Local Institutional Development and Organisational Change For Advancing Sustainable Urban Water Futures

This paper presents the local institutional and organisational development insights from a five-year ongoing interdisciplinary research project focussed on advancing the implementation of sustainable urban water management. While it is broadly acknowledged that the inertia associated with administrative systems is possibly the most significant obstacle to advancing sustainable urban water management, contemporary research still largely prioritises investigations at the technological level. This research is explicitly concerned with critically informing the design of methodologies for mobilising and overcoming the administrative inertia of traditional urban water management practice. The results of 14 in-depth case studies of local government organisations across Metropolitan Sydney primarily reveals that the political institutionalisation of environmental concern, and commitment to local leadership
and organisational learning are key corporate attributes for enabling sustainable management. A typology of five organisational development phases has been proposed as both a heuristic and capacity benchmarking tool for individual practitioners, and local and state government program designers for improving the level of local implementation of sustainable urban water management activity. While this investigation has focussed on local government, these findings do provide guideposts for assessing the development needs of future capacity building programs across a range of different institutional contexts.