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Using Policy and Regulatory Frameworks to Facilitate Water Transitions

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Abstract

There are persistent calls across policy, industry and academia for urban water transitions in order to deliver increased sustainability, liveability and resilience. However, realisation of such transformational change is difficult, and there are a number of undesirable or unsuccessful transition trajectories that can manifest. Drawing on a contemporary stormwater quality management transition in South-East Queensland, Australia, this qualitative research paper provides an empirical exploration of a transition in struggle. The paper examines why and how this transition trajectory unfolded, focusing specifically on the evolution of culture, structure and practice changes from the 1970s to the present-day. The paper makes two scholarly contributions, firstly confirming the dynamic nature of transformational change and indicating the need to design transition initiatives across the culture, structure and practice domains to co-evolve and thereby build a robust and mutually reinforcing transition foundation. The results also reveal the critical role of regulation in providing a safety net for the transition and enabling continued progress even when commitment to policy goals wavers. These results also provide practical insight for practitioners engaged in the implementation of transition processes, and reveal the need for transition advocates to deliberately and proactively engage with regulatory frameworks to embed a novel practice.

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Acknowledgments

We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Commonwealth of Australia through the Cooperative Research Centre program. We also thank the Australian Research Council for providing support (DP120102791) for this research. We would also like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Social Science, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia

    Lara Werbeloff

  2. Cooperative Research Centre for Water Sensitive Cities, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia

    Lara Werbeloff

  3. Monash Sustainability Institute, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia

    Rebekah R. Brown

Authors
  1. Lara Werbeloff
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  2. Rebekah R. Brown
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Correspondence to Lara Werbeloff.

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Werbeloff, L., Brown, R.R. Using Policy and Regulatory Frameworks to Facilitate Water Transitions. Water Resour Manage 30, 3653–3669 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11269-016-1379-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11269-016-1379-6

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