Briony Cathryn Ferguson

The enabling institutional context for integrated water management: Lessons from Melbourne

There is widespread international acceptance that climate change, demographic shifts and resource limitations impact on the performance of water servicing in cities. In response to these challenges, many scholars propose that a fundamental move away from traditional centralised infrastructure towards more integrated water management is required. However, there is limited practical or scholarly understanding of how to enable this change in practice and few modern cities have done so successfully. This paper addresses this gap by analysing empirical evidence of Melbournes recent experience in shifting towards a hybrid of centralised and decentralised infrastructure to draw lessons about the institutional context that enabled this shift. The research was based on a qualitative single-case study, involving interviews and envisioning workshops with urban water practitioners who have been directly involved in Melbournes water system changes. It was found that significant changes occurred in the cultural-cognitive, normative and regulative dimensions of Melbournes water system. These included a shift in cultural beliefs for the water profession, new knowledge through evidence and learning, additional water servicing goals and priorities, political leadership, community pressure, better coordinated governance arrangements and strong market mechanisms. The paper synthesises lessons from the case study that, with further development, could form the basis of prescriptive guidance for enabling the shift to new modes of water servicing to support more liveable, sustainable and resilient outcomes for future cities.

A diagnostic procedure for transformative change based on transitions, resilience and institutional thinking

Urban water governance regimes around the world have traditionally planned large-scale, centralized infrastructure systems that aim to control variables and reduce uncertainties. There is growing sectoral awareness that a transition toward sustainable alternatives is necessary if systems are to meet society’s future water needs in the context of drivers such as climate change and variability, demographic changes, environmental degradation, and resource scarcity. However, there is minimal understanding of how the urban water sector should operationalize its strategic planning for such change to facilitate the transition to a sustainable water future. We have integrated concepts from transitions, resilience, and institutional theory to develop a diagnostic procedure for revealing insights into which types of strategic action are most likely to influence the direction and pace of change in the overall system toward a desired trajectory. The procedure used the multipattern approach, from transition theory, to identify the system conditions and type of changes necessary for enabling system transformation. It incorporated the adaptive cycle, from resilience theory, to identify the current phase of change for different parts of the system. Finally, it drew on the concepts of institutional pillars and institutional work to identify mechanisms that are likely to be most effective in influencing the transformative dynamics of the system toward a desired trajectory. We have demonstrated application of the proposed diagnostic procedure on a case study of recent transformative change in the urban water system of Melbourne, Australia. We have proposed that an operational diagnostic procedure provides a useful platform from which planners, policy analysts, and decision makers could follow a process of deduction that identifies which types of strategic action best fit the current system conditions.

A socio-technical model to explore urban water systems scenarios.

This article reports on the ongoing work and research involved in the development of a socio-technical model of urban water systems. Socio-technical means the model is not so much concerned with the technical or biophysical aspects of urban water systems, but rather with the social and institutional implications of the urban water infrastructure and vice versa. A socio-technical model, in the view purported in this article, produces scenarios of different urban water servicing solutions gaining or losing influence in meeting water-related societal needs, like potable water, drainage, environmental health and amenity. The urban water system is parameterised with vectors of the relative influence of each servicing solution. The model is a software implementation of the Multi-Pattern Approach, a theory on societal systems, like urban water systems, and how these develop and go through transitions under various internal and external conditions. Acknowledging that social dynamics comes with severe and non-reducible uncertainties, the model is set up to be exploratory, meaning that for any initial condition several possible future scenarios are produced. This article gives a concise overview of the necessary theoretical background, the model architecture and some initial test results using a drainage example.