Abstract:
Water management is undergoing a transformation towards integration, source control
and ecological thinking. In the EU, the Water Framework Directive can be considered
as a driver towards this new approach to water management. Innovations are deemed
necessary to deliver this ideal of water management. In this thesis efforts by water
sewerage companies in England & Wales to rectify agricultural pollution at source are
viewed as an organisational innovation towards more sustainable water management.
These source control interventions can help achieving the goals of the Water
Framework Directive by reducing diffuse pollution from agriculture, fostering
participation in water management and by reducing overall cost of implementation.
This thesis contributes to understanding the process of change in water management by
developing a model of the innovation-decision process. Insights about how innovation
and therefore change can be influenced is generated by applying this model to the
process of source control intervention adoption by water and sewerage companies.
This research employed a flexible research design using comparative case studies. Each
of the 10 water and sewerage companies in England and Wales represented an
individual case. Data were collected in two phases using semi-structured interviews
with selected water and sewerage company representatives. Thematic analysis,
recurrence counts and content analysis were applied to analyse interviews.
It was found that water companies are likely to contribute towards integrated
approaches to water management, since there is a trend to adopt source control
intervention. Change in water management is influenced by the interaction of factors
from the domains: ‗Natural-Physical‘, ‗Organisational Characteristics‘, ‗Regulatory-
Institutional‘ and ‗Innovation Attributes‘. The rate of change by water and sewerage
companies is governed by a combination of asset characteristics, environmental state
changes and the funding cycle. Furthermore, innovation is triggered by direct regulation
and regulation that requires the gathering of information. Contrary to this flexible or
framework regulation performs better in guiding the direction of change.
