Abstract
In recent decades, the urban water sector has experienced accelerating social complexity that derives from conflicting goals and beliefs, making the sustainability of the sector primarily a governance issue. However, existing governance models do not reflect the new reality. There is thus an urgent need to develop an urban water governance model reflecting this increasing complexity, to support sustainable governance. We integrate concepts from sociology, institutional theory and sustainability transitions to build a governance framework that includes interactions of social structures, and practices, shaped by different institutional logics and categorised at strategic, tactic, operational, and reflexive level.
Highlights
Water is a core element of numerous societal functions in urban areas, including the delivery of potable water to households, business and industries, disposal of waste, drainage and flood control, fire fighting, provision of aesthetic values in public spaces and support of biodiversity, among many others
Based on a theoretical review, we extended an existing classification of governance practices and structures (2010) developed in the field of sustainability transitions with elements borrowed from sociology, with emphasis on institutional theory
We present three concrete logics identified in the urban water sector and apply these when describing the governance framework and illustrating its ele ments
Summary
Water is a core element of numerous societal functions in urban areas, including the delivery of potable water to households, business and industries, disposal of waste, drainage and flood control, fire fighting, provision of aesthetic values in public spaces and support of biodiversity, among many others. Research on governance has burgeoned in diverse fields (including political science, public administration, economics, sociology and ge ography) during the past two decades, addressing disparate issues and producing diverging interpretations (Kemp et al, 2005; Kersbergen and van Waarden, 2004; Kjær, 2004; Kooiman, 2003) This growing interest is reflected on the study of urban water governance (Neto, 2016), which usually departs from a definition of governance constrained to a “narrowly technical decision-making process” The different conceptualisations of governance suggested for the urban water sector are often supplemented by non-coherent incorporation of ideas from these diverse fields, preventing understanding and consensus about what governance of urban water services means (van de Meene et al, 2011; van Dijk, 2012) and impeding successful design of sustainable governance configurations (OECD, 2011) To address this issue, Loorbach (2010) devised a governance framework for managing sustainability transitions in Western de mocracies. It raises awareness among urban water practitioners, policy makers and decision-makers about the meaning and content of gover nance, and the need to consider the interplay between contested values, beliefs and goals, when seeking to produce sustainable solutions for urban water services
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