The need to have greater autonomy in management and in order to establish better accountability, including checks and balances against inequities and injustice, has led many countries to separate the function of service provision from the function of regulation. In addition to the overarching need for a functioning judicial system, sectoral reform has also added to the social equity dimension of water resources management. Thus, for example, sector reforms carried out in the 1990s in Latin America have been known as: “from unregulated centralized public provision to regulated decentralized public provision