What is Integrated Urban Water Management

The scarcity of water resources exhibited in different parts of the world and the dysfunctional consequences associated with urban water processes and services are encouraging countries to adopt transformative innovative thinking. The movement from the “visions” of urban water management to ‘actions” demands more emphasis on the development of relevant platforms and frameworks that enable effective transitions and sustainability of actions and good practices. Within the context of a changing environment, urban water management processes need to be “shifted” from the “conventional” approach to a wider context capable of addressing the growing urban water management lock-ins. Complexities in urban water management originate from the difficulty of maintaining sector-based balances (mainly supply-demand balances) governing internal functionality as well as from the intensity and uncertainty of the dynamics of both the entire water system and the wide range of change agents interacting in its external environment. Such lock-ins are affecting the capacity of urban water managers and policy makers to develop suitable strategies and implementation pathways and improve the overall resource utilization and service provision capacity and efficiency. While conventional approaches continued to be widely used to address such lock-ins, little improvement tend to be gained with regards to the dynamics of the “problem domain” and the feasibility of “solution spaces”. Over years, emphasis continued to be on advocating “nesting” urban water management processes into the context of integrated water management, but without ensuring the availability of relevant change management strategies, tools and agents. Issues relating to water governance, decentralization of water management processes and authorities, involvement of stakeholders, development and adoption of appropriate information platform, and capacity building are moving to the front line agenda of urban water managers and policy makers. In the absence of relevant tools and integrated frameworks, the capacity of conventional urban water management approaches to address such a new context remains questionable. The complexity exhibited across the entire urban water subsystem (both in scale and magnitude) calls for not only the development on new or modified “program sets” but also transformed and enriched ‘mind sets”. Such migration can be envisioned through the adoption of system thinking, innovation and strategic niche management. This will improve the capacity of the overall urban management “sub-system’ to orchestrate its functionalities with the overall water system using a holistic approach. This contribution focuses on the imperativeness of capacity building in urban water management in a changing environment and the importance of developing sustainability framework and approach in accordance with the principles of system innovation and thinking.