEARS IN THE RECITALS AND BASIC PRINCIPLES OF THE ACT? Integration, as a goal to achieve or as a means to “good water governance” is not a declared aim of the Act; however, its goals include “sustainable development in the sectors of public water services ”[,2b One of the gap-filling innovations of the Water Utility Services Act was that it specified the fundamental principles of public water services. In the light of their application in practice, we divide these fundamental principles to declared and operational ones. It is important to know, that the 11, i.e. 10+1, fundamental principles are subordinated to one another according to their sequence, which means that, in the event where there is a conflict between two fundamental principles, the principle with a larger sequence number is subordinated to the one with a smaller sequence number (which means that, in the event of a conflict, the ones in the beginning of the sequence should be considered; this is the meaning of the +1, i.e. the 11th fundamental principle). Although integration, as an expression, does not appear in the fundamental principles of the Water Utility Services Act, but the expression “regionality” does1131, it does, however, obviously express integration - the integration of service areas in this case — and to such an extent that certain authors rather apply the word “regionálisadon” instead of “integration”1141. I do however disagree with this, because I interpret the concept of integration, as I referred to it in the Introduction, in a much broader sense. The expression “regionálisadon” only refers to the logical and reasonable combination of service areas, but this does not cover the entire concept of an integration-based reform. Furthermore, according to my point of view, the expression “regionálisadon” is not correct, because there have been some professionals of water utility operation who - not entirely unfoundedly
