Fjalar Johannes de Haan

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.

Many roads to Rome

This article presents an exploratory modelling approach that illustrates how overall transition pathways can emerge from a limited number of underlying change patterns. Pathways describe the temporal development of transitions, they are trajectories of change that carry societal systems such as health care, energy supply or water management into qualitatively different states. Under any given input scenario, a very large number of different pathways may result due to uncertainties such as those related to human agency. Though the pathways all differ in detail, clusters of pathways share enough qualitative similarities to allow identification of a small number of ideal types: many roads to Rome. The input scenario influences how often the various types of futures emerge, not what types emerge. The article explores this using a series of hypothetical cases and compares the results with ideal-typical pathways from the literature. A historical case is simulated for illustration. An exploratory modelling approach for sustainability transitions is presented.Sustainability transition pathways from the literature are reproduced bottom up.Any single scenario may give rise to several different types of future pathways.Different scenarios lead to similar kinds of future pathways: many roads to Rome.Scenarios influence how often types of futures emerge, not what types emerge.

Urban Sustainability Transitions

The central question for this chapter is: how can urban and transitions perspectives assist understandings of low carbon housing and urban change? Current ‘urban’ and ‘transitions’ perspectives are presented along with recent and current attempts to bring urban and spatial perspectives to transitions studies. Australia as a site for urban transitions studies is considered, and three aspects of low carbon housing and urban change are highlighted: policy settings and governance, spatial/urban dimensions and carbon and consumption context. Contributions of urban and transitions perspectives to understanding low carbon housing and urban change are explored through two case examples of low carbon housing and urban change in Australia: photovoltaic panels on domestic rooftops and broader retrofitting and renovation activity towards low carbon housing. Transitions perspectives include the multilevel perspective and Transition Management. While these vary, the focus here is that they can each provide useful insights when coupled with other perspectives of urban and social change. Power, space and consumption all feature in practices of urban low carbon transitions, and it is essential that further analytical tools are brought to bear in these domains. They offer a scale for the study of cultural projects where change is as likely to be associated with cultural or social change as by policy settings.

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.

Modelling Sustainability Transitions: An Assessment of Approaches and Challenges

Transition modelling is an emerging but growing niche within the broader field of sustainability transitions research. The objective of this paper is to explore the characteristics of this niche in relation to a range of existing modelling approaches and literatures with which it shares commonalities or from which it could draw. We distil a number of key aspects we think a transitions model should be able to address, from a broadly acknowledged, empirical list of transition characteristics. We review some of the main strands in modelling of socio-technological change with regards to their ability to address these characteristics. These are: Eco-innovation literatures (energy-economy models and Integrated Assessment Models), evolutionary economics, complex systems models, computational social science simulations using agent based models, system dynamics models and socio-ecological systems models. The modelling approaches reviewed can address many of the features that differentiate sustainability transitions from other socio-economic dynamics or innovations. The most problematic features are the representation of qualitatively different system states and of the normative aspects of change. The comparison provides transition researchers with a starting point for their choice of a modelling approach, whose characteristics should correspond to the characteristics of the research question they face. A promising line of research is to develop innovative models of co-evolution of behaviours and technologies towards sustainability, involving change in the structure of the societal and technical systems.

Place in Transitions—Concepts for When it Matters: Essentially, Accidentally, Locus and Nexus

How much does place matter in transitions? And if it matters much, how to deal with it? This research essay explores the conceptual aspects of these issues. At the core is that transitions concepts and frameworks typically employ a functional systems perspective in which place and scale are implicit. The burgeoning literature on the geography of transitions and urban transitions provides many clues as to the aspects of place and scale that would be of conceptual import for transitions. When can a transition truly be considered of—rather than ‘merely’ occurring in, or to—a certain place? I argue that transitions can be considered to cover a spectrum ranging from accidentally place based—when place matters only because things need to happen somewhere—and essentially place based—when the transition dynamics are completely contingent on the local context, needs and aspirations. For transitions erring on the essential end of the spectrum, I argue, a systemic conceptualisation of place—which I call the locus—is useful, while the systems affected by the transitions, the nexus, can be conceptualised in the familiar ways. Locus and nexus are mutually embedded, and an analytical interface is found in the networks and interactions of actors.

Disruptions in strategic infrastructure planning – What do they mean for sustainable development?:

The vision of sustainable development remains difficult to realize in practice. Processes of strategic planning for public infrastructure represent a major challenge, as, in many cases, they return unsustainable investment solutions. Research offers certain planning methodologies to improve the prospects of sustainable investments. However, very little is understood about how planning processes are undertaken in practice, and what problems in the procedural aspects of planning – termed “planning disruptions” in this paper – lead to deviations from the vision of sustainable development in infrastructure investments. This study scrutinizes the current scope of planning methodologies through the empirical case of a water supply augmentation in Melbourne, Australia. We derive a typology of planning disruptions which offers initial ingredients for a diagnostic tool to explore planning problems in the context of sustainable development. We also suggest making the current scope of planning methodologies more robust, by developing interventions that explicate and prepare for potential disruptions.

Urban Sustainability Transitions: An Emerging Hybrid Research Agenda

This chapter takes stock of the fourfold ambition of this book, namely: To introduce transitions scholars and practitioners to urban studies To introduce urban scholars and practitioners to transitions studies To collect and present case studies based in Australian cities that intersect urban and transitions themes and present these in a global setting of climate emergency and urbanization To introduce a wider, global audience to urban transitions ideas, scholarship and practice as it is emerging in various ways across Australia.