Water provision and wastewater treatment are crucial for the survival of human beings. Having access to safe drinkable water responds to an essential human need. This chapter builds on our alignment framework, in order to investigate the second layer of our framework, which concerns the alignment between the technological design of a network infrastructure and the meso-institutions that regulate its domain of action. As argued in the previous chapters, we consider governance to be a key concept in understanding the alignment or misalignment within this layer. We investigate the issues at stake through a careful study of the Singaporean water and wastewater infrastructures. Indeed, beyond its spectacular success, Singapore provides a rich example for better understanding modalities that allowed an initially poor country to align the institutional rules framing the organization of its water and wastewater network with the variety of technological solutions selected to overcome the dramatic scarcity of its resources. Through this analytical narrative, our chapter shows the combination of entities and devices that underpin the modalities of governance, through which context-specific technologies and specific institutional norms and rules can be either successfully aligned or suffer from misalignment.

This chapter identifies the technological features of network infrastructures that are relevant for safeguarding their critical functions. Our approach pushes further the economic analysis of the technological dimension of network infrastructures by taking on board important lessons from systems engineering literature. Doing so allows a better understanding of the issues of coordination among the complex combinations of artefacts that provide the physical foundations of infrastructures. Different technological layers are identified and characterized, based on the degree to which the purpose of network infrastructures is specified. The layer “architecture” is typified by the constitutive features of network infrastructures, related to the generic services provided, the constitutive material components, and the basic technological arrangements for safeguarding critical functions. The layer “technological designs” articulates the contextual framing of a generic architecture related to the provision of specific services, material components, and technological arrangements. Lastly, the layer “technical operation” is characterized by the actual processing of technological devices and arrangements so that services are physically provided. In this way, our approach provides an integrated view of the relevant technological features of network infrastructures that can be related to the corresponding institutional characteristics.

In this concluding chapter, we evaluate our framework and reflect on the core questions we set out in the introductory chapter. First, we summarize the main conceptual contributions of our framework and its ability to specify and operationalize the interdependence between institutions and technologies, and its implications for the provision of expected services. The main building blocks of our comprehensive framework comprise the identification of critical functions, the interdependent dimensions of institutions and technologies, and the modalities of their alignment. Second, we reflect on the empirical cases detailed in the second part of the book, in order to learn lessons about what we gained from our framework when dealing with “real world” situations and potential ways that the framework could be improved. Through the variety of cases we selected, these empirical explorations showed the capacity of our framework to identify and analyze characteristics and difficulties proper to the network infrastructures investigated. Finally, we consider how our approach can provide guidance for public policy and private sector initiatives against the background of ongoing transitions in network infrastructures. We explore how the issues of coordination and alignment could be managed by private agents (consumers, firms, and other organizations) as well as public authorities.