Maintaining the Status Quo: How Institutional Norms and Practices Create Conservative Water Organizations

Water managers are falling behind in the race to resolve mounting troubles. Adverse environmental and social consequences of past management practices are evidenced by endangered species' lost habitats, the billions of people without access to clean water or sanitation services, and fierce competition among advocates for the use of diminishing water resources. Observers of these and other water problems have been predicting and often advocating fundamental changes in the way we manage water resources. Such extreme stress on water organizations would seem to be the appropriate context for innovation, and water analysts have suggested a number of techno-scientific, legal, and behavioral modifications that could be adopted in managing water resources. Advances in water metering and pricing could enable water utilities to reduce water demands. Water transfers could ensure that scarce water is used for its highest value. Privatization of water utilities and the substitution of markets for public agency control could introduce economic discipline into water use. Such advances could postpone expensive and environmentally damaging infrastructure construction or even make it unnecessary. We found in our research, however, that existing US water organizations' responses to mounting stressors have been timid experiments with incremental and marginal innovation. Left in place are the longstanding norms and practices that have brought us to the current condition. Many challenges have been met not with technical, legal, or behavioral innovations but with changes in organizational linkages and relationships so that risks inherent in unstable political and physical environments are spread across a wider range of organizations and stakeholders. These new arrangements leave much of the water agencies' structure and behavior unchanged and many problems unresolved.