Session 12. 1. A.

Water utilities are public service organizations that provide an essential service. As socio-environmental pressures—related to climatic changes, population shifts and aging infrastructure among others—build, water utilities will face a myriad of difficult decisions. Because water supply is a socio-technical system, decisions regarding water provision are driven not only by technical and economic influences, but also by norms, rules and practices at both the organization and sector levels. Yet, how these institutions affect water utility decision-making is not well understood.

In this study we draw on insights from institutional theory and socio-technical systems theory to examine water utility decision-making. Using the concept of institutional logics, we examine the rationalities that influence decision-making regarding infrastructure repairs, operational practices, system disruptions and responses to external mandates using case studies of eight drinking water utilities in the U.S. We find that multiple co-existing logics interact to influence water utility decisions. Logic interaction can take various forms—one logic might dominate, be compatible with or reinforce other co-existing logics—and affects which logic guides a utility’s decision in the end. These findings help better understand how water utilities may respond to socio-environmental pressures by clarifying the role of sense-making in water utility decision-making.

Utilities, such as energy and water providers, play a crucial role in shaping urban climate action in terms of mitigation or adaptation, yet their contributions are often understudied. This paper addresses the question: Are cities with strong city-utility relationships better at implementing climate action? If so, what types of relationships are most relevant? Our analysis is motivated by the growing recognition that cities are pivotal actors in addressing climate change, with utilities serving as key partners e.g. in the energy transition or to adapt water systems to climate impacts. Local governments and utilities have always been closely interrelated in many ways, e.g. through ownership or privatization, collective action in social programs, regulation or cronyism. Such relations might also play out strongly for climate -related decisions, making partnerships or conflicts among them central to urban climate governance.

We conduct a mapping exercise to explore mechanisms through which city-utility relationships influence climate action. This will include empirically described mechanisms of collective action, such as public ownership and regulation, as well as less-explored factors like familial ties and the “green revolving door” phenomenon. By contextualizing our findings through existing literature and expanding them with an AI-assisted systematic literature review, we provide a comprehensive overview of how these relationships impact urban climate governance. Our output is a catalogue of mechanisms for key pathways through which city-utility partnerships enhance or hinder climate action, offering value to researchers and practitioners interested in municipal governance and utilities. The catalogue provides a basis for planning or as device for situating further empirical studies. We hypothesize the catalogue will highlight the importance of collaboration between utilities and local governments for the successful implementation of urban climate plans, emphasizing the need for an integrated approach to climate governance.

New approaches to ensure urban water supply resilience are urgently needed. This requires moving beyond the management of water scarcity through infrastructural measures to understanding resilience as an outcome of complex interactions between people, water resources and technological infrastructure, which affect water services as urban commons. We conceptualize urban water systems as Coupled Infrastructure Systems (CIS), also referred to as Social-Ecological-Technological Systems (SETS). We analyze the CIS/SETS from different stakeholder perspectives to create a pluralistic, yet systematic, understanding of CIS/SETS interactions. We conducted a household survey (N=300) and expert interviews (N=19) in Amman, one of the world’s water scarcity hot spots. Our data analysis results in 1) the identification and characterization of new interactions among CIS/SETS sub-systems. We contribute this urban, resource-scarce example to the growing CIS-typology, which aims to identify general patterns of interactions for a better comparability among systems. 2) Inspired by frame analysis, we interpret the CIS/SETS through the lens of its different actor groups. Each group focuses on different system elements and interactions, resulting in disconnected system understandings or ‘frames’. Local experts focus on deficits of CIS/SETS elements and aim to increase available resources, while international experts emphasize the efficiency of CIS/SETS interactions. Households cope with deficient water supplies by mobilizing adaptive strategies. 3) We derive uncertainties resulting from unpredictable system dynamics, missing knowledge, and different (and unrecognized) stakeholder views. Accounting for these factors in water management strategies could enhance urban water resilience and help reframe the water management from a service delivered by public authorities to meet household water demand to one of an urban commons managed through shared responsibilities.

Landscapes are the emergent property of land-use systems in which feedback interactions between individual actions, the biophysical- and institutional context shape the observed state of the system. Contemporary interactions lock land-use system into undesired states of the system through reinforcing feedback loops. Largely driven by demands for food and fodder, such reinforcing mechanisms generate large-scale, high intensity, and homogenous agricultural landscapes at the consequence of biodiversity and ecosystem services. Where interactions at the systems scale are complex as the feedback between individual actions and changes in the landscape are spatially and temporally decoupled, such feedbacks can be more easily closed at the individual and local level. Here we set out to explore the tipping points at which individual actions leverage larger scale changes through the concept of feedback loops. Using the Coupled Infrastructures Framework and feedback principles from the field of control engineering, we develop conceptual- and formal models of the agricultural land-use system in the Province of Groningen. Building on ongoing rural transition processes in response to the Dutch Nitrogen crisis (Dutch National Program Rural Areas), we use these models to identify the set of local interactions needed to trigger tipping points towards alternative states of the land-use system. Based on this, we demonstrate what arrangements of the biophysical- and institutional context are needed to unleash latent values for individual action in pursuit of more desired landscapes.

Dynamic Adaptive Policy Pathway (DAPP) maps are employed to plan management decisions in contexts where the future of critical assets and infrastructures is highly uncertain due to environmental changes. Recent discussions highlight the necessity of utilizing them for managing complex common-pool resource issues, shaped by the intricate interconnections among diverse species, ecosystem services, and stakeholders. However, these social-ecological systems (SES) present challenges due to the vast array of potential adaptation options available.

This study introduces a method for effectively constructing DAPP maps by integrating Ostrom’s governance frameworks: the Institutional Analysis & Development framework (IADF), the Social-Ecological Systems framework (SESF), and the Coupled Infrastructure Systems framework (CISF). We leveraged them to create and organize adaptation actions, their targets, and the roles of actors and infrastructures that trigger these actions within various nested governance arrangements, e.g. operational, collective-choice, constitutional, etc ... This integrated approach enhanced our capacity to derive DAPP maps based on the mathematical principles of complex dynamical systems and viable control theory.

We apply this method to explore nested adaptive governance pathways for managing species-rich hedgerow networks that provide diverse ecosystem services. Our focus is on two SES with distinct community needs: one rural and one peri-urban, both located in France's Auvergne region. In the face of climate change affecting hedgerow species, we identify a set of viable adaptation pathways across nine alternative nested governance arrangements. Indicators are developed to highlight key factors driving differences in DAPP maps in response to changes in climate and SES context.

From this application, we discuss the strengths and limitations of this approach for managing increasingly complex SES and semi-natural infrastructures, considering the challenges posed by greater diversity in species, stakeholders, and ecosystem services. Additionally, we discuss how this complexity may impact usability and testability in practical applications.