Investment in sanitation and drinking water infrastructure is essential for universal access to these services in developing countries. Universal coverage of water and sanitation services (WSS) can prevent the dissemination of waterborne diseases and mitigate their adverse effects. These diseases are responsible for many deaths worldwide, especially among the disadvantaged population and children. A causal effect can be established between WSS investment and hospital admissions due to waterborne diseases. Therefore, we considered an innovative network-DEA approach that models the link between serially connected subsystems (upstream investment and downstream hospitalizations). This approach allowed us: to measure the efficiency of both subsystems; estimate the amount of (efficient) investment necessary to universalize the access to proper WSS infrastructure; and mitigate hospital admissions due to waterborne diseases. We used the Brazil case study to test our model. On average, Brazilian states could increase the number of people not requiring hospitalizations due to waterborne diseases by 157 thousand per R$100 million invested in sanitation and 26 thousand per R$100 million invested in drinking water. Our results suggest that relatively small (efficient) investment in those two infrastructure types has a massive impact on hospitalizations. This impact would be more significant than the investment in WSS coverage. Therefore, if safely managed, WSS would cover all citizens, and Brazil would come closer to developed countries.

The Olympic Charter is the binding document that rules the Olympic Movement which, among other things, has the role of managing the organization of the biggest and most complex sporting event in the world - the Olympic games. The multi-disciplinary nature of this event implies the involvement of diverse stakeholders, including hosts and respective communities that, besides having different interests, rely on each other to fulfil them. As the owner of the event, the International Olympic Committee has the role of managing these interests through the update and modification of the Olympic Charter. This paper explores the evolution of this document, taking special consideration of the influence that occurrences related with stakeholder’s governance and urban strategies of hosts had on its rules. A cross-referenced review between the historical events within these two fields of study is compared to a systematic review of the Charter’s evolution. The results include a timeline with eight periods identifying the progress of those relationships, showing that the Olympic Charter has had a more reactive than pro-active character: it was highly influenced by hosts and other internal and external governance issues that, together, were responsible for the addition of new rules.

Public–Private Partnership (PPP) arrangements are used in different sectors in the provision of infrastructure and public services. The use of PPP agreements in urban regeneration projects, although more recent, has been gaining prominence in different contexts. However, in many cases, PPP projects have a controversial implementation, often not achieving the proposed objectives and presenting negative results. Their controversial implementation is the result of a lack of knowledge and lack of application of the best practices and Critical Success Factors (CSFs) associated with them. Based on this, the present study aims to identify and analyze the CSFs for PPP arrangements in urban regeneration projects. The study was conducted in two distinct parts. The first part consists of a literature review on the PPP CSFs in general. The second part consists of the development of a questionnaire seeking to identify the CSFs of PPP arrangements for urban regeneration projects. Based on the literature review and the questionnaire answers, the main success factors of PPP projects for urban regeneration were identified and structured in the framework with five main clusters: two related to the external environment (enabling environment and exogenous factors) and three related to the internal environment (preparation phase, procurement phase, and contract management phase).