Sustainability transitions in Los Angeles’ water system: the ambivalent role of incumbents in urban experimentation

ABSTRACT

Growing urban populations, climate change, drought, and ageing infrastructures increase pressure on water delivery. This prompts the search for innovations, with incumbents increasingly attempting to enable and steer ‘experimental’ approaches. Historically, incumbents were assumed to be largely resistant to potentially disruptive innovations. However, their strategic orientations may be changing due to the urgency of sustainability challenges leading to increased experimentation. This change raises a question about how incumbents influence experiments in particular directions while neglecting or discouraging others. This research centers on the ‘La Kretz Innovation Campus’, and three experiments therein, partly established by the incumbent water utility in Los Angeles. It explores how creating an internal ‘protective space’ for experimentation generates struggles over institutional changes necessary for such experiments to thrive. Conceptualizing ‘incumbent-enabled experimentation’ as a set of practices nested within novel institutional, organizational, and political arrangements reveals the internal tensions incumbents face when seeking more sustainable directions.

KEYWORDS:

• experimentation
• water
• incumbencies
• incumbent
• sustainability
• Los Angeles

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tessa Mauw

Tessa Mauw is a researcher, previously at the department of Human Geography and Spatial Planning at Utrecht University. Her research and interests focus on sustainability transitions, urban experimentation and evaluation and monitoring.

Shaun Smith

Dr Shaun Smith is an assistant professor at the department of Human Geography and Spatial Planning at Utrecht University. His current research interests concern 'cross–domain' governance. This concerns how infrastructure 'domains' (water, wastewater, and energy) are (or are not) coordinated and interconnected in multi–faceted ways.

Jonas Torrens

Dr Jonas Torrens is an assistant professor at the Technology, Innovation and Society group at the Eindhoven University of Technology. His research and teaching centre on understanding and enabling transformations towards sustainability, with interest on urban, policy and societal experimentation and novel approaches to transformative and mission–oriented innovation policy.