Law and Management

Centre for Sustainable Regional Communities

Australian Research Council Linkage Project

Interactions between Social, Economic and Regulatory Aspects of Residential Household Water Consumption

Chief Investigators:

• Dr Brad Jorgensen , Centre for Sustainable Regional Communities, La Trobe University
• Professor John Martin, Centre for Sustainable Regional Communities, La Trobe University
• Dr Meryl Pearce, School of Geography, Population and Environmental Management, Flinders University
• Associate Professor Eileen Willis, Paramedic and Social Health Sciences, Flinders University

Water security is at crisis point in many Australian regions and overseas. This research will engage citizens in water conservation and management, and will have a number of significant outcomes that will benefit national and community interests. These include:

1. devising effective water management strategies that are acceptable to residential customers in two contrasting water service regions,
2. a generalisable and replicable model of residential household water consumption that highlights the issues of public trust in current water governance arrangements, and
3. recommendations for communication and behaviour change interventions that promote water-use efficiency and conservation, and are sensitive to regional differences.

This project seeks to integrate social and economic perspectives on water demand management. While economic approaches tend to emphasise incentive structures to achieve direct effects on water consumption, social theory focuses on the meaning of water-use behaviours in order to understand how incentive and regulatory policy tools might be interpreted across residential households.

The research will enable comparisons across different water service regions (South Australia and Victoria) reflecting quite different social and environmental contexts. The project will provide water managers with information about the drivers of residential water consumption across spatial scales in an environment of changing water supply demand conditions.