Participatory Adaptive Integrated Urban Water Management – the Tensions
- Publication Type:
- Thesis
- Issue Date:
- 2022
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Urban water management is now experiencing significant growth in complexity and uncertainty. This trend is expected to continue as emerging pressures will likely be exacerbated in the future. Furthermore, the way we currently manage our water in the city is no longer appropriate to respond to this ever-growing uncertainty and complexity of the human-urban water system. A shift to an Adaptive, integrated and participatory approach is advocated.
This thesis seeks to inform the transition to a more sustainable paradigm for urban water planning and management, which exhibits characteristics and qualities from public participatory (PP), integrated urban water management (IUWM), and adaptive management (AM) approaches. To that end, the research explores the challenges and issues of complexity and uncertainty in current water planning processes. The potential tools and methods to deal with such problems are discussed from different perspectives.
A nested exploratory case study methodology with multiple cases was utilised to conduct the research in South Eastern Australia seaboard metropolitan areas. The methods include semi-structured interviews, literature review and document analyses.
The literature reviewing process identified the lack of documented cases that exhibit principles of the three approaches and the lack of analysis on how they should be adopted in conjunction. The interviews confirmed that the three approaches are perceived as highly interconnected and have the potential to complement others. Further, the findings indicated critical features of the three approaches in practice and identified four major challenges. Furthermore, uncertainty and complexity emerged as critical concerns that were further explored.
The Cynefin framework was adopted to investigate the roots causes of the emerging complexity and uncertainty and the potential methods and tools for future planning and management. The study revealed that there is a lack of methods or tools that can operate within the complex domain.
The key recommendations from this research are 1) that the methods and associated tools should be applied and coordinated together in a framework guided by a combined approach to better address complex problems; 2) more attention should be paid to develop the techniques and practices for designing and implementing pilots and learning experiments; and 3) it is necessary to provide capacity-building assistance on integrating IUWM and AP.
This research demonstrated that to adequately plan for sustainable and resilient urban water servicing, the water sector needs to find a consistent and coherent way to simultaneously incorporate adaptive, integrated, and participatory approaches, especially when dealing with complexity.
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