Enabling sustainable urban water management through governance experimentation

Abstract

A shift towards sustainable urban water management is widely advocated but poorly understood. There is a growing body of literature claiming that social learning is of high importance in restructuring conventional systems. In particular, governance experimentation, which explicitly aims for social learning, has been suggested as an approach for enabling the translation of sustainability ideas into practice. This type of experimentation requires a very different dynamic within societal relations and necessitates a changed role for professionals engaged in such a process. This empirically focused paper investigates a contemporary governance experiment, the Cooks River Sustainability Initiative..