Half Empty? Drinking Water Systems and Regional Resilience in Rural Canada

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates the extent that new regionalism has been employed in the planning of rural drinking water systems as a strategy to support rural regional resilience. Through a content analysis of policy documents, this paper explores the question of whether current approaches to the planning of rural drinking water systems reflect a transition towards regional resilience. While there is potential for drinking water systems to support or enhance rural regional resilience, this potential is emergent at best. Policy documents reveal the adoption of regionalist practices is challenged by a lack of regional cohesion and barriers from existing institutional structures.

KEYWORDS:

• Drinking water
• infrastructure
• regional resilience
• planning
• rural

Acknowledgements

The authors thank all of those people from the Kootenays who have participated in this project – without your help this research would not have been possible. We would also like to acknowledge the foundational work of the Canadian Regional Development project team and all of the team members for their support, particularly Kelly Vodden and Sarah Minnes. This work was supported by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada through a Doctoral Fellowship.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [767-2012-2390].