Community perspectives on sustainable urban water security

ABSTRACT

Delivering urban water security requires community engagement and participation. But, there are varying levels of interest in water-related issues within a population, the use of technical language can complicate effective communications, and achieving consensus between stakeholder groups can be difficult. This research used a survey of adults from Australia (n = 140) to show that community members can be very willing to engage in urban water security and especially desire active involvement in establishing objectives. However, they clearly demonstrate preferences for how they want to be involved and on which issues. Participants reported that they could understand complex ‘level-of-service’ objectives for water security, and urban water security priorities include water quality, reliability, accessibility and sustainable quantity of supply across both short and long timeframes. The findings support the call for public participation in sustainable urban water security management, and provide rich insights for water providers in urban locations across the globe.

KEYWORDS:

• Urban water security
• community
• stakeholder
• participation
• engagement

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Karen Cosgrove for testing the survey design and providing feedback; and all the respondents who participated in the survey.

Author contributions

Julie Allan: Conceptualisation, methodology design, data collection, data analysis and interpretation, writing—original draft. Kelly Fielding: data analysis and interpretation, writing—critical revision and editing. Steven Kenway: writing—critical revision and editing. Brian Head: writing—critical revision and editing.

Ethics approval

University of Queensland—Engineering, Architecture and Information Technology, Low & Negligible Risk Ethics Sub-Committee. Approval No 2,018,001,722

Disclosure statement

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

Availability of data

The dataset is available in the UQ eSpace repository at https://doi.org/10.14264/3f210b0.

Supplementry material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed https://doi.org/10.1080/15592324.2018.1473686.

Additional information

Funding

This research did not receive any grants or funding support.