Structuring Hydrosocial Relations in Urban Water Governance

Most of the world's population lives in urban areas, and the population concentration in urban centres significantly affects water flows and ecological functions. We consider urban water as a smaller water cycle within the global water cycle. It thus has ecological and social characteristics. As we face the so-called water crisis, comprehending urban water use, delivery, and management is essential. Yet prior to 2005, limited scholarly attention was directed towards understanding the nuances and challenges of urban water governance. This has now shifted, with urban water governance regarded as a critical field of research. But the field remains fragmented, which limits knowledge cumulation and ability to deal with urban water governance issues. We aim at clarifying the field to overcome this difficulty and ease a systemic understanding of urban water governance. We depict urban water governance as a particular and generic object. To present its multiple dimensions and challenges, we define the generic dimensions, i.e., water, urban, and governance, to then focus on associations of generic dimensions.

Urban governance is as much about infrastructure as it is about people and processes. In particular, the history of urban governance is closely intertwined with the history of urban water services. Historically, as urban areas became larger and more densely inhabited, the collective need for better water services (drinking water, sanitation and flood protection in particular) became overwhelming. Cities simply could not grow beyond a certain relatively modest size without the simultaneous articulation of an integrated water services infrastructure to replace the piecemeal local arrangements previously in place. This necessarily implied new and more complex governance arrangements, in this case the institutionalisation of water services management in functional departmental structures, linked to political decision-making, finance, quality assurance and related functions. Whilst other papers have presented case studies of the urban hydrosocial transition (UHT) in terms of the physical extension of water services (e.g. water supply, sanitation and surface water management), this chapter focuses specifically on urban governance of water. We argue that the progressive breakdown of Fordist neo-corporatism in water services has opened up the field to a proliferation of ‘glocal’ (to use Swyngedouw’s useful neologism) governance arrangements. Whilst integrated water resource management (IWRM) principles imply a supra-urban scale of governance, the fact that urbanisation brings with it local concentration of water-related impacts means that there is an ineluctable local and urban dimension to water governance. It is therefore not surprising that cities around the world are asserting themselves as central players in water governance. Brief case studies from around the world are presented by way of illustration.

This chapter explores the literature on urban water governance to answer the following question: What does the literature on urban water governance tell us about how to understand and address metropolitan water challenges? I address this question through a literature review and content analysis.

This article discusses whether the COVID-19 pandemic acted as a catalyst for change in urban water governance in Mexico. We analyse the National Water Commission’s action plan; the private firm Veolia’s use of digital technologies and strategic partnerships in Aguascalientes; and the grassroots activities of the Bajo Tierra Virtual Museum in Queretaro. We argue that the pandemic had no real impact on the first two cases since their initiatives were circumscribed by centralized and market-oriented structures, but constituted an opportunity for Bajo Tierra to gain visibility and recognition to transition towards more adaptive forms of water governance.

Political ecological analyses of urban water governance are produced by a broad community of researchers and practitioners with the aim of transforming water-based knowledge into policies, programs, and action. This work is often underpinned by a normative commitment to exposing the uneven effects of socio-environmental change, in the hope of realigning socio-natural interactions for the broader good of human societies and natural environments. In this chapter, we point to three current areas in which political ecological analyses of urban waters provide prominent contributions. First, traditional commitments to Marxist approaches to understanding urban water have evolved into an understanding of water-related territories that extend beyond the confines of the city. Second, the materiality of water and the social relations of science intertwine to direct investment into infrastructures that realise certain visions of urban water over others. Third, urban water governance is increasingly acknowledging and attending to a plurality of water-related worlds, knowledge, and relationships, including those of Indigenous peoples. While urban political ecology may be at a current crossroads in terms of its future application, these examples illustrate how political ecological analyses of water continue to be relevant for understanding urbanisation as an ongoing process that unfolds across space.

Recently, three processes were used to analyze the consequences of plausible climate change scenarios for urban water governance in Lima. The first process, led by a German-financed research team, developed climate change scenarios using innovative tools. The second, Chance2Sustain, brought spatial perspectives to urban development and water governance, mapping spatial inequities in water-related vulnerabilities and including community-based knowledge. The Metropolitan Municipality of Lima (MML) initiated the third process, to prepare a city development and Climate Change Adaptation Strategy. This paper examines how these processes of knowledge construction contributed to transitions in water governance and climate change adaptation strategies. Although all processes used concertación (1) in their knowledge construction, the actors and the incorporated knowledge differed considerably. While the first example was dominated by professional groups and technical–professional knowledge, the Chance2Sustain and city processes included a wider range of actors and shifted thinking about adaptive management towards including contextual-embedded knowledge.

Configuring transformative governance to enhance resilient urban water systems

We examine the effects of different types of executive incentives on technological innovation of declining firms and the moderating effects of the degree of decline and organisational slack on executive incentives and enterprise technological innovation. We also assess the synergetic effects of different types of executive incentives on technological innovation of declining enterprises. We find the following: first, executive compensation incentive, equity incentive and control incentives are beneficial to promote technological innovation in declining enterprises. Second, the degree of decline negatively moderates the relationship between equity incentive and technological innovation. Third, organisational slack positively moderates the relationship between equity incentive and technological innovation, as well as the relationship between control incentives and technological innovation, especially for severely declining enterprises. Fourth, there are synergistic effects between executive control incentive and compensation incentive, control incentives and equity incentive on technological innovation. The contributions are as follows: first, taking declining enterprises as sample, we suggest that to increase the role of compensation incentive and equity incentive in promoting technological innovation in declining enterprises, the control incentives should be strengthened. Second, organisational slack should be fully exploited for severely declining enterprises so that executives should have the motivation and conditions to carry out technological innovation and further help declining enterprises to turnaround successfully.

This book examines the role played by business in urban water governance by analyzing the evolution of the global private water sector along with four public-private partnerships in Mexico and the U.S. The local nature of water services often hides the global developments behind the rise of transnational water corporations, which have gone from being local operators to becoming dynamic and powerful actors within an interconnected transnational space for water. This book focuses on the French groups Veolia and Suez, two of the most prominent private actors in global water governance, and the development and adaptation strategies of both companies in the cities of Aguascalientes, Mexico City, Atlanta, and Milwaukee over the past 30 years. Drawing on over 100 interviews conducted with corporate executives, public authorities, and local users of water services, this book moves beyond the simplistic dichotomy of the public-private debate and develops a theoretical framework that analyzes the economic and political power wielded by transnational business actors in global water governance. Not only does the book explain how Veolia and Suez strategically mobilize resources at difference scales in order to expand their global operations, but it also provides a nuanced picture of how state regulation remains of central importance to understanding the dynamics and evolution of the global water sector. Students and scholars interested in business and the environment, including public-private partnerships, business management and transnational corporations, and water governance, will find this book of great interest as will professionals and policymakers working in these fields.

This paper is a case study of the limitations to urban climate resilience of the city region of Udon Thani province in Thailand which is rapidly growing and aims to become a regional hub despite being confronted with climate-related challenges such as drought and flood. The research focuses on the formal institutional factors which are obstacles to mainstreaming climate change adaptation into urban management and thus exacerbate Udon Thani’s vulnerability to drought and flood. The research examines plans and policies of land use and water supply services at national, regional, and local levels regarding the provincial development strategy and the spatial coordination of public agencies at the same level of governance in order to examine the vertical and horizontal institutional arrangement, legal framework, policy drivers, and other limitations to the mainstreaming of climate resilience into urban development planning. Interviews were also held with relevant public officials and practitioners. The findings reveal that there are limitations caused by formal institutional arrangements and gaps which have resulted in the lack of coordination between agencies at different levels or administration or agencies operating under different ministries. There are also discrepancies of responsibility and information and financial resources which significantly undermine the efficiency of the two urban services, and, consequently, Udon Thani city region’s climate resilience and ability to accommodate spatial and socioeconomic growth.

Hydropower dams regulate water flows for millions of downstream inhabitants worldwide, altering water availability. Under a changing climate, flow control is often framed technically and politically as being essential for reducing drought and flood risks. However, it can also disrupt ecological flows, impact livelihoods and erode environmental knowledge. We contribute to this debate by examining how ribereños —rural communities in Colombia characterized by their interdependence with rivers—experience fluctuating water levels. We focus on ‘dry events’, situations where decreases in the river's water levels hinder ribereños' livelihoods. Our case study, the Lower Sogamoso River (dammed in 2014 by Hidrosogamoso Dam), no longer follows a clear pattern of rising and falling waters, which previously allowed ribereños to prepare socially and economically for seasonal activities. Drawing on a relational perspective on rivers and infrastructures, we mobilize the notion of rhythms to account for the temporal dimensions of hydrosocial relations and sociotechnical infrastructures. Using an interdisciplinary combination of ethnographic research and statistical analysis of hydrological and electricity data, three distinct situations come into view: the regular dry season, hourly low water levels and the 2015–2016 El Niño. Our findings demonstrate how temporal operations of hydropower and associated pricing mechanisms transform the hydrosocial relations of riverine communities. Daily operations disrupt gradual seasonal streamflow patterns, hindering seasonal livelihoods, while pricing decisions generate disruptive events on an hourly scale. During the 2015–2016 drought, the energy company's water storage and price bidding strategy led to unprecedented water level variations. Synthesis and applications . Our interdisciplinary approach made it possible to connect the temporal experiences of communities with large electricity market fluctuations. We emphasize that dry events must be assessed not only based on climatic conditions or dam presence but also taking into account the intersection of temporal logics at multiple scales. We underscore the need to evaluate streamflow variations at both daily and hourly scales, which are often overlooked in research and policy yet are essential for riverine cultures across the globe. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog. Spanish translation: Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.

This research aimed to evaluate the impact of land cover/use changes on watershed responses and hydrological processes by applying the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) distributed hydrologic model to the Buyukcekmece Water Basin of Istanbul Metropolitan city. SWAT model was run for two different scenarios for the 40-year period between 1973 and 2012, after completing calibration procedures under gauge-data scarce conditions. For the first scenario, 1990 dated Land cover/land use (LCLU) map and meteorological data obtained between 1973 and 2012 were used. For the second scenario, 2006 dated LCLU map and same meteorological data were used to analyze the impact of changing landscape characteristics on hydrological processes. In the selected watershed, LCLU changes started towards the end of the 1980s and reached a significant status in 2006; therefore, 1990 and 2006 dated LCLU maps are important to model human impact period in the watershed. Afterwards, LCLU changes within sub-basin level were investigated to quantify the effects of different types of land changes on the major hydrological components such as actual evapotranspiration, percolation, soil water, base flow, surface runoff and runoff. Our analysis indicated that, under the same climatic conditions, changes in land cover/use, specifically urbanization, played a considerable role in hydrological dynamics with changes on actual transpiration, base flow, surface runoff, runoff, percolation and soil water mainly due to urban and agricultural area changes. Among the different hydrological components analyzed at watershed level, percolation, ET and base flow were found to be highly sensitive to LCLU changes, whereas soil water was found as the least sensitive to same LCLU changes.

The benefits of urban data cannot be realized without a political and strategic view of data use. A core concept within this view is data governance, which aligns strategy in data-relevant structures and entities with data processes, actors, architectures, and overall data management. Data governance is not a new concept and has long been addressed by scientists and practitioners from an enterprise perspective. In the urban context, however, data governance has only recently attracted increased attention, despite the unprecedented relevance of data in the advent of smart cities. Urban data governance can create semantic compatibility between heterogeneous technologies and data silos and connect stakeholders by standardizing data models, processes, and policies. This research provides a foundation for developing a reference model for urban data governance, identifies challenges in dealing with data in cities, and defines factors for the successful implementation of urban data governance. To obtain the best possible insights, the study carries out qualitative research following the design science research paradigm, conducting semi-structured expert interviews with 27 municipalities from Austria, Germany, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, and the Netherlands. The subsequent data analysis based on cognitive maps provides valuable insights into urban data governance. The interview transcripts were transferred and synthesized into comprehensive urban data governance maps to analyze entities and complex relationships with respect to the current state, challenges, and success factors of urban data governance. The findings show that each municipal department defines data governance separately, with no uniform approach. Given cultural factors, siloed data architectures have emerged in cities, leading to interoperability and integrability issues. A city-wide data governance entity in a cross-cutting function can be instrumental in breaking down silos in cities and creating a unified view of the city’s data landscape. The further identified concepts and their mutual interaction offer a powerful tool for developing a reference model for urban data governance and for the strategic orientation of cities on their way to data-driven organizations.

A prospective, randomized study comparing the effectiveness of different types of incentives in increasing physical activity behavior on the Vitality health promotion program

Research on urban service delivery strategies lacks a multilevel approach able to account for the influence of authority structures on effective reform. A comparative analysis of efforts to increase recycled wastewater production in the United States (specifically California) and Australia is used to evaluate the effectiveness of centralized and decentralized urban governance systems in reform efforts and, more importantly, the institutional and political mechanisms underlying these differences. The results show that Australia, with a more centralized system, has more effectively set and implemented an urban water governance agenda that includes recycled urban wastewater. However, in both places local resistance has been a barrier to effective change. These findings demonstrate that reform capacity and policy success may differ between governance systems while common barriers and political dynamics persist.