The municipal waste management sector in Europe: shifting boundaries between public service and the market

This paper provides a comparative assessment of the organization of urban waste management in selected European countries and discusses the regulatory implications of the ongoing evolution. Using an institutional economic approach, focused on governance of transactions along the value chain, we argue that: i) there is evidence of an increasing shift towards operator-based integrated systems; ii) the emphasis put on material and energy recovery opens the market far beyond the traditional legal monopolies established for managing urban services. These results pose new challenges for economic regulation and makes it more complicate to trace the boundary between the public service and the market domain. Spaces for competition in the market have become much larger, but the role of public regulation and planning are nonetheless more far-reaching than in the past.