Co-governing small-scale distributed water systems: an analytical framework

Current discourses in urban water management emphasize a diversity of water sources and scales of infrastructure for resilience and adaptability. The last two decades, in particular, saw the emergence and development of various small-scale systems so that the debate has largely moved from centralized versus decentralized water systems toward governing integrated and networked systems of provision and consumption where small-scale technologies are embedded in large-scale centralized infrastructures. However, while centralized systems have established boundaries of ownership and management, distributed water systems at local levels (such as stormwater harvesting technologies for the street, allotment/house scales) do not, thereby raising the critical question of the latter’s viability for adoption and/or continued use. This paper brings together the literature on public sector governance, co-production, social practices and modernized mixtures to develop an analytical framework for cogoverning such systems. Being the first that attempts to incorporate the end-users, the framework provides urban water practitioners guidance when designing and institutionalizing governance arrangements for small-scale distributed water systems so that these systems continue to exist, and become widely adopted, within the established urban water regime.