Zoe Sofoulis

Skirting complexity: The retarding quest for the average water user

The urban water industry leads many other sectors in Australia in tackling the complex challenges of climate change and managing unpredictable supplies of a vital resource. But effective engagement with social and cultural dimensions of urban water sustainability is retarded by the persistence of historical and rationalist models of water users and user-provider relations that deploy demographic and psychological statistics but are largely uninformed by analyses of the cultural meanings, social purposes and practical effects of water and related technologies in everyday life. Particularly problematic is the emphasis on the average water user. Drawing examples from three qualitative research projects conducted between 2004 and 2011 that involved householders, water industry and government personnel, and other researchers, this paper examines how notions of average users are mobilized alongside, and sometimes interfere with, more recent forms of user-provider relationships, leading to water-saving strategies that make individuals hyper-responsible while avoiding more complicated transformations of infrastructures, institutions and baseline service expectations. The conclusion considers conditions of production and circulation of social and cultural research and knowledge in the water sector.

Below the double bottom line: The challenge of socially sustainable urban water strategies

Abstract Recent interview-based research on how Australian urban water professionals grasp the social aspects of sustainable water management suggests that interest in these dimensions outstrips understanding of them, and that more culturally intelligent, socially realistic and ethically sensitive notions of people, culture and society are needed. Despite lip-service to “triple bottom line” assessments of policies and developments, Australia’s policymakers have advanced no further than a “double bottom line” based on economic and environmental values, the latter preferably expressed in dollar terms. The economic (or market relation) also substitutes for the social dimension in a continued policy emphasis on customers rather than citizens or community members. An overemphasis on behavioural economics, a lack of social, political and cultural theory, and neglect of people’s actual practices means that much policy and research around water fails to grapple with such basic social elements as gender, different roles and access to resources within households, cultural diversity, or ethical orientations. A major challenge is to mobilise rather than ignore the altruistic and socially-oriented human capacities for adapting to change beyond the customer relation or the confines of technical and economic rationality; including by collective innovations in values and practices of caring for water.

Local adaptations in a changing water climate: small-scale infrastructures

As climate changes manifest themselves increasingly around us, questions of how and why communities adapt to climate shifts – and associated water scarcity – become more relevant and urgent to gove...

Water Systems Adaptation: An Australian Cultural Researcher’s Perspective

Humans are often regarded as endpoints of water supply systems, their behaviour adjustable to match supply constraints or savings targets. But they are also its starting points: only by means of surveyors, scientists, engineers, governments and technocrats have the waters of Earth come to be systematised into extractable, managed and commodified resources available to meet human-defined objectives, such as improved public health and domestic convenience, in an environment made increasingly uncertain owing to global rearrangements of terrestrial resources (including carbon) by humans. An early responder to challenges of sustainability and climate change, the water sector developed demand reduction strategies that now provide examples—not all emulable—for adaptation strategies in other sectors. Broad acceptance of ‘triple bottom line’ sustainability, realisations that experts’ solutions are contestable by publics and require their cooperation, and growing responsibilities for demand management involving consumption and consumers, have all highlighted water’s social dimensions. But as in the climate change sector, where “The drivers of the carbon based economy are embedded in culture, history and politics, rarely the realm of biophysical scientists” (Bellette 2012, p.5), there is a problematic mismatch between the technical and scientific expertise of water managers and the nature of the demand they attempt to predict and control. Lacking expertise to deal with the complex social character of water demand, yet seemingly reluctant to recruit it, the water industry mobilised its supply-side experience to formulate resource-centred approaches that emphasised efficiencies, volumes and pricing. This strategy maps the limits of the water supply system, then determines how to change people’s water behaviours and household fittings to fit system constraints. Information and technology could turn householders into rational and efficient ‘micro-resource managers’; social marketing could convert them into guilty customers who would change their attitudes, Water Resour Manage (2013) 27:949–951 DOI 10.1007/s11269-012-0224-9

A ‘Knowledge Ecologies’ Analysis of Co-designing Water and Sanitation Services in Alaska

Willingness to collaborate across disciplinary boundaries is necessary but not sufficient for project success. This is a case study of a transdisciplinary project whose success was constrained by contextual factors that ultimately favoured technical and scientific forms of knowledge over the cultural intelligence that might ensure technical solutions were socially feasible. In response to Alaskan Water and Sewer Challenge (AWSC), an international team with expertise in engineering, consultative design and public health formed in 2013 to collaborate on a two-year project to design remote area water and sanitation systems in consultation with two native Alaskan communities. Team members were later interviewed about their experiences. Project processes are discussed using a ‘Knowledge Ecology’ framework, which applies principles of ecosystems analysis to knowledge ecologies, identifying the knowledge equivalents of ‘biotic’ and ‘abiotic’ factors and looking at their various interactions. In a positivist ‘knowledge integration’ perspective, different knowledges are like Lego blocks that combine with other ‘data sets’ to create a unified structure. The knowledge ecology framework highlights how interactions between different knowledges and knowledge practitioners (‘biotic factors’) are shaped by contextual (‘abiotic’) factors: the conditions of knowledge production, the research policy and funding climate, the distribution of research resources, and differential access to enabling infrastructures (networks, facilities). This case study highlights the importance of efforts to negotiate between different knowledge frameworks, including by strategic use of language and precepts that help translate social research into technical design outcomes that are grounded in social reality.

The Cyborg, its Manifesto and their relevance today: Some reflections

The mere presence of adoring fans has been insufficient to entice Donna Haraway to visit Australia. Only Helen Verran and postgraduates at Melbourne University’s History and Philosophy of Science department managed to interest her once in the late 1990s. So as the first Australian with a doctorate co-supervised by Haraway at the History of Consciousness program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, I have occasionally been called upon to speak when the doyenne of cyborg feminism was, as usual, unavailable down under (Sofoulis 2003). The role of antipodean Haraway always made me uneasy. It is a mistake to project patriarchal (and oedipal) traditions of scholarly filiation onto feminists. In my observation, feminist supervisors rarely seek to turn out clones of themselves and feminist students do not usually aspire to replicate/replace their professors. Like cyborgs, feminist students can be “exceedingly unfaithful to” and quite uninterested in their origins (Haraway, 1991, p.151) . 1