Reconnecting People and Water

Public Engagement and Sustainable Urban Water Management

Liz Sharp

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780415728447
• eBook ISBN: 9781317916390
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Infrastructure
• Index: Business

Water management in industrialised western countries has long been seen as a technical process associated with pipes, drains and bureaucracies. This technical model of water management is now being questioned. This book examines the nature of contemporary water management and the prospects for and barriers to different forms of engagement with the public.

In particular, it shows how historical and social scientific understandings develop and question current water management norms in relation to water in the landscape, water in the home and the hidden management of water beneath our streets and behind our walls. It is shown that the four-fold challenges of climate change, urbanisation, changing environmental standards and fiscal accountability mean that we can no longer rely on unseen technical fixes to erase the threats of pollution, water shortages and floods. Such concerns offer two prompts for public engagement and participation. First, on a purely instrumental level, public engagement can complement, or offer an obvious alternative to, technical fixes. Second, public engagement may provide a route to find new ways of addressing water and related challenges.

The author offers a unique social science perspective on many of the socio-technical issues facing the management of water in urban settings in developed countries, where urban is interpreted broadly to include all areas served by piped water. Drawing on historical context and an extensive review of the published literature, as well as the author's own empirical studies, the work prompts broader discussions about how we manage water in contemporary society. It is invaluable for students and professionals in water resource management and planning.

CONTENTS

1. Acknowledgements
2. Introduction
3. 1 Visions for water management
4. 2 Urban water use in context
5. 3 The governance of water supply and demand
6. 4 Water in the home: learning from the past
7. 5 Understanding water practices and mobilising change
8. 6 Water qualities
9. 7 Water out of place
10. 8 Flood risk governance
11. 9 Water in the landscape
12. 10 Conclusion
13. References
14. Index

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The writing of this book has involved structuring and ordering understandings that I have acquired during more than 15 years of research and teaching about water on the engineering–social science interface, and through my studies about the physical and human environmental interactions that preceded that. This means that there are some institutions and many people who have been important in the development of my ideas.

I want to acknowledge the universities of Bradford and Sheffield for supporting my career development and fostering my unusual interdisciplinary focus. I am also grateful to the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and the European Union Framework 7, whose recognition of the need for social science to examine water issues has been crucial in supporting my work. Specifically, I would like to acknowledge the importance of the following grants:

• Water Cycle Management for New Developments (WaND, GR/S18373/01)
• Urban Rivers and Sustainable Living Environments (URSULA, EP/F007388/1)
• The Pennine Water Group Platform Grant (PWG, EP/1029346/1)
• Tailored Water Solutions for Positive Impact (TWENTY65, EP/NO10124/1)
• PREPARED EU Framework 7 Collaborative Project no. 244323

Some of the people who have been critical in helping me to understand the hydrology, engineering and ecology of water include Richard Ashley, Barney Lerner, Simon Tait, Joby Boxall, Vanessa Speight, David Butler, Paul Jeffrey, Lorraine Maltby, Dusi Thomas, Dominic Scott, Adrienne Walsh, Stuart Lane, Keith Richards, Adrian Saul, Phil Warren and Chris Jones.

The idea of the book grew from the ‘Water and its Management’ module I taught at the University of Bradford’s Department of Geography and Environmental Science. It has therefore had the benefit of the many important and interesting questions that numerous students asked of me, and also of supportive colleagues including Nigel Copperthwaite, Sarah George, Carl Heron and Amy Dodds (née Walton).

Some of the social scientists who stimulated and helped to develop my understandings of the interactions between people and water include: Susie Molyneux-Hodgson, Peggy Haughton, Margi Bryant, Stephen Connelly, Christine Sefton, Cathy Knamiller, Emma Westling, Leona Skelton, Zoe Sofoulis, Ali Browne, Will Medd, Marta Rychlewski, Susan Owens and Paul Raven.

A big thank you to those who have read drafts or partial drafts of the book and provided comments, including: Emma Westling, Barney Lerner, Richard Ashley, John Flint, Chad Staddon, Nikky Wilson (who also helped with indexing), Ruth Levene, Phiala Mehring, Stephen Connelly and, among these, a special big thank you goes to Zoe Sofoulis (who helped me feel enthusiastic about the book before I wrote it, and then read and commented on the whole book in draft) and also Leona Skelton (who guided me in forming historical commentaries, and also copy-read an almost-finished version).

Finally, I would like to thank those who have helped me personally through the process of producing this book, including Zoe Sofoulis, Richard Ashley, Vanessa Speight, Barney Lerner and Leona Skelton (all for encouraging me), Martin Hoffman (in particular, for feeding me!) and to my sister and parents for their love, and for first enabling my interest in water to develop, aged four, when building dams on a stream in Wales.

INTRODUCTION

What does it mean to reconnect with water?

In contemporary western societies, water is almost invisible. It is vital to our daily lives, yet so readily obtained and so quickly disposed of that we give it little thought. Rain may prompt a change of attire, but, except in extreme events, it impinges little on our lives. In many respects the invisibility of water is a symptom of the ‘success’ of water management. We have long delegated the roles of obtaining clean water, of draining our streets and of disposing of dirty water to experts who are so good at their job that we don't even see them doing it. In this respect, we are disconnected from the systems that make our everyday life possible.

Good, a reader might say. Water professionals do their jobs and we are able to get on with our busy lives. We really do not want to go back in time and ‘connect with water’ through collecting our own bucketful from the well. What is the problem?

The answer is that achieving ‘invisible water’ for those who currently enjoy it comes at a great financial and environmental cost. Even more importantly, providing ‘invisible water’ for everyone would be impossible. Even in developed countries, where invisible water has been achieved for most, it is going to be extremely hard to maintain: this is because the pipes are old, the climate is changing and we expect our water systems to contribute positively to improving our environment.

Finding ways to ‘connect’ people more closely with water is one alternative to water remaining invisible that may be both cheaper and environmentally more sustainable. At its heart, people being more connected with water means the public taking a greater part in both decisions and action to achieve better water management. In effect, it means moving away from the ‘one size fits all’ model of water management that has dominated the way that water systems have developed over the past century. It means tailoring water management processes to suit local conditions and needs – both in terms of water and in terms of culture. It means local water systems being more actively managed by the public, in conjunction with their utility, whether by modifying their fresh water consumption, being more selective about what they dispose of, collecting and using rainwater for themselves, or possibly by accepting, owning or maintaining local drainage features or river banks. Reconnecting people with water means more complicated physical systems, combining centralised elements with decentralised elements under the control of the water user. And it means the business of water utilities moves from being almost entirely technical and operational to combining technical and operational elements with communication and negotiation with many different ‘network managers’; that is, with stakeholders and members of the public managing elements of the water networks for themselves.

Reconnecting with water does not mean reverting to some pre-industrial nightmare in which each household takes full and absolute responsibility for their water supply and disposal. It does, however, mean learning lessons from the past and from other places so that we can find new ways in which members of the public, alongside utilities and other organisations, take appropriate responsibility for ensuring that local water systems are effective and sustainable. It is likely to mean that people develop a greater understanding about how water works within their locality. Drawing on Linton's (2008) understanding of how the hydrological cycle has been replaced by a ‘hydrosocial cycle’, Reconnecting People with Water could be called ‘moving towards hydrosocial water management’.

Central arguments of Reconnecting People with Water

So, ‘reconnecting with water’ means the public understanding water management and challenges in their locality and being active participants in the process of addressing those challenges. But what, precisely, am I saying about such ‘reconnecting’? In practice, there are four interconnected arguments that I make through this book.

First, I make a descriptive argument about the past. As implied by the title Reconnecting People with Water, I am suggesting that in the past many people had a part to play in making decisions and taking actions that contributed to the collective process of managing water and waste water in their locality. Through having to think and know about water in their locality, I suggest, we all had a connection with the weather, the geography and other people's cultural expectations that is lacking today. Through the gradual development of what I call ‘technocratic water management’ I suggest that these connections have been severed. Reaching its zenith in the developed world in the 1970s and 1980s, technocratic water management promised a ‘modern’ utopia in which people did not need to engage with their environment. This first descriptive argument that there has been a gradual process of disconnecting people from water is made explicitly in Chapter 1; it then discusses details of these processes in relation to water supply (Chapters 3 and 4), water quality management (Chapter 6) and flood management (Chapter 7).

Second, I make an argument about the state of contemporary water management. It is, of course, the case that – even at its most technocratic and disconnected extreme – water management has always operated in a social context. However, the difference between water management now and in the mid- to late twentieth century is that many water utilities and local amenity groups are seeking to explicitly find ways to reconnect people with water. ‘Hydrosocial water management’ is already present in some developed countries, I suggest, because water management organisations are reaching out to work with their customers, local residents, environmental groups and others to manage water systems differently. They are asking for water-saving behaviour, care with the use of drainage systems, attention and action to improve local waterways, and seeking volunteers for water-related duties such as being river wardens. Moreover, hydrosocial water management has also arisen because some local citizens, amenity or environmental groups are themselves prompting changes to water management activities as a means to improve the role of water in their locality. This second argument, that there is a change underway in water management, is made throughout the book through numerous examples of where and how ‘reconnecting’ practices are already undertaken.

Third, I make a values-based argument that more high-quality ‘reconnecting’ is required. Specifically, I suggest that high-quality hydrosocial water management promises (1) water services that are equally effective and better value for money than those currently available, (2) co-benefits in other areas like nature conservation and landscape beauty and (3) enhanced democracy, with public debate and decision-making about water, the landscape and our collective management thereof, both symbolising and mediating citizens' attachments to their localities and communities. In terms of water management, I suggest that while many technical solutions will continue to be relevant, more knowledge by water experts of public and lay perspectives could help in the design and selection of tailored solutions, and specifically that changes in behaviours or expectations can be both financially and environmentally less costly than traditional technical approaches. In terms of joining water management up with other services, more knowledge of water management by different publics and infrastructure service providers could offer the potential for integrating water decision-making more closely into other decisions about the management of our landscape and our wider investments – for example, in parks and in economic regeneration. In terms of democracy, the concern is that, in the past, technical specialists have made decisions about new water technologies or investments with limited reference to public perspectives. As citizens, we have interests in how our society delivers collective services and maintains our environment and hence public perspectives are relevant and important in water decision-making that forms part of a democratic process.

This values-based argument about the need for more ‘reconnecting’ is made through many illustrative examples about reconnecting with water in contemporary water management. I've already noted above that these examples are used to show the changing nature of water management, but by assessing and evaluating the experiences discussed the same examples can offer normative guidance about whether and how reconnecting can work. By showing where, how, for whom and why reconnecting has worked (and, indeed, where, how, for whom and why it has not worked), the book begins to help examine the nature of ‘high-quality’ hydrosocial water management. It illustrates the advantages and disadvantages of new arrangements for different stakeholders, with the aim of helping readers think through arrangements that might work in their context.

It is also useful to note at this point that there are important critiques that might be made about whether reconnecting with water can really make a difference within the modern world. In arguing about how we need to reconnect people with water it is important to both explore and address these perspectives. I will touch on these critiques in Chapter 1, but then explore precisely what they say and how they might be answered more fully in the Conclusion, .

Fourth, I argue that the consequence of the need for more reconnection between the public and water is that a whole new set of skills and knowledge is needed to inform our water management institutions and processes. Specifically, they need some new types of professionals within the utilities, but they also need to draw on a new knowledge from universities, academies and institutes that is external to the utility. To begin with the internal argument, if water utilities are to successfully engage the public they need professionals with an understanding of public communication and public participation as well as water services. Employing such professionals is likely to enable utilities to develop and deploy a far more nuanced and differentiated understandi...

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