Integrated water management recommendations in practice: coexistence of old and new ways in Arizona

Abstract

Integrated water management (IWM) is widely regarded as a key strategy in achieving a variety of urban sustainability goals. Despite the promise of this strategy, however, uptake of IWM practices has generally been slow. A central reason for this lies in the divergence of action recommendations in the literature and actual water management praxis. In this paper, we explore how action taken by governments relate (or not) to IWM dimensions found in the literature. We do this by combining a corpus of actions taken by local governments in Arizona with a systematic review of the IWM literature. More precisely, we identify a confined set of IWM action dimensions particularly relevant to current praxis and apply these to water management practices reported by local governments in Arizona. We find that governments in the state systematically use IWM strategies to complement or enhance traditional water management approaches. Uptake differs across management spheres in terms of magnitude and form and is informed by contextual characteristics. Overall, our study indicates that transition may be guided by bottom-up experimentation, context-sensitive selection, and incremental change. This is in contrast to how IWM is often understood in the literature – as sharp shift and break with old traditions.

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“…At the same time, future research should use measures of learning that are direct and multidimensional. A "direct" measure will be a measure of actual change in the beliefs or behaviors of policy actors, for instance the adoption of new policies (Berger et al, 2020) or the transmission of practices from one organization to another (Valente, 1995). A "multidimensional" measure will be one that accounts for the many forms of learning that occur within social and policy systems, including belief updating versus behavioral change, or individual learning processes such as trial-and-error policy experimentation versus social learning processes such as the diffusion of innovations between policy actors (Henry, 2016).…”

Role of city collaboration networks in the acceleration and attenuation of integrated water management

“…IWM practices are gradually introduced into an existing water management system. This happens step by step and takes different forms (Berger et al, 2020). Introducing IWM often creates knock-on effects across the system.…”

“…Due to its broadness and its systemic component, IWM is best thought of in terms of portfolios of practices or strategies. Based on an analysis of water innovations in Arizona, Berger et al (2020) differentiate three main IWM implementation strategies. Table 1 provides an overview of these strategies.…”

“…The reported innovations were used to identify the IWM strategies that cities employ. For this, we used the typology by Berger et al (2020) discussed earlier. We first determined for every local government the IWM practices (column 3 in Table 1) that it employs.…”

“…Practices associated with IWM are numerous and diverse. They include, for example, green infrastructure, use of alternative water sources, decentralization of water services, fit-for-purpose thinking, stakeholder involvement, water-sensitive urban planning, use of water-smart technologies, and integration of supply-and demand-side management (Berger et al, 2020).…”