Gobernar la escasez: respuestas de las ciudades de São Paulo y Ciudad del Cabo a crisis hídricas y una aproximación al caso de Bogotá

Abstract

This article comparatively evaluates institutional responses to urban water crises in São Paulo (2014–2015) and Cape Town (2017–2018) in order to identify how cities respond to such events and to establish a dialogue with the recent experience of Bogotá. Based on an analytical framework centered on three dimensions—the administrative nature of the operator, institutional incentives, and political accountability—the article explores how different governance arrangements shape the capacity to respond to scarcity. Through this analytical approach, we demonstrate that effective management does not depend solely on whether the provider is public or private, but rather on the institutional capacity to align incentives, coordinate actors, and maintain political legitimacy. The article also shows that cities confront these crises with a limited set of tools, whose differences lie primarily in their sequencing and institutional legitimation. It concludes that governing scarcity is, above all, a matter of state capacity and governance, rather than organizational design or exclusively technical solutions.