31

In reunified Germany, municipalities and professional associations have reacted differently to the arrival of foreign private operators in the water sector, the management of which has traditionally been public and local. This fact leads us to reconsider the analysis of organizational changes offered by the new sociological institutionalism and public policy transfer. Indeed, these do not sufficiently take account of policy dynamics that call into question or hamper the adoption of exogenous models. The conflicts over legitimacy and organizational compromises to which partial privatization of the water sector in Germany has given rise demonstrate both the degree to which ways of importing (or not) a foreign-origin system depend on local issues and interests and the fact that, far from going without saying, the institutionalization of an organizational change by means of transfer varies according to the configurations of the actors concerned.