Household water tanks: mediating changing relations with water? (original) (raw)
Related papers
The trouble with tanks: unsettling dominant Australian urban water management paradigms
Local Environment, 2014
Over the course of Australia's Millennium Drought, urban water managers gained more appreciation of householders' willingness and capacities to respond to water shortages and restrictions, including by installing rainwater tanks (RWTs) for watering gardens. How urban water managers regard tanks and tank users gives insight into their understandings of social sustainability, as found in interviews conducted in 2006 and 2010. These also revealed a growing distance between policymakers and water providers pursuing a broader approach to sustainability in their communities. The RWT is considered here as a limit case for paradigms of urban water management: it challenges conventional distinctions (such as provider/consumer) and heralds a new hydropolitics. These challenges are discussed as seven kinds of trouble with tanks: (1) incompatibility with the management model and vision of modernity enshrined in the ideal of centralised provision in control of accredited water experts;
The ‘meaning’ behind household rainwater use: An Australian case study
Technology and Society, 2015
Suburban rainwater tanks have the potential to reduce household mains water consumption, but simply installing the technology does not mean rainwater is automatically incorporated into everyday practices. Exploring how rainwater is conceptualised in contrast to mains water, and the way it is used in household practices, provides insights into why rainwater tank households may not be using less mains water than households without tanks. Water saving strategies that promote rainwater tanks tend to focus on installation rather than how, why and where rainwater is substituted for mains water. While there is the assumption that rainwater tank households use less mains water, an investigation of rainwater practices have revealed influential social and cultural factors that extend far beyond installing a new technology. Drawing on a household water study involving 21 interviews and 1425 surveys in the Illawarra region, Australia, practice theory principles provided insight into how rainwater was conceptualised, revealing the ‘meaning’ of rainwater as an influential factor informing its everyday use. The historical, cultural and emotional meanings of rainwater contribute to shaping its use in everyday practices. Rainwater means different things to different people and it is this spectrum of meanings that inform the range of practices, and volumes of use. This study highlights opportunities for increased integration of rainwater into household practices, which may broaden the perceived uses and usefulness, reshaping it's meaning over time.
Governing the use of water: the institutional context
Desalination, 2006
The use of water presents an inherent problem for governing, and this paper brings a political science perspective to bear on institutional questions which arise in relation to recycling. Here, "institution" is not to be equated with "government organization": the paper draws on institutional organizational analysis and social construction analysis to show that the governing of water use should be seen not as a technical response to an unambiguous need, but as the outcome of a continuing and complex process of institutionalization. It briefly outlines the "traditional" institutionalization of water use in Australia, and the way in which this has been challenged by rhetorics of managerial control, goal specificity, market forces, and public accessibility, all of which underlie the recent National Water Initiative. In this context, recycling has to be seen not simply as a technical alternative to present practice, but as a challenge to the existing institutionalization of water use, particularly in respect of the place of water users in governing of water use.
Limits on the human right to water — the politics of social displacement
Australian Journal of Human Rights, 2011
This article considers the process by which reallocation of water entitlement is occurring in Australian irrigation areas, focusing in particular on Northern Victorian irrigation regions. This process is emblematic of wider strategies addressing climate change: the use of cap and trade-market-mechanisms to achieve reallocation of resources. Non-norms-based redistribution of resources raises questions of the status of legal rights, and the progressive denormatisation of law. This article will analyse legal norms in Australia as they apply to rights to water as social and property rights. lt will consider the diminishing purchase of the normative aspect of law on significant sites of conflict-allowing economic analysis to act as a proxy for conventional policy and normative analysis, and limiting law to a transactional mechanism. However, non-normative analyses fail to address discontent and the potential delegitimisation of law where cultural norms have already been established.
The New Politics of Water Fresh Water: New Perspectives on Water in Australia Edited
2007
Australia write straight into one of the most discussed and contentious issues of our time: fresh water. The book is an edited collection of eighteen essays, by twenty-seven authors from around Australia. The authors write from professions and perspectives ranging across the visual arts, academia, Indigenous First Nation organisations, and government natural resource management. The book's origins lie in a two-day workshop held in Adelaide, supported by the Hawke Research Institute at the University of Adelaide, the Academy of the Social Sciences, and the Academy of the Humanities. The workshop's focus on 'water justice' translates to the essays in the collection, which illuminate issues over 'fresh water' (mostly surface river water), with concerns for current, past, and future social and environmental (in)justice in Australia. Fresh Water attempts to create interdisciplinary conversations about water in Australia by bringing together such diverse perspectives. Underpinning the diversity of views is a bass chord that resonates with each essay. In introducing the collection Emily Potter and Stephen McKenzie highlight the deeper connection between the chapters: 'At the heart of the book is the relationship between humans and water: the tensions born of an intimacy predicated on our physical needs and a Western cultural history of environmental exploitation' (3). The strength of this volume is that the authors do not shy from the big issues, the political and social entanglements of water in riverine communities, injustice in access to water, and the need for change in government policy and non-indigenous conceptions of water more generally. Deborah Bird Rose (whose chapter 'Justice and longing' begins the book) calls for a 'new ethos' of water that is 'cross-cultural and inclusive'. Rose argues that we need to live for water, 'not just make a living from it' (original italics. 8). Drawing on her experiences working with Aboriginal communities on land claims from 1982 to 2006, Rose explores Indigenous connections with water, and what they reveal about western water values, as articulated in science, legislation, and everyday imaginings of water in Australia. Ecologists, such as those who worked to prevent irrigation dams being built upstream from Cooper's Creek, recognised the need to conserve
Questioning the Constructed Intangibilities of Water Resources within the Modern Household
Enquiry The ARCC Journal for Architectural Research
The built environment defines how societies shape relationships within hydrological systems to ensure water security within natural and constructed limitations. Globally, due to geographic, climatic, and anthropogenic reasons, the experience of water scarcity is highly unequal. Within water-secure households, water is often taken for granted as a resource; this is in stark contrast to over a quarter of the world, including at least two million American citizens, for whom water insecurity intersects with the risk of losing residential tenure and heightened disease burden (Urban Waters Learning Network, n.d.; Fedinick et al. 2019). In this paper, I show how centralized water governance models typically result in highly varied levels of household water security. Globally, public and private water authorities have adopted an economic model of scarcity in water management. Governments and service providers attempt to forestall unsustainable environmental degradation, costly energy intens...
Intra-household water use and management from a gender perspective has remained a relatively under-researched theme in developed countries. Australia is no exception, with the lack of research particularly evident in the many rural and peri-urban communities. These communities have experienced significant water scarcity in recent years. In this context, this paper explores the potential of water use diaries to explore gender perspectives in Australian intra-household water use. Primarily a methodological paper, it examines the concepts that might inform a water diary examining gendered aspects of intra-household water management and use. Following the research approach to gendered intra-household resource allocation established in developing nation research, the aim is to develop a tool that has the potential to clarify the gender implications within households of current water policies and practices.
The relational emergence of community and technology through the politics of water use
Social and Cultural Geography, 2018
Increasing water scarcity intensifies research interest in water-saving practices afforded by different water technologies. In community gardens, socio-technical water assemblages are visible and therefore they make insightful how water use norms and expectations materialise through technology. This paper discusses how water use is shaped through the emergence of technologies and community relationships. It draws on participant observation and twenty-five walking interviews conducted at three community gardens in Sydney, Australia. In these gardens, different technologies – such as water tanks, taps and buckets – are in place for water collection, distribution and use. The study shows that water practices emerge in relation to various technological, community and environmental conditions. Water use entangles with circumstances such as the changing availability of water, time and technologies, and the proximity of gardeners’ homes to the garden. The research shows that people express community relationships through their use of private and communal water technologies, and that they are guided in this by feelings of guilt over wastefulness and their commitment to different gardening objectives. Together these circumstances and relationships shape water-saving practices that allow gardeners to express community mindedness by sharing water with others, while also working towards their individual gardening goals.
The world is experiencing a water crisis. A fundamental aspect of this crisis is the lack of access to basic water services experienced by poor and marginalised communities in the Global South. At least 780 million people do not have access to safe water, while between three and four billion people (half the world's population) lack a household water connection. The dominant response to this crisis has been framed within the good governance approach to development, largely reliant on market-based water governance reforms that focus on increasing the efficiency and financial sustainability of water utilities. However, in response to a growing recognition of the need to address the crisis of access and the systematic exclusion of the poor that underpins it, a human right to water has emerged in international law. In 2010 the existence of this right to water was recognised in Resolution 15/2010 of the Human Rights Council, which built on the 2010 resolution of the UNGA on the right to water and sanitation, and on General Comment No.15 of the United Nations Committee on Economic Social and Cultural Rights in 2002. This study examines how the recognition and implementation of the right to water could address the crisis of water access facing the urban poor in the Global South. Central to this question is an analysis of the tension between the ri.ght to water, with its focus on equity and participation, and the good governance approach to water reform, with its focus on efficiency and financial sustainability. This question is investigated by examining and comparing case studies of water governance reform in Manila, Philippines and Johannesburg, South Africa. The study concludes that the right to water can help to address the crisis of access by increasing the emphasis on service delivery for the poor, particularly by empowering them to participate in water governance. It is through this participation that poor and marginalised communities can help to develop and implement water policies that better respond to their needs and to their entitlement to safe and affordable water services. Declaration relating to disposition of project thesis/dissertation I hereby grant to the University of New South Wales or its agents the right to archive and to make available my thesis or dissertation in whole or in part in the University libraries in all forms of media, now or here after known, subject to the provisions of the Copyright Act 1968. I retain all property rights, such as patent rights. I also retain the right to use in future works such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis or dissertation.