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Under pressure to deliver services both more efficiently and more effectively, some governments have begun to experiment with the provision of public goods through the creation of partnerships involving the public, private and not-for-profit sectors. Water is one of the many ‘public goods’ traditionally provided by governments around the world. Concerns about the transparency and accountability of public–private partnerships are particularly acute in this sector, because failures in governance can have tragic consequences. Using grounded theory development research methods, the authors examine the governance of municipal water systems in Canada. Three cases are presented that make use of a range of formal governance structures. Yet, regardless of the differences in formal structure, in each case the formal structures have proved insufficient, and domain-based collaborative governance mechanisms have …