Journal article
Analysis of institutional work on innovation trajectories in water infrastructure systems of Melbourne, Australia
Briony C Rogers, Rebekah R Brown, Fjalar J de Haan, Ana Deletic
Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions | ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV | Published : 2015
Abstract
Infrastructure systems are facing sustainability challenges but are locked into their current practices. Transitions studies aims to understand trajectories towards new socio-technical regimes and argue for agency-centric perspectives to explain processes of change. This paper adopts an institutional lens, examining the institutional creation processes needed for maturing innovations within established systems. Three innovations in Melbourne's water system were selected as empirical cases: desalination, wastewater recycling and stormwater harvesting. Each had a different institutional alignment with the established regime and different trajectories between key stages of maturity, from pre-ni..
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Awarded by Australian Research Council
Funding Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments. The authors would also like to thank all interview participants and the three water sector leaders in Melbourne who participated in the validation of this research. This research was conducted as part of the Australian Government's "Cooperative Research Centre for Water Sensitive Cities" and the European Union's 7th Framework Programme, "PREPARED: Enabling Change". It will contribute to the development of an explorative computational strategic planning tool, DAnCE4Water (Dynamic Adaptation for eNablingCity Evolution for Water). This research was partly supported under the Australian Research Council's Linkage Projects funding scheme (project number LP120100683).