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Of floods and droughts: The uneven politics of stormwater in Los Angeles
Abstract
Stormwater is a complex political and geographical problem. It is at once bound to land-use decisions, tied to geographical features such as lakes and rivers, and capable of flowing across different political boundaries and jurisdictions. In this paper, I empirically focus on how disparate understandings of stormwater are forged through different institutional arrangements and the ways multiple actors interact across scales of governance in Los Angeles. The results indicate four discourses influence decisions on urban stormwater management and are articulated through different forms of knowledge and power in environmental governance. The discourses diverge over contrasting perspectives on infrastructural interventions, the role of economic approaches, and the need for new institutions and rules. I suggest that disagreement may not deter integration and collaboration across different scales of governance, but without addressing conflict over key discursive claims about how stormwater governance should proceed, broadly accepted outcomes may remain elusive. With current trends in environmental governance moving towards hybrid forms that bring together groups that transcend traditional organizational structures, this paper reveals how more sustainable outcomes are being devised through current configurations of knowledge and power.
... As Heynen et al. (2006) state: "In fact, it is exactly those "natural" metabolisms and transformations that become discursively, politically, and economically mobilized and socially appropriated to produce environments that embody and reflect positions of social power" (p. 6). Therefore, the water cycle is determined by contextual political and economic flows, and this is why in sustainable stormwater management it is important to understand why actors in control can validate or dismiss decisions around stormwater (Cousins, 2017b;Finewood et al., 2019). ...
... visions and their reasons, and to validate or reject NbS futures (Cousins, 2017b;Finewood et al., 2019). Despite the different contexts that constitute the three case studies, it became evident that analyzing levels of acceptance, perspectives, and perceptions on NbS can enhance the practical application of NbS towards more just and equitable transitions. ...
... For this reason, interviews were complemented by the analysis of secondary data about the perception of the space by inhabitants living in the surrounding neighborhoods of the park. After the interviews were held, I analyzed an existing dataset from surveys on citizen perception developed by the Opinion Research Center of the City Council of Barcelona from 2015 to 2021 with the participation of 670 citizens (Ajuntament deBarcelona, 2015; 2016a;2017b; 2019b;. These surveys accommodate to a stratified random sampling procedure, following the census tracts of the surrounding neighborhoods of the park (Ajuntament deBarcelona, 2015; 2016a;2017b; 2019b;. ...
Nature-based Solutions (NbS) are increasingly being implemented as tools to sustainably manage stormwater and adapt to floods and droughts, while providing multifunctional benefits to humans and biodiversity. Extensive literature exists on Sustainability Transition Theory (STT), which helps to understand the governance and management dimensions of NbS as a sociotechnical system, but neglects its historical, geographical, and socio-environmental aspects. This thesis aims to gain a critical understanding of NbS from a cross-disciplined approach through Political Ecology (PE) and STT and focuses on the conflicts, environmental justice issues, discursive representations of nature’s role, the uneven production and distribution of Cultural Ecosystem Services (CES), and sensitivity to spatial dimensions that are produced when NbS are implemented. This dissertation examines water related NbS through empirical cases of NbS in the Delta of the Tordera River and Barcelona, Spain, and Hannover, Germany. By applying a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods on different urban and peri-urban scales, this thesis examines the different levels of acceptance, perceptions, and perspectives that stakeholders have of NbS. It offers reflections to understand how nature is reframed in the space production of NbS, as results show that stormwater and green spaces are directly related to each other toward ‘greening’ transitions, intensifying pressures to solve existing urban and peri-urban problems. It also provides insights into the new governance schemes associated with NbS and the reasons for disagreement among parties, such as power imbalances, tradeoffs, and intrinsic uneven human-nature relations. This thesis contributes to a better understanding of the nuances of implementing NbS as a political process and argues to redefine a more realistic NbS discourse, and provide platforms for knowledge exchange and discussions to create more just NbS.
... The political character of urban water is highly recognised, especially in the academic literature"since it addresses the relationship between unequal access to water services and inequitable urban governance" (Jaglin & Zérah, 2010: vi). The political nature of water commonly translates into the water management, which tends to become vulnerable to specific interests and competing actors defending their status, power and goals (Brandeler, Gupta, & Hordijk, 2018;Cousins, 2017). A political context can be positive, as in the case of Singapore, where the government achieved a comprehensive vision towards an IUWM through looking for water independence and a stop to relying on water imports from neighbouring Malaysia, who threatened to cut off the water supply to the island (Chen et al., 2011). ...
... This happens when the public recognises that ongoing practices fall short in responding to particular problems and request solutions. Moreover, Khoo (2013) defines that sustainability eventually raises conflicts due to the competition between different visions about objectives and mechanisms to achieve sustainability (Cousins, 2017;Hansen & Coenen, 2015;Morison & Brown, 2011). These conflicts and disagreements include different perceptions and definitions in regards to water governance and policy, such as decisions that relate to technology, costs, land use and other forms of competition-related with traditional practices (Cousins, 2017;Ioris, 2017;White, 2017). ...
... Moreover, Khoo (2013) defines that sustainability eventually raises conflicts due to the competition between different visions about objectives and mechanisms to achieve sustainability (Cousins, 2017;Hansen & Coenen, 2015;Morison & Brown, 2011). These conflicts and disagreements include different perceptions and definitions in regards to water governance and policy, such as decisions that relate to technology, costs, land use and other forms of competition-related with traditional practices (Cousins, 2017;Ioris, 2017;White, 2017). Hence, alternative approaches in water management are not neutral elements. ...
Water scarcity and climate change events cause constraints in urban environments. Integrated Urban Water Management approaches have emerged to promote alternatives to urban water management and minimise such problems. These approaches have been facing reduced advances in been adopted. Literature has studied this phenomenon using Transition Theory. However, studies have barely focused on the cases when changes in the water systems are promoted by the actors of the existing dominant system (or incumbent-led transitions), while recognising the power and political dynamics in the developing world. This research addresses this gap by study two empirical projects in Mexico City that proposed a change in urban water management. A framework adapted from the Transition Theory was used to clarify power dynamics in the water system in Mexico City, especially the role of actors in maintaining practices or deliver power to sustainable alternatives, represented by urban experiments. Also, this research recognises that the water system in Mexico City had already suffered some adjustments responding to external pressures that led to the introduction of sustainable practices. However, more work in the system structure and other domains (such as transport and conservation or resource management) is needed to make a significant change and introduce integrated approaches properly. The main insights for this thesis are: (i) The recognition of the incumbents´ role in supporting alternative projects inconsistently as a response to regime´s external and internal pressures. (ii) Integrated approaches require a multi-regime integration. However, this is challenging due to the complexity of coordinating a large cohort of stakeholders that respond to reduce uncertainty and maintain diverse regimes´ visions, political-power structures and vested interest. (iii) Incumbents see multi-regime coordination as a risk, so they tend to compete and act in an antagonist manner to maintain resources and power, complicating socio-technical systems coordination. Finally, (iv) incumbent-led sustainable projects require a strict development design and evaluation fostering internal continuity, while external supervision is also required. Hence, the necessity of empowering external actors to the regime. The studied cases evidenced that sustainable projects represent another actor competing for resources, but struggles emerge in different scales and systems, recognising that a strict policy design from several domains is needed. Overall, this research shows that water management is difficult to modify due to the inherent complexity of the interconnected systems rather than a lack of will to change them.
... While integrated water resources management and other holistic planning efforts are popular among both scholars and practitioners, the slow and uneven uptake has brought many of these frameworks under criticism (Cohen, 2012;Cousins, 2017c;Dhakal & Chevalier, 2016. Shared ways of constructing solutions to stormwater problems can bring stakeholders together, despite silos, but how they are forged influences how technical and institutional interventions will proceed in a particular place and time (Cousins, 2017b). ...
... Diversity among governance approaches and perspectives, as well as issues in assigning responsibility and authority, presents stormwater as a collective action problem (Cousins, 2017b;Dhakal & Chevalier, 2016;Ostrom, 1990). The problem of collective action arises from the need for many individuals and institutions to contribute and participate in an effort to reduce the adverse impacts of stormwater on the urban environment. ...
... A large proportion of literature still points toward a preference for traditional, or gray infrastructures, over green infrastructure (Brown, 2008;Dhakal & Chevalier, 2016;Ferguson et al., 2013). Part of this preference stems from accounting procedures that do not fully integrate the full range of ecosystem services green infrastructure can provide (Cousins, 2017b;Hansen & Pauleit, 2014;Lovell & Taylor, 2013;Meerow & Newell, 2017). Gray infrastructures, however, also provide a standardized practice that is easily measurable and calculable, in terms of volumes of stormwater captured or diverted, and provides a method to segregate stormwater from the social systems influencing how it flows across the landscape (Finewood, 2016). ...
... Lack of detailed cost data and information about running SSM solutions including maintenance costs (Backhaus et al., 2012;Burns et al., 2015;Cettner et al., 2014b;Chaffin et al., 2016;Cousins, 2017b;Dhakal and Chevalier, 2017;Flynn and Davidson, 2016;O'Sullivan et al., 2012;Perales-Momparler et al., 2015;Porse, 2013;Roy et al., 2008;Zhang et al., 2017) has led many local authorities, contract developers, and private stakeholders to show unwillingness to spend money on integrating SSM solutions because of the perceived risk in cost and performance (Barbosa et al., 2012;Dhakal and Chevalier, 2017). The lack of effective market incentives further exacerbates the situation (Cousins, 2017b;Prosser et al., 2015;Roy et al., 2008). ...
... Lack of detailed cost data and information about running SSM solutions including maintenance costs (Backhaus et al., 2012;Burns et al., 2015;Cettner et al., 2014b;Chaffin et al., 2016;Cousins, 2017b;Dhakal and Chevalier, 2017;Flynn and Davidson, 2016;O'Sullivan et al., 2012;Perales-Momparler et al., 2015;Porse, 2013;Roy et al., 2008;Zhang et al., 2017) has led many local authorities, contract developers, and private stakeholders to show unwillingness to spend money on integrating SSM solutions because of the perceived risk in cost and performance (Barbosa et al., 2012;Dhakal and Chevalier, 2017). The lack of effective market incentives further exacerbates the situation (Cousins, 2017b;Prosser et al., 2015;Roy et al., 2008). Limiting the use of governmental funding in promoting stakeholder participation also decreases uptake of SSM, which in turn increases the local government's financial burden if few private investors are involved. ...
... Lack of performance evaluations of SSM solutions is noticed by many researchers, e.g., (Chaffin et al., 2016;Cousins, 2017b;Perales-Momparler et al., 2015;Porse, 2013;Prosser et al., 2015;Roy et al., 2008;van der Sterren et al., 2009). For conventional piped drainage systems, it is easy to calculate the investment and evaluate the performance in terms of stormwater runoff. ...
... When explaining cities' sustainability shortcomings, urban political ecologists have emphasised the uneven power relations underlying urban stormwater. For instance, although environmental discourses frame stormwater as an opportunity for urban sustainability, bureaucratic strategies frequently make stormwater management an expert task to strengthen technocratic organisations (Finewood 2016;Cousins 2017). However, less attention has been paid to the social relations that underlie technology and influence the realisation of integrated stormwater approaches and urban stormwater politics. ...
... Accordingly, tax revenues are primarily used to interconnect centralised facilities to advance public water supply and water quality missions, which marginalises decentralised green stormwater practices in top-down public infrastructure development. As a result, entrenched arrangements of power and knowledge shape urban stormwater sustainability (Cousins 2017). However, the Los Angeles case provides a more differentiated story than one of mere path dependency. ...
Worldwide, cities have embraced the idea of integrated stormwater management using more decentralised and green infrastructures to enhance urban sustainability. Los Angeles County has recently introduced a new stormwater tax that envisions sustainable stormwater futures through far-reaching infrastructural change. While embracing such visions, however, different actors seek to use tax revenues for diverging infrastructure designs. Our paper therefore explores shifting stormwater politics in Los Angeles by highlighting the social relations underlying technology. Technical disputes that we frame as combinations of material artefacts, discourses, expertise and institutions provoke the specific “material politics” behind the emergence of a hybrid stormwater system in which centralised stormwater practices of incumbent public utilities predominate, but increasingly co-exist with more decentralised landscape-centred practices and become interdependent on them. We argue that technical disputes reflect ambiguities about a future stormwater system and engender the renegotiation of responsibilities, knowledge orders and the overall rationale of stormwater management. Hereby, a strict focus on controlling stormwater volumes partly runs counter to attempts to couple stormwater and urban greening improvements more tightly. We conclude by emphasising that infrastructures are relational systems that carry many potential stormwater futures and by outlining ways to better align stormwater management with wider urban sustainability objectives.
... Varimax rotation technique was used in this study to rotate the factors with eigenvalues higher than one. This process maximizes the number of Q-sorts associated with only one factor (Cousins 2017). In the next step, significant factors (i.e., 'idealized' sort) were determined that were considered as meaningful shared perspectives. ...
... Also, distinguishing and consensus statements among idealized Q-sorts for each question were reviewed to construct discourses representing shared or discrete perspectives among participants. A distinguishing statement has a Q-sort score (i.e., Z-score ranging from −3 to +3) that is statistically unique for a specific factor, while a consensus statement does not notably distinguish in the Q-sort score between any pair of factors (Brown 1993 andCousins 2017). Constructing discourses based on identified factors were subjected to interpretative analysis using interview data, while focused on capturing respondent's subjectivity with respect to factor analysis without inferring investigator's subjectivity. ...
In many disciplines, the resilience concept has applied to managing perturbations, challenges, or shocks in the system and designing an adaptive system. In particular, resilient infrastructure systems have been recognized as an alternative to traditional infrastructure, in which the systems are managed to be more reliable against unforeseen and unknown threats in urban areas. Perhaps owing to the malleable and multidisciplinary nature in the concept of resilience, there is no clear-cut standard that measures and characterizes infrastructure resilience nor how to implement the concept in practice for developing urban infrastructure systems. As a result, unavoidable subjective interpretation of the concept by practitioners and decision-makers occurs in the real world. We demonstrate the subjective perspectives on infrastructure resilience by asking practitioners working in governmental institutions within the metropolitan Phoenix area based on their interpretations of resilience, using Q-methodology. We asked practitioners to prioritize 19 key strategies for infrastructure resilience found in literature in three different decision contexts and recognized six discourses by analyzing the shared or discrete views of the practitioners. We conclude that, from the diverse perspectives on infrastructure resilience observed in this study, practitioners’ interpretation of resilience adds value to theoretical resilience concepts found in the literature by revealing why and how different resilience strategies are preferred and applied in practice.
... In parallel to this scholarship on actors, there is also a growing body of GI urban policy research targeted at both the actors engaged and the GI policies themselves. Cousins (2017a; examines the varying actors and perspectives on managing stormwater in his research on Los Angeles. Although various actors are involved in promoting and implementing GI at the city scale in Pittsburgh, Finewood et al. (2019) caution that if GI is framed too narrowly, it can be reduced to a technical conversation between experts. ...
... As such, this research builds on several recent studies highlighting the significance of actors and agency at the local level (e.g. Cousins, 2017a;Elder & Gerlak, 2019;Larson, 2018;Radonic, 2019) but also sharpens the focus on agents as a key factor related to GI implementation and contributes a focus on equity and inclusion in GI policy and design. ...
Green Infrastructure (GI) is being adopted in cities all around the world as a key piece of climate change adaptation and water management for local governments. Recognizing that there is increasingly a diversity of actors engaged in designing, implementing, and fostering GI policies, we aim to better understand how urban GI policies take shape over time. We draw from two bodies of scholarship – – agency in Earth System Governance and entrepreneurs in public policy scholarship -- to study the agents who come to exercise authority to shape GI governance. We trace the trajectory of urban GI practices and policy over the past two decades, keenly observing how GI policies are adopted and change over time. We focus on Tucson, Arizona and combine document analysis, key informant interviews, and participation in stakeholder meetings with an innovative timeline method we collaboratively developed with stakeholders to identify the key events and actors in GI policy adoption. Our findings suggest diverse yet, interconnected roles for entrepreneurs highlighting how agency is exercised, how learning occurs and takes shape across entrepreneurs and scales, and how inequities are realized and addressed.
... While the cases explored in this Special Section are spatially located in rural regions, the water and energy produced in those rural places benefit urban ones. A number of political ecologists address urban drought, examining urban conservation practices (Vine 2018;Radonic 2019;Randle 2021), representations of water conservation (Boyer et al. 2021), urban efforts to manage water flows (Cousins 2017b;Randle 2022), and the metabolic links through which urban centers consume and reconfigure water resources in rural areas (Cantor 2021). Shifting attention to rural areas and taking the position that droughts are socially constructed, even as economic growth and climatic conditions are used to justify practices that contribute to water scarcity, the Special Section authors interrogate the material and discursive intersections of political economies of drought, as well as its ecological conditions, knowledge production, and legal and regulatory infrastructures. ...
This Special Section examines the political ecology of drought, focusing on the production of drought in rural areas where regimes of water dispossession, exploitation, and extraction exacerbate drought conditions for rural inhabitants, even as water and energy produced in those impacted rural areas benefit urban areas. This introduction situates the articles in a larger conversation about drought governance practices by tracing four interwoven analytical threads. An initial examination of definitional quandaries over drought paves the way for a discussion of the problematics of governing through drought, in particular, the ways in which, following Urciuoli, "strategically deployable [linguistic] shifters" contribute to consensus-building, and the ways in which legal and regulatory regimes, as well as politics, help shape settler economic practices during droughts. The discussion then turns to social justice and unequally distributed vulnerabilities intensified by groundwater depletion and drought governance practices. The article concludes by critically considering several possible approaches to drought governance that take the coproduction of nature and culture as integral. The introduction argues, and the Special Section articles support this, that a reconfiguration of drought economics and governance, along with a prioritizing of Native American sovereignty in the US, is imperative.
... Applied to flood risk, the study of hydrosocial relations has highlighted the extent to which individuals and groups in a flood-prone area continuously respond to the material and discursive dimensions of floodwater, while water and infrastructures are themselves active and interconnected agents with specific local characteristics (Krause, 2013(Krause, , 2016Krause & Strang, 2016). For instance, from one day to the next or between adjacent areas, floodwater can shapeshift, from a menace to a beneficial resource to be captured for food growing (Cousins, 2017). ...
In Malate, a district of Manila, flooding is a frequent occurrence. This paper draws on in-depth interviews with Malate inhabitants to approach urban floods as more than discrete disastrous episodes which interfere with a pre-existing normality. The paper employs a Levebvrian conceptualisation of rhythm and entrainment, while also offering reflections on the limits of its relevance to global South cities. Theorised from Malate, urban floods point to the mutual constitution of the social-technical-natural relations of urban infrastructures, and the on-going disruptive rhythms of floodwater. We argue that the rhythms of floodwater can be glimpsed at the intersections of different yet interrelated urban infrastructures. We focus on the infrastructures identified by research participants as pertinent to flood risk in Malate: drainage, waste management, and mobility. By tracing the spatial intersections and temporal rhythms of infrastructurally mediated urban floods, this paper contributes to scholarship on the situated hydrosocial relations of everyday life.
... Centering storage, this analysis builds on the limited social science literature on Southern California groundwater management (Blomquist, 1992;Blomquist and Ostrom, 1985;Porse et al., 2016), diverging from many previous accounts of LA's waterscape. Water's flow through aqueducts into the city's water supply system (Kahrl, 1983;Piper, 2006) and through the urban landscape as unruly stormwater (Cousins, 2017a(Cousins, , 2017bGumprecht, 2001) has occupied most scholars of LA's waterscape to date, particularly those concerned with the production of space. Though the politics of dam construction have entered analyses of Southern California flood management (Orsi, 2004), the role of those infrastructures in smoothing the process of uninterrupted water supply provision by holding reserve supply has largely avoided comment (for a notable exception, see Cousins, 2020). ...
In the US West, water stories are often aqueduct stories, narratives of moving the vital resource from one place to another. This paper, in contrast, explores nascent efforts to keep the water still, in the name of helping buffer cities from the anticipated impacts of climate change. Scripted as potential holding sites for an urban water reserve, aquifers and the task of filling them now orient a range of policies and material investments across Southern California. Building on writings that explore the multi-scalar politics of storing and stockpiling vaccines, resources, and lively or uncooperative commodities, this analysis approaches storage as a key moment within circulation, a dynamic, constitutive stillness that conditions flows. Three early-stage subterranean water stockpiling projects connected to the City of Los Angeles are explored, and used to demonstrate how the pursuit of storage is remaking material and political relationships within and between urban jurisdictions, while complicating long-fraught urban–rural relations within the region's waterscape. These shifts suggest the value of reorienting the notion of the urbanization of nature to better attend to the geographies of resource storage, in addition to those of resource flows and circulations.
... But there are many studies in the literature of other countries that recognize these barriers, focusing on institutional or governance aspects (e.g. Cousins, 2017;Qiao et al., 2018). However, with regard to developing countries, "Lack of coordination and collaboration" and "Lack of capacity or experience" have only been recognized as obstacles for China in studies about governance issues (Jiang et al., 2017). ...
Urban stormwater management is one of the key challenges concerning sustainability in urban areas. Sustainable urban stormwater management (SUSM) has been increasingly adopted around the world and proved its effectiveness in enhancing sustainability and quality of life in cities. Nevertheless, these strategies are yet to be widely adopted in developing countries. This paper presents barriers to the widespread adoption of SUSM in Brazil, as a developing country case study with severe urban stormwater management problems. To achieve this objective, a thorough review of literature on the barriers has been conducted. An online survey has been designed and disseminated to different Brazilian participant stakeholder groups (i.e. public professionals, private professionals, teachers, and population) to identify the SUSM-related barriers in Brazil. The reviews recognized 31 potential barriers in literature which were categorized into six barrier types. Five of the evaluated barriers have been recognized by at least 80% of the respondents as the most important, namely: “Lack of design and maintenance standards”, “Lack of long-term planning”, “Lack of dissemination and knowledge”, “Lack of incentives”, and “Reluctance to change”. The barriers identified by this research are coherent with the SUSM adoption context in Brazil. These barriers are mainly related to knowledge about SUSM and similar to those diagnosed in previous studies in literature. Overcoming the common barriers is the prelude to effective SUSM solutions to increase urban stormwater sustainability in Brazil and in other developing countries. This paper also presents some initiatives adopted around the world to overcome these barriers, which could be used as reference to an effective public policy proposition.
... Indeed, many of my environmentalist interlocutors express active concern that administrative tools like the Federal Emergency Management Agency's official flood maps vastly underestimate the potential for flooding from the even stronger storm systems that climate change will likely bring to the region (see Berg and Hall 2015). However, as others have detailed, recent decades have seen the rise of new, more hybrid paradigms of urban stormwater management in the U.S. West, approaches that seek to prioritize multiple forms of environmental benefit alongside a desire for public safety (Orsi 2004;Karvoven 2011;Cousins 2017). The sections below detail how these new paradigms have intersected with and at times, complicated longestablished forms of riparian politics in twenty-first-century LA. ...
Long a contested environment, Los Angeles’s eponymous, concrete-lined river underwent a significant transformation in 2010. Following a protracted review, the United States Environmental Protection Agency changed the river’s classification from a federally managed flood control channel to “traditional navigable waterway of the United States”, as defined by the federal Clean Water Act. Southern California’s environmentalist community celebrated this long-desired legal shift, which placed the river squarely in the public – and publicly accessible – domain. In the years that followed, this community’s discourse and practice around the river have developed around a pair of related-yet-divergent notions of this peculiar urban riparian environment. For some, the waterway is framed as a place to be sustained, restored, and made accessible to residents as unconventional ‘natural’ space and a valuable recreational amenity. Among others, it is understood as an underutilized source of a vital, scarce resource for the city: water. Drawing on long-term participant observation among Los Angeles-based environmental activists, NGO workers, and water managers, this chapter explores the social, material, and legal practices that have accreted around these interpretations of the river.
... The flexibility embedded within banking schemes allows developers to offset their on-site impacts on water quality through the buying and selling of credits associated with stream, wetland, or ecosystem restoration (Robertson, 2004). Credit banking schemes, however, are often criticized for allowing some developers to avoid on-site mitigation measures through their ability to purchase credits that satisfy their low impact development requirements in their stormwater permits (Cousins, 2017c). Maintaining ecological equivalency between altered and restored ecosystems also present challenges about how to resolve on-site versus off-site mitigation measures (Lave, 2012) and highlight the difficulties of coordinating action across different levels of governance and the private sector (Robertson, 2012(Robertson, , 2018. ...
Municipalities large and small are grappling with how to address enduring water quality challenges stemming from the impermeability of much of the built environment and how to address shifting precipitation patterns due to climate change. Finding ways to fund and finance the redesign, retrofit, and adaptation of the built environment, however, presents a major obstacle in an environment of municipal fiscal austerity. In this paper, we examine how municipalities are adopting different fee structures and financial tools to pay for stormwater abatement through green and gray infrastructure and improve their capacity to deal with the impacts of climate change. Drawing on a survey of 233 municipalities and interviews with municipal leaders, we show that transitioning towards green infrastructure in municipal stormwater and climate change planning is a broad goal among most respondents, but stormwater fee systems are typically not sufficient for meeting regulatory mandates as well as the operation and maintenance costs needed to replace or repair urban water infrastructure. This shortfall has led many municipalities to use a host of other financial tools, such as credit and mitigation banking and social impact and green bonds. We suggest this shift has important implications for achieving sustainability and ensuring just transitions.
... But there are many studies in the literature of other countries that recognize these barriers, focusing on institutional or governance aspects (e.g. Cousins, 2017;Qiao et al., 2018). However, with regard to developing countries, "Lack of coordination and collaboration" and "Lack of capacity or experience" have only been recognized as obstacles for China in studies about governance issues (Jiang et al., 2017). ...
Urban stormwater management is one of the key challenges concerning the sustainability in urban areas. Through several approaches, sustainable urban stormwater management (SUSM) is becoming widely adopted around the world and is proving its effectiveness in enhancing sustainability and quality of life in the cities. Nevertheless, these strategies are still not widespread in developing countries, such as Brazil, where more than 40% of municipalities reported pluvial flooding in the last five years. Inspired by international experiences, this paper presents the barriers to the widespread adoption of SUSM in Brazil, as a developing country case study with severe urban stormwater management problems. A thorough literature review has been conducted. Surveys relating to urban stormwater management have been completed by different stakeholder groups to investigate the factors involved in the problem, such as institutional issues, professional capacity, and resource availability. “Lack of design and maintenance standards”, “Lack of long-term planning”, “Lack of dissemination and knowledge”, “Lack of incentives”, and “Reluctance to change” have been recognized as the most challenging barriers by 80% of the respondents. Overcoming the common barriers is the prelude to effective SUSM solutions to increase urban stormwater sustainability in Brazil and in other developing countries with similar challenges.
... Currently though, stormwater management in the United States continues to struggle with changing climatic conditions while maintaining human and environmental well-being [13,14,17]. Many urban water and stormwater management scholars suggest that climate change requires a complete rethinking and overhaul of water management, including stormwater management, especially in urban areas [14,22]. This rethinking of water management parallels the development of the concept of nature-based solutions to urban environmental challenges. ...
Water management and governance continues to rely on the scientific and engineering principles of the hydrologic cycle for decision-making on policies and infrastructure choices. This over-reliance on hydrologic-based, technocratic, command-and-control management and governance tends to discount and overlook the political, social, cultural, and economic factors that shape water-society relationships. This paper utilizes an alternative framework, the hydrosocial cycle, to analyze how water and society shape each other over time. In this paper, the hydrosocial framework is applied to stormwater management in the United States. Two hydrosocial case studies centered on rain and stormwater are investigated to highlight how stormwater management can benefit from a hydrosocial approach. The insights and implications from these case studies are then applied to stormwater management by formulating key questions that arise under the hydrosocial framework. These key questions are significant to progressing stormwater management to more sustainable, resilient, and equitable outcomes for environmental and public safety and health. This paper frames a conversation for incorporating the hydrosocial framework into stormwater management and demonstrates the need for an interdisciplinary approach to water management and governance issues.
... The term "environmental justice" itself refers to the struggles against the inequalities in the distribution of environmental risks and possibilities [2]. The uneven impacts of climate change also highlighted the importance of environmental justice research [3][4][5]. Climate change has a significant effect on the probability of environmental injustices in the East-Central European region especially since the rapid increase in the frequency of extreme weather events. For example, floods and drought can occur simultaneously -but in different areas. ...
Environmental justice is a normative framework for the analysis of environmental impacts on the wellbeing of individuals and social groups. According to the framework, the deprived social groups and ethnic minorities are often more exposed to environmental risks and hazards due to their disadvantaged situation, and due to the lack of representation and political power. To manage the impacts of injustices and to include the citizen in the decision-making processes, proper information is needed on local attitudes and decision-making processes. Therefore, this study sought to (i) identify the main factors shaping the attitudes towards environmental injustices and (ii) to analyse the attitudes and perception of the various social groups and (iii) to identify the main factors which are shaping the attitudes and actions of those who were affected by the floods of 2001 and 2010 through the use of decision tree method. The data for the predictive model was acquired from a questionnaire survey conducted in two disadvantaged and flood-hit Hungarian regions. Based on the survey data, a principal component analysis (PCA) was conducted, which resulted in three principal components; fear, social change, and change in the built environment. The study focused only on the elements of the “fear principal component”, due to the decision tree tool homogenous groups identified in relation to this component. Our analysis showed that ethnicity has a determinative role in the emergence and the level of fear from floods; the Roma respondents expressed a significantly higher level of fear than others.
... Water supplied to Los Angeles through the State Water Project and the Los Angeles Aqueduct, for example, presents reliability challenges due to climate change, environmental regulation, and municipal policy, which seek to reduce dependency on imported water supplies purchased from the MWD (LADWP, 2010). On the other hand, drought and climate change brought managerial and technocratic attention to large centralized infrastructures that promote retention, such as dams and spreading grounds, and allow large volumes of runoff to be captured and stored for water supply benefits (Cousins, 2017a). ...
This paper examines the sociotechnical imaginaries shaping the development, retrofit, and multiple uses of water infrastructure in response to crisis. Focusing on Morris Dam, located on the San Gabriel River in Los Angeles County, I ground my analysis in a case that highlights how the interactions between professional engineering and scientific practice, political aims and goals, and environmental conditions shape infrastructural form and function. Analysing three different phases in the infrastructure’s lifespan, I argue that infrastructures exist in and beyond their initial functions as metabolic conduits, as they take on new meanings in relation to shifting social, political, and environmental crises. In the first phase, I focus on the sociotechnical imaginaries and forms of politics that take shape around the development of Morris Dam as a modernization project. In the next phase, I draw attention to the unintended configurations of science, nature, and naval weapons development that emerged at Morris Dam in the mid-20th century and continued through the Cold War. The final phase examines the retrofitting process that re-modernized the dam as a technology to advance water resources sustainability and resilience in the region. Together, I use these different forms of infrastructural relations to illustrate how malleability works as an infrastructural feature and political process enabling infrastructural resilience and attachment to changing sociotechnical imaginaries over time.
... If they were to provide their private land, and thus funding in urban development or re-development, private stakeholder involvement would be a significant factor in increasing SSM implementation (Cousins, 2017a;Dillon et al., 2016;Gao et al., 2016;Newburn and Alberini, 2016). Academia involvement in relevant SSM experiments can provide knowledge of SSM to local governments and various private stakeholders, which can increase awareness of SSM benefits and extend private stakeholder involvement (Burns et al., 2015;Cousins, 2017b;Flynn and Davidson, 2016;Prosser et al., 2015). In addition, the increase in resources, e.g., public land and funding, effective market incentives, and staff and time, will directly boost SSM implementation. ...
Cities worldwide are increasingly using green infrastructure to mitigate challenges related to stormwater, in an approach regarded as sustainable stormwater management (SSM). Various governance factors have been identified as one of the major barriers to SSM implementation. In this study, we examined specific governance factors influencing local SSM implementation in four case cities in Sweden and China. Based on systems thinking, we first developed a general causal loop diagram (SSM-CLD) illustrating the interrelations between previously identified influencing governance factors in SSM. We then used this general SSM-CLD as a framework to conduct and analyze 23 semi-structured interviews with local government officers in the four case cities. Based on the analysis, we summarized the most frequently mentioned governance factors and created one SSM-CLD for each case city. We then examined the main differences between the local SSM-CLDs and the general SSM-CLD, and the differences between the Chinese and Swedish case cities. The results revealed that, in the two Chinese case cities, the role of national policy in setting local leaders' priorities, the strong organizational set-up, and planning instruments are significant for SSM implementation. In the two Swedish case cities, public awareness, local government politicians' priorities, and trust in SSM performance are important for SSM implementation. Acquiring funding for long-term maintenance of SSM was identified as a common challenge in all four cities studied. These results provide a better understanding and potential lessons for other cities on how governance factors influence SSM.
... Furthermore, public health problems due to stormwater runoff's pollution has become a contributor of social stress (Barbosa et al. 2012), as urban inhabitants have developed a feeling of vulnerability against the increase in the periodicity of stormwater related issues in urban environments. Finally, and not less important, are political and geographical limitations which further complicate stormwater management (Cousins, 2017). ...
Urban environments are under natural stresses such as typhoons and droughts whilst concurrently being threatened by stresses produced by human activities. Creating impermeable swaths across large areas in our cities is one of the most well-known anthropogenic impacts; with impervious surfaces occupying up to 80-90% of the urban land area, increasing the risks of flooding and diffuse pollution. Strategic urban planning incorporating innovative systems and policies is necessary to mitigate the deleterious human health and environmental impacts of urbanization. Impervious areas in the city are comprised mostly of streets, sidewalks, roads, roofs and parking areas. All of them have the potential to be designed as source control stormwater techniques, and therefore, the potential to restore the natural water cycle in the urban environment. Thus, the future of stormwater management in cities lies in the development of an urban network of green and blue spaces that deliver ecosystem services. Green infrastructure is at the forefront of stormwater management techniques in urban environments, being used as multi-functional, nature-based solutions, mimicking processes of the natural environment. They can be used not only to design new areas within the city, but also to retrofit urban environments, enhancing biodiversity, providing amenity to the citizens, improving urban runoff management and increasing flood resilience amongst other benefits. Many municipalities have realized the opportunities available to implement green infrastructure within the right-of-way transportation corridor as a means to comply with regulations while also improving urban livability. Green Street Programmes across the globe, containing green stormwater infrastructure (GSI), have been successfully applied, contributing to the generation of better spaces and a rise of a new industry around sustainable stormwater management as a wider benefit to society. Green Streets takes the opportunity to re-design the urban landscape by employing GSI solutions instead of the previously-built impervious surfaces. Green Streets also create more secure spaces for pedestrians and their interaction with urban traffic. This book chapter is a review of the scientific knowledge on Green Street design through the use of GSI; this is the future pathway to design cities resilient to flood and urban pollution, thereby creating better urban spaces to live.
... Even amid evidence from field and monitoring studies that demonstrate the potential to improve watershed hydrologic function through LID and evidence of a high willingness to pay for associated environmental and amenity benefits among watershed inhabitants (Brent et al., 2017), widespread and watershed-scale implementation of LID lags (Dhakal and Chevalier, 2017;Fenner, 2017). Barriers to LID adoption may take the form of policy, governance, resource or cognitive barriers (Dhakal and Chevalier, 2017;Cousins, 2017;Kim and Li, 2017). With respect to policy and governance barriers to LID implementation, Dhakal and Chevalier (2017) spatially-based models with stakeholder priority weighting (Meerow and Newell, 2017), and participatory frameworks (Dagenais et al., 2017;Schifman et al., 2017). ...
A review of literature related to
stormwater runoff characterization and its subsequent
management and treatment from 2017 was conducted. The
250 articles summarized herein are organized along three
central themes: (1) stormwater quality and quantity
characteristics, (2) site-scale stormwater management
practices, with a focus on low impact development (LID)
and green infrastructure (GI), and (3) watershed-scale
performance of stormwater controls. Within each section,
common research themes and future work are highlighted.
This article is open access here: https://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/wef/wer/2018/00000090/00000010/art00039%3bjsessionid=cfkmjfectlaf9.x-ic-live-02#
... Voices criticising current urban drainage systems and signalling a new period in the management of water flows in cities are gaining momentum both in the academic and professional worlds (see, for example, Pahl-Wostl, 2007;Cettner et al., 2013;Marlow et al., 2013;Carlson et al., 2015;Hofmann, 2015). Arguments usually deployed to build a case against conventional systems and propose new solutions usually revolve not only around climate change and related impacts, especially increasing flooding episodes (Cousins, 2017;Stakhiv, 2011;Walsh et al., 2012;Zhou, 2014) but also around issues of governance and citizen involvement (van de Meene et al., 2011;Bos and Brown, 2012;Porse, 2013;Brown et al., 2013). In both cases, infrastructures and institutions need to be flexible, adaptable and integrated if resilience to future risks posed by urban water flows is to be managed adequately (Roy et al., 2008;Brown et al., 2009). ...
Our objective in this paper is to trace the historical trajectory of urban drainage in Barcelona from the 19th century to the present highlighting the main changes in approach, from the 'everything down the drain' philosophy of the 19th century to the sustainable urban drainage systems of the early 21st century. In this trajectory we identify four main historical periods. The first period corresponds to the 'Garcia Faria Plan' of the late 19th century which initiated the construction of modern drainage in Barcelona. The second period, lasting for much of the 20th century, showed the expansion of the centralised sewer system that, however, could not solve the chronic problems of flooding and pollution created by fast urbanisation. The third period, governed by the Olympic Games of 1992 and the rehabilitation of the beach front, entailed a massive reconfiguration of the sewer system now connected to wastewater treatment plants and enhanced with a number of large underground stormwater reservoirs. Finally, since the early 2000s, urban drainage is increasingly adopting decentralised, small-scale solutions to drainage such as Sustainable Urban Drainage Systems (SUDS). While signs of the transition towards a more sustainable approach to urban drainage are already present, the conventional approach remains strong and appears to be evolving also towards more sustainable solutions. Hence, system coexistence rather than substitution appears to be the outcome of the transition in urban drainage in this city.
In recent years, as a result of intensive urbanisation, a significant increase in the surface of impermeable areas has been observed, which results in changes in the hydrological cycle of catchments. In order to counteract these changes, low-impact development (LID) solutions are increasingly being implemented in urban catchments, including bioretention systems. Taking this into account, a new bioretention drainage channel (BRC) was designed, whose main task is retention, infiltration, and pre-treatment of rainwater. The pilot laboratory tests carried out on two BRC prototypes (K1 and K2) showed that the average rate of reduction of mineral-suspended solids from rainwater was 69% and 57%, respectively, for K1 and K2. Analysing the results of the research, it was found that the bioretention drainage channel is characterised by very high efficiency in removing petroleum hydrocarbons from rainwater, and the reduction rate of these pollutants for both the K1 and K2 channels was close to 100%. In turn, hydrodynamic studies carried out on the model of the urban catchment showed that the implementation of BRCs will reduce the peak runoff by more than 82%, and the maximum flow in the sewage network by 83%.
The large-scale deployment of low-cost monitoring systems has the potential to revolutionize the field of urban hydrology monitoring, bringing improved urban management, and a better living environment. Even though low-cost sensors emerged a few decades ago, versatile and cheap electronics like Arduino could give stormwater researchers a new opportunity to build their own monitoring systems to support their work. To find out sensors which are ready for low-cost stormwater monitoring systems, for the first time, we review the performance assessments of low-cost sensors for monitoring air humidity, wind speed, solar radiation, rainfall, water level, water flow, soil moisture, water pH, conductivity, turbidity, nitrogen, and phosphorus in a unified metrological framework considering numerous parameters. In general, as these low-cost sensors are not initially designed for scientific monitoring, there is extra work to make them suitable for in situ monitoring, to calibrate them, to validate their performance, and to connect them with open-source hardware for data transmission. We, therefore, call for international cooperation to develop uniform low-cost sensor production, interface, performance, calibration and system design, installation, and data validation guides which will greatly regulate and facilitate the sharing of experience and knowledge.
HIGHLIGHTS
Low-cost sensors have the potential to revolutionize water monitoring.;
We provide an up-to-date scientific review of commercially available low-cost sensors.;
We introduce a unified metrological framework for various low-cost sensors.;
Suggestions and recommendations for sensor modules choice and uses are given.;
The development of low-cost monitoring systems requires elaborating common guidelines.;
Stormwater management has recently begun a paradigm shift away from traditional top-down approaches in response to climatic changes, urbanization, and regulatory pressures. This paradigm shift is characterized by two key developments: the implementation of additional decentralized green infrastructure, and the practice of individuals managing stormwater from their privately-owned property. This transition involves redefining who is responsible for managing stormwater and the infrastructure used within stormwater management. Using insights from two urban watersheds, Watershed 263, Baltimore, MD and Watts Branch, Prince George’s County, MD and Washington, DC, where this shift is underway, we assess changes in the hydrosocial relationships underpinning this paradigm shift including the emergence of stormwater hydrocitizenship. We investigate stormwater hydrocitizenship as the role and responsibilities of individuals within stormwater management. We focus on the role of government at several levels, drawing insights from the concept of biopower. Our findings suggest that this paradigm shift and the emergence of a stormwater hydrocitizenship remains embedded in top-down governance, which in turn creates significant tension among different stakeholders. Arising from this critical analysis, we seek to promote a reimagining of how, where, and who manages stormwater towards more sustainable, resilient, and equitable outcomes.
This article aims to demonstrate how critical urban geography and Urban Political Ecology (UPE) can provide analytical tools to fully incorporate the social dimension in Sustainable Urban Drainage Systems (SUDS), overcoming ageographical and depoliticized understand-ings of sustainable stormwater transitions. Through its socio-technical framework, Sustainability Transitions Theory (STT) has contributed significantly to the discourses around governance, infrastructure and management of the new stormwater paradigm from hazard to resource. However, the theory fails to recognise the complexities that geographical, historical and political dynamics introduce into this process, as questions arise regarding why, how and for whom stormwater becomes a resource. The article argues that UPE can offer insights into why and how drainage transitions may take place in specific contexts, considering aspects of sustainability, social equity, justice and democracy.
Stormwater management is a fundamental public service in urban areas that has wide-ranging implications on water supply, public safety, and ecosystem health. This paper examines stormwater management priorities expressed by community leaders and residents, educators, industry professionals, and water managers. It uses Q-methodology, a mixed-method approach, to understand prevalent narratives around stormwater management that comprise the public discourse. The purpose of this research is to elucidate points of agreement and disagreement in the context of a contentious flood risk management project. In total, 18 participants ranked an identical set of 25 idea statements relative to one another. Through principal component analysis, I identify four distinct narratives that prioritize different aspects of stormwater management objectives. The narrative analysis shows broad agreement that decentralized, soft infrastructure (e.g., green infrastructure) should be part of stormwater management solutions. However, there is widespread disagreement over funding mechanisms, the community's responsibilities, and the underlying planning approach to stormwater management. There was no discernable pattern in sector affiliation with any of the narratives. I summarize the dimensionality of stormwater governance and the potential spectrum of ideas about infrastructure, responsibilities, and planning approaches in a framework that characterizes competing viewpoints. The results of this study are useful in understanding underlying sources of conflict regarding stormwater management that may not be readily apparent in public discourse.
Urbanization leads to the growth of impervious surfaces, which increases surface runoff, causing pluvial and flash flood phenomena. Furthermore, it significantly limits the infiltration of stormwater into the ground; this, in turn, reduces groundwater supply, ultimately intensifying drought effects. In order to adapt urbanized areas to climate change, the objective is to stop these unfavorable processes and strive for recreating the natural water cycle through developing decentralized stormwater management practices on private properties. An important management instrument that motivates property owners to invest is economic incentives, such as stormwater or impact fees associated with a system of rebates/discounts that depend on the applied stormwater runoff reduction solutions. Herein, we analyze a new economic instrument—a fee for reducing natural field retention—which is planned to be introduced in Poland. We assessed the incentive and funding (income-generating) function of the fee based on the example of the Sudół river catchment in Krakow, Poland. The research involved conducting simulation calculations and assessing the incentive impact through calculating investment Net Present Value (NPV), which is the investor’s response to the proposed economic incentives included in the structure of the fee and the rebate system. This study demonstrated errors and loopholes in the suggested fee rules—too low rates that prevent achieving profitability (negative NPV) for small-scale stormwater retention practices, and incorrect conditions that enable obtaining discounted fees. We also estimated the fee rate that ensures investment profitability.
Stormwater management must address three direct threats to urban ecological security during the urbanisation of China: waterlogging, water pollution and shortages of water resources. Based on the theory of landscape security patterns, macro-level stormwater landscape security patterns (SLSPs) associated with regional flood security, runoff pollution control security structures and water resource utilisation can be set up to solve urban stormwater and environmental problems. The objective of this study was to construct the SLSP of the Tiebei area in Nanjing, east China. A high-precision digital terrain model and a digital orthophoto map were obtained using portable, unmanned aerial vehicle remote sensing technology and Pix4Dmapper software. These data were integrated in an ArcGIS platform and used to calculate runoff flow direction and flow accumulation, measure runoff pollution levels and determine priority areas for water resources protection. Combined with regional planning of the Tiebei area, the SLSP was effectively and efficiently constructed. This study also examined current management and use of urban stormwater and addressed the important bases for ecological flood prevention, regional planning and site design of the urban landscape.
Public and policy makers alike are concerned about national and global deforestation and forest degradation. These issues pose a significant threat to social, economic and environmental welfare. Attempts to prevent forest loss and increased attention to pilot REDD+ projects in community forestry sites would both deliver rural livelihood benefits and help to reduce adverse climate impacts. However, there has been no significant exploration of the viewpoints of local experts to determine the monitoring and action needed to support community-based forestry and improve the governance of REDD+ pilot projects in Cambodia. Therefore, this study aimed to assess the perceptions of local stakeholders towards the quality of governance of the first community forest REDD+ pilot project in Cambodia, employing Q-methodology. We adapted 11 indicators of the hierarchical framework of assessment of governance quality to design 40 Q-statements related to REDD+ governance or achievements. The 52 P-set ranked these Q-statements with respect to the community-based REDD+ pilot project. Our study revealed that local stakeholders held four distinct, and partially opposite, views, that: (1) the REDD+ project is successful because it is inclusiveness and capable of causing behavioral change; (2) REDD+ pilot projects should be led by government, not external or locally; and needs more resources; (3) the REDD+ pilot project has raised unrealistic expectations, would likely be a source of corruption and will probably not be successful for local people or halting deforestation; and (4) the REDD+ pilot project is inclusive but not very transparent and probably ineffective at protecting forest. Through these four varied perspectives from local people involved in the project, we can see that there remain serious challenges to the future of pilot community forestry REDD+ projects, including the complex interaction between the multinational actors and the local socio-ecological systems. To move forwards, this study suggested Cambodia should make a pro-poor REDD+ program, implementing more community-based REDD+ projects which explicitly build the assets and capacity of the poorest households. This study also shows that Q-methodology can highlight the diverse viewpoints of local stakeholders concerning the quality of community forest REDD+ governance, helping policy makers, implementers and local stakeholders to better identify the challenges to be addressed.
Green infrastructure (GI) projects provide new and sustainable solutions for managing stormwater by reducing impervious cover, capturing and conveying localized flood waters, promoting infiltration, replenishing depleting groundwater supplies, improving runoff quality, and increasing flood risk and drought resiliency. Green infrastructure projects have been implemented within southern California, including in the highly urbanized Los Angeles metropolitan area. However, despite the growing use of GI, there is a need to better understand the existing inventory of projects. This paper presents the review of the current portfolio of GI in the counties of Orange and Los Angeles, including the city of Los Angeles, through the development of a geographic information systems (GIS) database and the evaluation of pertinent project data from over 2,400 GI projects such as project types, locations, design volumes, and monitoring information. This review will improve understanding of the existing infrastructure for future planning, detailed design, and performance analyses to ensure optimal use of available resources.
This article concentrates on how hydro-social relations are differentially structured across technical experts engaged within diverse and multiple networks of institutional and bureaucratic practice and the implications this has for more inclusive forms of environmental governance and decision-making. I empirically focus on stormwater governance in Chicago and Los Angeles as a means to capture the range of geographical and institutional variations in environmental knowledge. Both cities face considerably different water resource challenges in the United States but are at the forefront of developing comprehensive and progressive urban water governance programs. In the article, I identify four visions of hydrosocial relations: hydro-reformist, hydro-managerial, hydro-rationalist, and hydro-pragmatist. Each of these represents a particular understanding of how hydrosocial relations should proceed. They all align around shared framings of integrated management and the utilization of the best available science and technology to drive decision-making. Consensus, however, masks fundamental differences among the varying groups of expertise. Differences center on the perceived effectiveness of different types of infrastructural interventions, of market and economic incentives, and the role of new institutions and rules to govern stormwater. I argue that each frame looks to structure hydrosocial relations to fit their own vision but consequently offer apolitical strategies that reduce water quality and quantity problems to their technical and hydrological components.
Urban stormwater infrastructure traditionally promoted conveyance. Cities are increasingly designing stormwater infrastructure that integrates both conveyance and infiltration in hybrid systems to achieve public health, safety, environmental, and social goals. In addition, cities face decisions about distribution of responsibilities for stormwater management and maintenance between institutions and landowners. Hybrid governance structures combine centralized and distributed management to facilitate planning, operations, funding, and maintenance. Effective governance in any management approach will require changes in the expertise of stormwater agencies. Recognizing the distinction between hybrid infrastructure and hybrid governance is important in long-term planning decisions for construction and management of stormwater systems. A framework is presented that relates the level and type of existing stormwater infrastructure with available capital, institutional development, and predominant citizen contributions. Cities with extensive existing infrastructure are increasingly integrating distributed, "green" approaches that promote infiltration, and must improve institutional expertise for governance decisions. For cities with little existing infrastructure, landowner management often dominates, especially when municipalities cannot keep pace with rapid growth. In between, rapidly industrializing cities are positioned to use growing capital resources to fund both conveyance and infiltration measures based on current design principles. For all cities, local management innovations, including decisions regarding public engagement, will be critical in shaping future urban stormwater systems.
Cities around the world are increasingly prone to unequal flood risk. In this paper, I “materialize” the political ecology of urban flood risk by casting stormwater drains—a key artifact implicated in flooding—as recombinant socionatural assemblages. I examine the production of flood risk in the city of Bangalore, India, focusing on the city's informal outskirts where wetlands and circulations of global capital intermingle. Staging a conversation between Marxian and Deleuzian positions, I argue, first, that the dialectics of “flow” and “fixity” are useful in historicizing the relational politics of storm drains from the colonial to the neoliberal era. Second, flood risk has been heightened in the contemporary moment because of an intensified alignment between the flow/fixity of capital and storm drains. Storm drains—and the larger wetlands that they traverse—possess a force-giving materiality that fuels urban capitalism's risky “becoming-being”. This argument raises the need for supplementing political-economic critiques of the city with sociomaterialist understandings of capitalism and risk in the post-colonial city. The paper concludes with reflections on how assemblage thinking opens up a more distributed notion of agency and a more relational urban political ecology.
This paper develops a political-industrial ecology approach to explore the urban water metabolism of Los Angeles, which sprawls for thousands of miles across the American West. Conventional approaches to quantify urban carbon footprints rely on global, national, or regional averages and focus narrowly on improving the efficiency of flows of resources moving into and out of the city. These approaches tend to "black box" the methodologies that guide the carbon emissions calculus and the social, political, ecological, and economic processes that perpetually reshape nature-society metabolisms. To more fully delineate the water supply metabolism of Los Angeles, this paper combines theory and method from urban political ecology and industrial ecology. Specifically, we infuse spatiality into the traditional life-cycle assessment (LCA) approach by coupling it with GIS. By illustrating how decisions about system boundaries, emissions factors, and other building blocks fundamentally shape the end result, this intervention at once destabilizes and advances the LCA enterprise. Then, using interviews and historical analysis, we provide a critical analysis of how LA's various water supply infrastructures came to be and illustrate how a sustainable transition based on a narrow carbon calculus is problematized by historical circumstances and strategic (and often conflicting) new paradigms to secure water resources. The political-industrial ecology approach offers valuable insights into the spatiality of material metabolisms and the socio-political processes (re)shaping the relations between nature and society.
Urban stormwater runoff remains an important issue that causes local and regional-scale water quantity and quality issues. Stormwater best management practices (BMPs) have been widely used to mitigate runoff issues, traditionally in a centralized manner; however, problems associated with urban hydrology have remained. An emerging trend is implementation of BMPs in a distributed manner (multi-BMP treatment trains located on the landscape and integrated with urban design), but little catchment-scale performance of these systems have been reported to date. Here, stream hydrologic data (March, 2011–September, 2012) are evaluated in four catchments located in the Chesapeake Bay watershed: one utilizing distributed stormwater BMPs, two utilizing centralized stormwater BMPs, and a forested catchment serving as a reference. Among urban catchments with similar land cover, geology and BMP design standards (i.e. 100-year event), but contrasting placement of stormwater BMPs, distributed BMPs resulted in: significantly greater estimated baseflow, a higher minimum precipitation threshold for stream response and maximum discharge increases, better maximum discharge control for small precipitation events, and reduced runoff volume during an extreme (1000-year) precipitation event compared to centralized BMPs. For all catchments, greater forest land cover and less impervious cover appeared to be more important drivers than stormwater BMP spatial pattern, and caused lower total, stormflow, and baseflow runoff volume; lower maximum discharge during typical precipitation events; and lower runoff volume during an extreme precipitation event. Analysis of hydrologic field data in this study suggests that both the spatial distribution of stormwater BMPs and land cover are important for management of urban stormwater runoff. In particular, catchment-wide application of distributed BMPs improved stream hydrology compared to centralized BMPs, but not enough to fully replicate forested catchment stream hydrology. Integrated planning of stormwater management, protected riparian buffers and forest land cover with suburban development in the distributed-BMP catchment enabled multi-purpose use of land that provided esthetic value and green-space, community gathering points, and wildlife habitat in addition to hydrologic stormwater treatment.
Water infrastructure is essential for the functioning of modern cities. This paper analyses conventional models of water infrastructure provision and emerging alternatives in order to identify points of reform and resistance in the relationship between people, technology and water in cities. It begins with a review of recent academic contributions to understanding the relationships between people, technology and nature in cities through the analysis of urban infrastructure. The work of Andrew Feenberg, a critical philosopher of technology, is presented as the basis for analysing both the technical and discursive elements of infrastructure. Feenberg's concept of ‘the technical code’ is used to synthesise key insights from the analysis of urban infrastructure and technology, to devise a series of critical categories for comparing changes currently underway in urban water infrastructure provision. This ‘technical discourse of water infrastructure’ is used to analyse developments in desalination, wastewater reuse, decentralised non-potable supply, domestic water efficiency, water sensitive urban design and ecological sanitation. Planners, designers and policy makers concerned about sustainability should be wary of the technical inevitability of desalination, potable recycling and other systems which reinstate conventional codes of domination and control of nature and separation of public concern from technical rationality. Decentralised water systems embody assumptions about the limits to water resources, but can also be problematic as high users of energy and reinforcing a private right to water. Improving the efficiency of domestic water using technologies and appliances is unarguably important in achieving sustainability. Moving beyond water efficiency to open up discussions about water using practices and cultural norms holds greater potential for transforming water consumption. Water Sensitive Urban Design is widely championed by designers and planners as exemplifying a sustainable approach to urban nature, providing a useful foundation for moving beyond drainage into water supply and wastewater technology and discourse. Ecological sanitation is filling a basic necessity in developing cities and may be part of a longer term transition to sustainability in developed cities in the future. Eliminating water from sanitation and recovering resources from waste holds the potential to radically reorder relationships between bodies, urban spaces and nature. Relationships between cities, technologies and water are shifting. The extent to which this balance falls in favour of sustainability over coming decades will be determined by political discourse as well as technical innovation.
Water quality is a persistent problem despite decades of regulation. Theory suggests that more successful outcomes may occur if the assumption of a shared definition of the problem is questioned. This study explores whether different definitions may arise out of diverse ways of knowing and the implications including this diversity may have for policymaking. Through semi-structured interviews and participant observation, this research documents the perspectives of experiential knowledge in a fishing community in North Carolina, academic knowledge in the scientific community, and political knowledge in the management community. Results show that beginning with definition, these perspectives differ in framing water quality issues, laying responsibility, and delineating potential solutions. Those who can communicate between knowledge groups emerged as a particularly important, yet shrinking, group in establishing trust. Efforts to solve water quality issues in the future would benefit by incorporating these perspectives and fostering boundary-spanning for a more comprehensive view of water quality.
Regional collaborative institutions are seen as tools for improving collaboration and for reducing the inefficiency of fragmented management and planning. However, recent research has shown that the ability of new regional institutions to achieve these aims is contingent upon their relationship to the existing institutional landscape. This paper uses network analyses of six newly created Integrated Regional Water Management (IRWM) subregions in southern California to examine how their introduction intersects existing water management systems and whether the patterns of interaction in water planning have changed as a result. The results further our understanding of collaborative governance and regionalism by showing that the ability of regional institutions to facilitate new interactions can vary widely across a given institutional landscape. Further, while IRWM has helped to strengthen the water management network in southern California, it has not replaced existing watershed planning efforts. Interviews with water managers reveal there is support for IRWM but it is still too early to evaluate its effectiveness. Further research should explore the drivers and consequences of heterogeneity in IRWM and whether the incentives for participation are sufficient.
Urban political ecology (UPE) has provided critical insights into the sociomaterial construction of urban environments, their unequal distribution of resources, and contestation over power and resources. Most of this work is rooted in Marxist urban geographical theory, which provides a useful but limited analysis. Such works typically begin with a historical-materialist theory of power, then examine particular artifacts and infrastructure to provide a critique of society. We argue that there are multiple ways of expanding this framing, including through political ecology or wider currents of Marxism. Here, we demonstrate one possibility: starting from theory and empirics in the South, specifically, African urbanism. We show how African urbanism can inform UPE and the associated research methods, theory and practice to create a more situated UPE. We begin suggesting what a situated UPE might entail: starting with everyday practices, examining diffuse forms of power, and opening the scope for radical incrementalism.
Global climate change has been increasingly defined as a security threat by a range of political actors and analysts. Yet as the range of voices articulating the need to conceive and approach climate change as a security issue has expanded, so too has the range of ways in which this link has been conceptualized. This article systematically maps different approaches to the relationship between climate change and security as climate security discourses, divided here between national, human, international and ecological security discourses. In exploring the contours of each, the articles asks how the referent object of security is conceptualised (whose security is at stake?); who are conceived as key agents of security (who is responsible for/able to respond to the threat?); how is the nature of the threat defined; and what responses are suggested for dealing with that threat? Systematically mapping these alternative discourses potentially provides a useful taxonomy of the climate change–security relationship in practice. But more importantly, it serves to illustrate how particular responses to climate change (and the actors articulating them) are enabled or constrained by the ways in which the relationship between security and climate change is understood. The article concludes by suggesting that the most powerful discourses of climate security are unlikely to inform a progressive or effective response to global climate change.
The growing field of urban political ecology (UPE) has greatly advanced understandings of the socio-ecological transformations through which urban economies and environments are produced. However, this field has thus far failed to fully consider subjective (and subject-forming) dimensions of urban environmental struggle. I argue that this can be overcome through bringing urban political ecology into conversation with both post-structural political ecology and critical geopolitics. Bridging these literatures focuses attention on practices of socio-ecological exclusion and attachment through which environmental subjectivities are formed. This argument is drawn out through a case study of the politics of local economic development and conservation within the watershed of the Big Darby Creek near Columbus, Ohio. This struggle was driven by a preservationist movement that coalesced around a shared understanding of socio-ecological hybridity as a source of metaphysical insecurity. Hybridity appears here as a site of political and ethical struggle over social and ecological exclusions produced in the pursuit of security. This case study demonstrates a paradox of environmental politics: the non-human is at once a site of constituent possibilities for identity and subjectivity as well as forces which seek to foreclose this radical openness. Recognizing the paradoxical nature of environmental struggle allows for a more complex and nuanced account of the multifarious forces that shape the formation of environmental subjectivities.
As part of the Low Impact Urban Design and Development research programme (LIUDD)1, Landcare Research and the University of Auckland are using a collaborative learning approach to support research on stormwater management. This approach is designed to increase the opportunities for reflective practice for a range of people involved with and affected by urban stormwater management in New Zealand. By providing spaces for reflective practice (taking the time to think and talk together about our experiences) we aim to support the building of knowledge across scientists, Iwi and Hapu, development professionals, urban regulators and community organizations. This paper presents an outline of collaborative learning as a capacity-building process with potential to assist the uptake of low-impact and adaptive management approaches to urban stormwater management. Adaptive management incorporating strong community development perspectives offers opportunities for long-term transformation away from conventional stormwater management practices that have a high impact on the environment. We discuss organisational and community capacity building plus reflective practice as critical elements of these approaches to urban stormwater management.
Urban green space is purported to offset greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions, remove air and water pollutants, cool local climate, and improve public health. To use these services, municipalities have focused efforts on designing and implementing ecosystem-services-based "green infrastructure" in urban environments. In some cases the environmental benefits of this infrastructure have been well documented, but they are often unclear, unquantified, and/or outweighed by potential costs. Quantifying biogeochemical processes in urban green infrastructure can improve our understanding of urban ecosystem services and disservices (negative or unintended consequences) resulting from designed urban green spaces. Here we propose a framework to integrate biogeochemical processes into designing, implementing, and evaluating the net effectiveness of green infrastructure, and provide examples for GHG mitigation, stormwater runoff mitigation, and improvements in air quality and health.
Since the late 1990s there have been many calls to bring critical geography into conversation with science and technology studies (STS). Although the strongest cross-fertilization to date has been ontological, political economy is another productive area for conversation between the two fields. More specifically, I argue that fully understanding the role that environmental science plays in expropriation requires expanding our focus of analysis to include not just the application of science but also its production and circulation. Through a field analysis of the Rosgen Wars, a fight that has convulsed the American stream restoration field since the mid-1990s, I demonstrate how Bourdieu's analytical framework can bridge political ecology and STS, revealing the political economic relations central to the development of scientific knowledge claims, education, authority, and policy. Desde finales de los 1990 se escuchan numerosos llamados para que se abra la conversación de la geografía crítica con los estudios sobre ciencia y tecnología (STS). Si bien hasta el momento la más fuerte fertilización cruzada ha sido ontológica, la economía política es otra área abonada para la interacción entre los dos campos. De manera más específica, arguyo que para entender cabalmente el papel que cumple la ciencia ambiental en la expropiación se requiere que ampliemos nuestro foco de análisis para incluir no solo la aplicación de la ciencia sino también su producción y circulación. A través de un análisis de campo de las Guerras Rosgen, una pelea que ha convulsionado el campo de la recuperación de corrientes americano desde mediados de los 1990, demuestro cómo el marco analítico de Bourdieu puede conectar la ecología política y los STS, revelando las relaciones político-económicas centrales para el desarrollo de los asertos, educación, autoridad y políticas del conocimiento científico.
An agument for the importance of equity as a criterion in evaluating water policy, with examples in wide-ranging case studies from North and South America and Europe.
Many predict that by the end of this century water will dominate world natural resources politics as oil does today. Access to water is widely regarded as a basic human right, and was declared so by the United Nations in 1992. And yet the water crisis grows: although the total volume of water on the planet may be sufficient for our needs, much of it is misallocated, wasted, or polluted, and the poorest of the poor live in arid areas where water is scarce. The coming decade will require new perspectives on water resources and reconsideration of the principles of water governance and policy. Water, Place, and Equity argues that fairness in the allocation of water will be a cornerstone to a more equitable ands secure future for humankind. With analyses and case studies, it demonstrates that considerations of equity are more important in formulating and evaluating water policy than the more commonly invoked notions of efficiency and markets. The case studies through which the book explores issues of water equity range from cost and benefit disparities that result from Southern California's storm water runoff policies to the privatization of water in Bolivia. In a final chapter, Water, Place, and Equity considers broader concerns—the impact of global climate change on water resources and better ways to incorporate equity into future water policy.
Contributors Thomas Clay Arnold, Madeline Baer, Amy Below, David Feldman, Paul W. Hirt, Helen Ingram, Sheldon Kamieniecki, Maria Carmen Lemos, Stephen P. Mumme, Richard Warren Perry, Ismael Vaccaro, John M. Whiteley, Margaret Wilder
A study of urban stormwater runoff that explores the relationships among nature, technology, and society in cities.
When rain falls on the city, it creates urban runoff that cause flooding, erosion, and water pollution. Municipal engineers manage a complex network of technical and natural systems to treat and remove these temporary water flows from cities as quickly as possible. Urban runoff is frequently discussed in terms of technical expertise and environmental management, but it encompasses a multitude of such nontechnical issues as land use, quality of life, governance, aesthetics, and community identity, and is central to the larger debates on creating more sustainable and livable cities. In this book, Andrew Karvonen uses urban runoff as a lens to view the relationships among nature, technology, and society. Offering theoretical insights from urban environmental history, human geography, landscape and ecological planning, and science and technology studies as well as empirical evidence from case studies, Karvonen proposes a new relational politics of urban nature.
After describing the evolution of urban runoff practices, Karvonen analyzes the urban runoff activities in Austin and Seattle—two cities known for their highly contested public debates over runoff issues and exemplary storm water management practices. The Austin case study highlights the tensions among urban development, property rights, land use planning, and citizen activism; the Seattle case study explores the city's long-standing reputation for being in harmony with nature. Drawing on these accounts, Karvonen suggests a new relational politics of urban nature that is situated, inclusive, and action-oriented to address the tensions among nature, technology, and society.
This paper engages with emergent conceptualizations of political–industrial ecology to understand the politics surrounding how the volume, composition, and material throughput of stormwater in Los Angeles is calculated and applied by experts. The intent is to examine the unfolding relationship between the volume and material flow of stormwater, and the social, political, and technical practices involved in identifying stormwater as a new and underutilized water resource. Specifically, it seeks to understand how the active processes of calculating the metabolic inflows and outflows of stormwater in Los Angeles serve as a way for the city to render value and meaning to the flows of stormwater. I suggest that the ways urban metabolisms are calculated reflect a volumetric approach to environmental governance that serves to achieve certain political goals. I refer to this type of governance as volume control—a way of organizing technopolitical interventions around overcoming problems related to the volume of resources flowing and circulating into, through, and out of cities and industrial systems. I argue that understanding this form of governance relies on taking a political–industrial ecology approach that accounts for both the social and material dimensions of resource flows. While the categories and motivations of stormwater governance remain contested over time and space, it is shown that stormwater in Los Angeles needs to be understood in relation to the ecological systems and scientific, political, and cultural practices designed to make it into a resource and align with existing patterns of growth and development.
Objets fronti_re = s'adaptent pour prendre en compte plusieurs points de vue et maintenir une identité entre eux Cet espace de travail se construit grâce à des objets-frontières tels que des systèmes de classification, qui relient entre eux les concepts communs et les rôles sociaux divergents de chaque groupe professionnel. Les objet-frontière contribuent à la stabilité du système de référence en offrant un contexte partagé pour la communication et la coopération. Les objets peuvent être considérés comme frontière (Star et Griesemer, 1989) en tant qu’ils contribuent à la stabilité du système de référence en offrant un contexte partagé pour la communication et la coopération.
This paper explores Pittsburgh's water governance to consider the way divergent approaches to urban stormwater management reproduce existing urban metabolisms and belie more radical possibilities for the urban hydro-social cycle. Federal action has forced municipalities in the Pittsburgh metropolitan region to make changes to its urban water systems and develop a plan to comply with water quality regulations. Within Pittsburgh's water governance debates, compliance centers on various sets of technological strategies for defining and solving purportedly wicked urban environmental problems. Urban political ecology, here, is used to deconstruct the tensions and convergences between these different stormwater governance strategies. I argue that green infrastructure approaches (whose intentions are to expand practice and participation) are framed by dominant grey epistemological approaches. In this view, alternative and creative forms of greening the city may not necessarily represent a more democratic process, but instead reproduce uneven urban landscapes under greener cover.
Managing urban storm water is challenging under the best of situations, and due to projected increases in intensity of rainfall events, is exacerbated by climate change. Institutional and individual aspects of urban storm water management and the implications for low-impact development (LID) are presented. The paper frames storm water as a public good provision issue in order to build on existing knowledge about that kind of social dilemma. This topic is then examined in more detail through stakeholder interviews conducted in Somerville, Massachusetts, United States. Interviews were completed at a variety of management levels, from household to regional planning level, and are related back to the theory of public good provision. Finally, synthesis of theory and practice results in specific recommendations for urban storm water management, based on revising the storm water institutional framework, showcasing redevelopment opportunities, and facilitating education and awareness through local NGOs.
This paper presents a historical analysis of the evolution of the World Bank's policies on urban water supply networks, from 1960 to the late 1980s. The analysis frames urban water supply as an attempt (contested and incomplete) to extend the biopolitical power of developmental states. I argue that the World Bank's agenda was predicated on a set of contradictions (and an untenable public/private binary) that contributed to the emergence of 'state failure' arguments by the late 1980s. This perspective enables critical reflection on the historical origins of the concept of 'state failure', and on contemporary debates over urbanization, infrastructure, and development.
This paper engages with recent work in political ecology that explores the ways in which scale is imbricated in environmental governance. Specifically, we analyze the deployment of specific ecological scales as putatively 'natural' governance units in rescaling processes. To undertake this analysis, the paper brings two sets of literature into dialogue: (1) political ecology of scale and (2) political economy of rescaling, drawing on theories of uneven development. Building on this literature, we develop the concept of an ecoscalar fix and explore its analytical potential through a case study of the rescaling of water governance in Alberta, Canada. We argue that although the 'eco-scalar fix' is usually framed as an apolitical governance change-particularly through the framing of particular scales (ie, the watershed) as 'natural'-it is often, in fact, a deeply political move that reconfigures power structures and prioritizes some resource uses over others in ways that can entrench, rather than resolve, the crises it was designed to address. Moreover, we suggest that, although watershed governance is often discursively depicted as an environmental strategy (eg, internalizing environmental externalities by aligning decision making with ecological boundaries), it is often articulated with-and undertaken to address challenges that arise through-processes of uneven development.
Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is being considered as an option to reduce CO2 emissions worldwide. Yet recent cases show that CCS faces divergent public acceptance issues. This paper investigates stakeholder perspectives on CCS in Indonesia. Q methodology was adopted to analyse the diversity of stakeholder perspectives. Four perspectives were identified: (1) "CO2 emissions reduction through clean energy sources rather than CCS"; (2) "CCS as one of the options in the transition to a sustainable energy system"; (3) "CCS as the only optimal solution to reduce CO2 emissions"; (4) "CCS is only a tactic to keep burning coal forever". Based on these results, we argue that stakeholder acceptance of CCS should be understood as a complex notion. This means that understanding whether or under what conditions stakeholders would be willing to support CCS, requires consideration of stakeholders viewpoints about broader questions of CO2 emission reduction and energy supply in Indonesia, rather than studying attitudes towards CCS in isolation. We discuss how the approach taken in this study can be used and followed up in policymaking on CCS in Indonesia.
This article reviews the literature relevant to market environmentalism in the water sector, focusing on five themes: the privatization of resource ownership and management, the commercialization of resource management organizations, the environmental valuation and pricing of resources, the marketization of trading and exchange mechanisms, and the liberalization of governance. For each dimension, the discussion addresses a topic of contemporary academic interest (and policy and political relevance): privatization and protest, the contradictions of commercialization, the distinction between environmental valuation and commodification, the multiplication of modes ofmarketization, and the limits to the liberalization of environmental governance. Specific attention is given to unresolved questions and tensions in the debate over market environmentalism, particularly the tension between human rights and environmental rights and among state, market, and community roles in water management.
Scientific work is heterogeneous, requiring many different actors and viewpoints. It also requires cooperation. The two create tension between divergent viewpoints and the need for generalizable findings. We present a model of how one group of actors managed this tension. It draws on the work of amateurs, professionals, administrators and others connected to the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California, Berkeley, during its early years. Extending the Latour-Callon model of interessement, two major activities are central for translating between viewpoints: standardization of methods, and the development of `boundary objects'. Boundary objects are both adaptable to different viewpoints and robust enough to maintain identity across them. We distinguish four types of boundary objects: repositories, ideal types, coincident boundaries and standardized forms.
This paper rereads debates over water security and insecurity through the tools of critical geographical scholarship. It seeks to demonstrate the value of such a critical perspective in achieving access to water for all. While rejecting a simplistic dismissal of mainstream discourses on water security, the paper notes the failure to adequately politicise the processes and relationships that reproduce water inequalities. Finding lessons in recent writings on political ecology, the hydro-social cycle and on the right to water, the paper concludes with a Gramscian claim to build from the fragmented but situated knowledges implicit in struggles to achieve democratic access to water.
Urban political ecology (UPE) has established a firm foothold as urban environments have become increasingly relevant for both academics and for the broader environmental movement. Over the last decade, UPE has established a position that took as its starting point the tightly interwoven status of “socionature”, coupling a critical stance on urban environments through a theorization of society in which the “urban” is a distinct historical expression of capitalism. More recently, some in UPE have voiced the concern that this approach places too heavy an emphasis on structural capitalist forces and have begun to reexamine and push further UPE's engagement with post-structuralism and post-humanism. This paper explores three such moves: the first is a resurgence in interest in environmental imaginaries; the second is a closer engagement with the extensive literature on urban governance; the last is a new form of engagement with post-humanism, specifically the theoretical implications of including non-human agency into accounts of urban political ecologies.
Within the literature, concerns have been raised that centralised urban water systems are maladapted to challenges associated with climate change, population growth and other socio-economic and environmental strains. This paper provides a critical assessment of the discourse that surrounds emerging approaches to urban water management and infrastructure provision. As such, 'sustainable urban water management' (SUWM) concepts are scrutinized to highlight the limitations and strengths in the current lines of argument and point towards unaddressed complexities in the transformational agendas advocated by SUWM proponents. Taking an explicit infrastructure view, it is shown that the specific context of the urban water sector means that changes to infrastructure systems occur as an incremental hybridisation process. This process is driven by a range of factors including lock-in effects of legacy solutions, normative values and vested interests of agents, cost and performance certainty and perceptions of risk. Different views of these factors help explain why transformational agendas have not achieved the change SUWM proponents call for and point to the need for a critical reassessment of the system effects and economics of alternative service provision models.
This paper uses a Q methodology for analyzing actor subjectivity in order to examine the extent to which differently situated actors agree or disagree about baseline constructions of land-use change, and the potential role of offsets in an indigenous community. In so doing, this study aims to accomplish three goals. First, it examines the level of convergence or divergence between actors concerning the land-use claims embedded within offset procedures. Second, it examines discursive alignments within actors by gauging how one's view of land-use change correlates with one's understanding of the goal of the offset project itself. Finally, the paper assesses the extent to which a level of discursive agreement is needed for project cooperation. The results show points of radical divergence between indigenous and non-indigenous experts involved in implementing the offset project, as well as points of pragmatic optimism regarding offsets and markets in affecting land-use change. Results indicate that discursive disagreement concerning basic understandings of land-use change and project goals did not preclude collaboration. The strong divergences between actors over the causes of land-use change, and the nature and intent of the offset project, suggest that truly collaborative offset implementation is illusory.
As urban water systems become increasingly stressed from climate change impacts, population growth and resource limitations, there is growing acceptance by scholars and practitioners of the need to transform practices towards more sustainable urban water management. However, insights into how strategic planning should be made operational to enable this transformation are limited; there is a need for a reliable diagnostic procedure that could assist planners, policy analysts and decision-makers in selecting and designing strategic action initiatives that best fit an urban water system's current conditions to enable desired system changes. This paper is the first step in the development of such a diagnostic approach by proposing a scope for an operational procedure that maps a system's current conditions and identifies its potential transformative capacity. It then reviews five existing analytic frameworks, which are influenced by transitions theory and resilience theory, and applies them each to a common empirical case study of successful transformative change in the stormwater management system of Melbourne, Australia. In this way, the paper explores how existing frameworks could potentially contribute to a diagnostic procedure for selecting and designing strategic action initiatives from the perspective of dynamic transformative change. The paper found that such a procedure should guide an analyst through steps that develop descriptive, explanatory and predictive insights to inform which strategic action initiatives best fit the current system conditions. The types of insights offered by different analytic frameworks vary, so a diagnostic procedure should be designed with a particular aim, problem or question in mind and the underpinning framework(s) selected accordingly.
In this paper I adopt Q methodology to engage critically, constructively, and empirically with Michael Goldman’s (2004, 185) thesis that the introduction of standardized models of environmental governance inscribes on developing county officials an “eco-governmentality” that is both “hegemonic” and “neoliberal”. In particular, I ask what it is that people trained in one of the more pervasive models of market-oriented environmental rule-making – Integrated Water Resource Management (IWRM) – believe in when they indicate that they support an “integrated” approach to water management. More specifically, I am interested in what it means to IWRM experts in Paraguay to be involved in a policy and planning environment in which it is virtually impossible to avoid entanglement with discourses and technologies of neoliberal rule. The combination of Q method with semi-structured interviews and participant observation techniques permits an empirical examination of the processes of ecogovernmental transformation at multiple scales – from patterns of convergence and divergence in the conceptual mappings of local officials, to coping strategies that individuals adopt in order to sustain themselves and their projects in the face of changing (ecogovernmentalizing) institutional and political contexts, to transformations in regulatory regimes.
In urban regions, the increased volume of stormwater runoff that results from the impermeable urban landscape is a potential source of water supply, particularly for groundwater recharge. One concern regarding infiltration of stormwater is its potential impact on groundwater quality. To further evaluate this, an extensive monitoring program was conducted in and around Los Angeles, California, over a six-year period. Samples collected from stormwater runoff, the vadose zone, and groundwater were analyzed for constituents of concern including metals, nutrients, organics, bacteria, and emerging contaminants. Findings indicate no degradation of groundwater quality as a result of intentional infiltration. At sites with shallow groundwater, concentrations of some constituents decreased over the period of the study.
California faces the prospect of significant water management challenges from climate change. The most certain changes are accelerated sea level rise and increased temperatures, which will reduce the Sierra Nevada snowpack and shift more runoff to winter months. These changes will likely cause major problems for flood control, for water supply reservoir operations, and for the maintenance of the present system of water exports through the fragile levee system of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. Rising water temperatures also are likely to compromise habitat for some native aquatic species and pose challenges for reservoir operations, which must release cool water to support fish downstream. Although there is as yet little scientific consensus on the effects of climate change on overall precipitation levels, many expect precipitation variability to increase, with more extreme drought and flood events posing additional challenges to water managers. Fortunately, California also possesses numerous assets - including adaptation tools and institutional capabilities - which can limit vulnerability of the state's residents to changing conditions. Water supply managers have already begun using underground storage, water transfers, conservation, recycling, and desalination to expand their capacity to meet changing demands, and these same tools present cost-effective options for responding to a wide range of climate change scenarios. Many staples of flood management - including reservoir operations, levees, bypasses, insurance, and land-use regulation - are appropriate for the challenges posed by increasing flood flows. Yet actions are also needed to improve response capacity in some areas. For water supply, a central issue is the management of the Delta, where new conveyance and habitat investments and regulations are needed to sustain water supply reliability and ecosystem conditions. For flood management, studies to anticipate required changes have only begun, and institutional constraints limit the ability to change reservoir operations, raise funds for flood works, prevent development in flood-prone areas, and encourage use of flood insurance. Needed reforms include forward-looking reservoir operation planning and floodplain mapping, less restrictive rules for raising local flood assessments, and improved public information on flood risks. For water quality, an urgent priority is better science. Climate change is likely to have far-reaching implications for water regulations and management, but we remain at an embryonic state of knowledge about these future changes. We will have to make policy, planning, and operational decisions without perfect knowledge of how much the climate is changing. Although local agencies are central players in all aspects of water management, adaptation will require strong-willed state leadership to shape institutions, incentives, and regulations capable of responding to change. Cooperation of federal agencies will be essential, given the important roles they play in flood management, environmental regulation, and water supply, particularly in the Delta.
Shifting from traditional, large, centralised infrastructure to alternative, distributed technologies is widely accepted as essential for enabling sustainable water management. Despite technical advances in sustainable urban water management over recent decades, the shift from traditional to more sustainable approaches remains slow. Current research on socio-institutional barriers suggests this poor implementation relates to a limited understanding of the different forms of governance needed to support alternative approaches, rather than the potential ineffectiveness of the technologies and practices. While some governance scholars express preferences for ideal hierarchical, market or network governance approaches, others suggest a hybrid of these approaches may be more appropriate for achieving sustainability. Currently, there is limited commentary about the potential characteristics of sustainable urban water governance. To extend the current scholarship, this paper systematically draws on the tacit knowledge of expert sustainability practitioners to identify potential governance characteristics of sustainable urban water management. In comparison with current urban water scholarship, which is supportive of a network governance approach at a conceptual level, the results strongly suggest that sustainability practitioners see the need for hybrid governance arrangements at a practical and operational level. These hybrid arrangements tended to comprise network and hierarchical approaches with market governance instruments. These insights from practitioners to help identify future research needs, focused on examining interaction among governance approaches at a variety of scales and locations.
This article describes and analyzes discourses regarding environmental governance held among key actors in a region of expanding high-input, high-output agriculture. Q-method, an intensive (small n) and quantitative technique in which n tests are measured by m individuals, was used to determine four empirically significant social perspectives: critical environmentalism, agri-environmentalism, private environmentalism, and statist environmentalism. The article highlights major differences and agreements among social perspectives, in addition to the arguments used to justify claims. These findings help fill a knowledge gap in the literature on governance debates between farmers and environmentalists; moreover, the findings contribute to a concern in the literature regarding the role of discourses in producing policy solutions to environmental governance problems. The article also supports continued use of Q-method in human geography, suggesting the value of Q as a research ends and means, particularly when research subjects include landed elites.
Electronic computers facilitate greatly carrying out factor analysis. Computers will help in solving the communality problem and the question of the number of factors as well as the question of arbitrary factoring and the problem of rotation. "Cloacal short-cuts will not be necessary and the powerful methods of Guttman will be feasible." A library of programs essential for factor analysis is described, and the use of medium sized computers as the IBM 650 deprecated for factor analysis. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
The development of markets in water quality, biodiversity and carbon sequestration signals a new intensification and financialisation in the encounter between nature and late capitalism. Following Neil Smith’s observations on this transformation, I argue that the commodification of such ‘ecosystem services’ is not merely an expansion of capital toward the acquisition or industrialisation of new resources, but the making of a new social world comparable to the transformation by which individual human labours became social labour under capitalism. Technologies of measurement developed by ecosystem scientists describe nature as exchange values, as something always already encountered in the commodity form. Examining these developments through specific cases in US water policy, I propose that examining this transformation can provide political ecology and the study of ‘neoliberal natures’ with a thematic unity that has been absent. I understand capital’s encounter with nature as a process of creating socially-necessary abstractions that are adequate to bear value in capitalist circulation. Such an argument supersedes the issue of nature’s materiality and points toward a common language for the analysis of both humans and nature as two participants in the labour process. Political ecologists struggling with the commodification of nature have tended to overlook the social constitution of nature’s value in favour of explicit or implicit physical theories of value, often as more-or-less latent realisms. I suggest that critical approaches to nature must retain and elaborate a critical value theory, to understand both the imperatives and the silences in the current campaign to define the world as an immense collection of service commodities.