Barriers to Advancing Sustainable Urban Water Management: a typology

Sustainable urban water management (SUWM) requires an integrated, adaptive, coordinated and participatory approach. Current urban water policies are beginning to reflect this understanding yet the rhetoric is often not translated to implementation. Despite the ‘new’ philosophy, urban water management remains a complex and fragmented area relying on traditional, technical, linear management approaches. Despite widespread acknowledgement of the barriers to change, there has been little systematic review of what constitutes the scope of such barriers and how these should be addressed to advance SUWM. To better understand why implementation fails to occur beyond ad hoc project interventions, a meta-analysis of observed and studied barriers was conducted. Drawing on local, national and international literature from the field of integrated urban water management and other similar fields, 53 studies were assessed, resulting in a typology of 12 barrier types. The analysis revealed the barriers are largely socio-institutional rather than technical, reflecting issues related to community, resources, responsibility, knowledge, vision, commitment and coordination. Furthermore, the metaanalysis demonstrated a paucity of targeted strategies for overcoming the stated institutional barriers. Evaluation of the typology in relation to capacity building, suggests that these systemic issues require a sophisticated program of change, that focus on fostering social capital, inter-sectoral professional development, and interorganisational coordination. Introduction It is widely accepted that for the urban water sector to transition to sustainable urban water management (SUWM), shifts from the traditional, linear, ‘old-world’ approach to an adaptive, participatory and integrated approach, is required. SWUM can be considered both a philosophical and technical approach that can be incorporated in all forms of urban re/development. The idea of managing urban water as a ‘total water cycle’ is confronting for it challenges traditional and technical management practices. Mitchell (2006) suggests that ‘new’ forms of management emphasise ‘demand management and supply, using nontraditional water resources and the concept of fit-for-purpose and decentralisation’. Current urban water policies are beginning to reflect this philosophy, yet the rhetoric is often not translated into practice with consistent failure to go beyond ad hoc demonstration projects (Harremoes, 2002; The Barton Group, 2005; Harding, 2006; Mitchell, 2006). Industry commentators have long identified that barriers exist to transitioning to SUWM and that these barriers are not generally technological, but are instead, socioinstitutional (see Vlachos and Braga, 2001; Kuczera and Coombes, 2001; Marsalek et al. 2001; Brown, 2005). Indeed, Wong (2006) suggested that to advance SUWM technologies, an understanding of the socio-institutional aspects of governance is required. More recently, authors have identified that ‘institutional inertia’ is responsible for the slow pace of change, yet there is still little understanding on how best to overcome this (Imperial, 1999; Brown et al., 2006a). Perhaps this situation is exacerbated by a lack of understanding of the overall scope and inter-relatedness between the range of institutional barriers that have been observed so far. There is no doubt that continuing with the status quo not only perpetuates the inefficient use of resources and continuing waterway degradation, but also continues to reinforce this so called institutional inertia. Therefore understanding the scope of this inertia is perhaps a productive starting point for considering the development of future initiatives for effectively diffusing the practice of SUWM. However, water industry commentators have expressed the need for programs of change involving institutional structures, settings and processes since at least the mid 1990s.