Healthy engagement: Evaluating models of providers and users for cities of the future

There is growing recognition within the water industry that new relationships are required that go beyond the provision of safe and healthy drinking water. Drawing on three studies of Australian water providers and users, as well as existing water research concerning 'hydrosocial contracts' and 'transition models', this study analyses the power relations, behavioural assumptions and impacts on water conservation emerging from different relationships. The paper discusses three types of relationship models: historical, rationalistic and integrated, focussing in particular on their roles in addressing or hindering the industry's transition towards 'cities of the future'. The paper calls for greater emphasis on the relationships embedded into water systems and management structures, and highlights a need for further HASS sector knowledge to understand the social and cultural dynamics within existing relationship models

Domestic Water Demand During Droughts in Temperate Climates: Synthesising Evidence for an Integrated Framework

In the upcoming years, as the population is growing and ageing, as lifestyle changes create the need for more water and as fewer people live in each household, the UK water sector will have to deal with challenges in the provision of adequate water services. Unless critical action is taken, every area in the UK may face a supply-demand gap by the 2080s. Extreme weather events and variations that alter drought and flood frequency add to these pressures. However, little evidence is available about householders’ response to drought and there are few if any studies incorporating this evidence into models of demand forecasting. The present work lays the groundwork for modelling domestic water demand response under drought conditions in temperate climates. After discussing the current literature on estimating and forecasting domestic water consumption under both ‘normal’ and drought conditions, this paper identifies the limited ability of current domestic demand forecasting techniques to include the many different and evolving factors affecting domestic consumption and it stresses the need for the inclusion of inter and intra household factors as well as water use practices in future demand forecasting models

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

© 2016, Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht. 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

Trouble at the disciplinary divide: a knowledge ecologies analysis of a co-design project with native Alaskan communities

This case of transdisciplinary collaboration raises a range of issues relevant to scientific research on complex twenty-first-century problems associated with water security, energy consumption and climate change impacts. These problems are widely acknowledged to require more than technocentric and resource-centred solutions, and they demand increased engagement with the people impacted by the problem, and with those who will live with the proposed solutions. This suggests a greater role for researchers from humanities and social science (HASS) disciplines in fields conventionally dominated by STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) knowledges. But bringing together positivist (quantitatively oriented) and interpretive (qualitative) paradigms of knowledge has its own difficulties, not least the effort to establish ‘a basis of mutual intellectual and professional respect’ that could ground a ‘genuine’ knowledge partnership (Nowotny et al. 2013). These two paradigms have very different ideas about the nature, generalizability and the purpose of knowledge. One theorist of water governance summarizes these differences: [P]ositivism sees the researcher and reality as separate, there is only one identifiable reality and the purpose of research is to control and predict. Interpretivism, on the other hand, notes that the researcher and reality are inseparable realities, are mental constructs in that they are social and experienced-based and there are multiple realities, which are dependent on the interpretation of individuals. (Meissner 2015, 3, citing Lincoln et al. 2011) The very contrast between these paradigms, Meissner points out, that positivism is not the only legitimate way of doing research; nor is it the only basis for theories of reality (2015). Positivists' beliefs that their reality is the reality, and that scientific method is the only valid method, are themselves obstacles to overcome in order to achieve successful transdisciplinary collaborations with researchers from different paradigms

Towards engaged consumption: New sources of inspiration for eco-feedback design

Eco-feedback interventions are capable of producing reductions in household energy consumption. Yet less is known about exactly how this reduction is achieved, how to maximise user engagement, or how to effectively translate engagement into energy saving. This paper discusses design opportunities for eco-feedback systems through observations of domestic energy use in both Western and rural developing world contexts. Drawing on case studies from these two contexts including 21 empirical interviews, we present an alternative framework for human-resource interaction, highlighting design opportunities for a transition towards more engaged and sustainable energy consumption among users

Biopolitics, discipline, and hydro-citizenship: Drought management and water governance in England

The information, practices and views in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG). \ua9 2019 Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers). In this paper we argue that English drought management rests on two imaginaries of hydrocitizenship: an economic/instrumental imaginary that frames people primarily as “customers,” and an imaginary that focuses more on the affectively charged, personal engagements between individuals and “hydrosocial” spaces. These imaginaries, we contend, roughly correspond with the two modalities of a form of governance referred to by Michel Foucault as biopower: biopolitics and discipline. Drawing on fieldwork conducted as part of a large interdisciplinary research project on drought in the UK, we sketch the contours of English drought management, exploring in particular the “macro-scale” elements of drought management (the biopolitical modality), premised on computer simulation modelling, and the elements of drought management that focus on the level of individual people (the disciplinary modality), premised in part on the work of local environmental organisations. The difference between the two notions of hydrocitizenship informing these two modalities of management, we conclude, produces tensions that potentially undermine water governance as it is currently organised in the UK. Ultimately, our goal in the paper is not solely to expose or critique existing governance efforts or the power relations therein, but rather to examine the interplay of governmentalities that constitute drought management in order to illuminate and expand the potential for “being governed differently.”