Equitable, affordable and secure supply of clean water is a key pillar of the sustainable development agenda and UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Achieving the SDGs is increasingly associated with a need to shift whole systems of production and consumption globally. Such transformational shifts however, need to be enacted at the community scale for long-term change to be sustained. At this scale, community-based processes grounded in local participation and collaboration between stakeholders is a critical platform for change, and even more critical for marginalised peoples, such as many Indigenous people in Australia, Canada or the US who face significant inequities in health and wellbeing compared with their Non-Indigenous counterparts. In Australia – Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders are ramping up efforts to empower local communities and improve conditions and opportunities for sustainable livelihoods through increased participation and control of decisions. However, authentic collaboration and community partnerships are difficult to implement and sustain in practice in the dominant Western management approach to water that relies on linear thinking, narrowly defined problems and compartmentalisation of issues with limited recourse to communities. In this paper we seek to respond to calls for more research to understand how collaboration works in practice in varying local contexts and cultures. We present preliminary findings from an ongoing research project working with remote Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island communities aiming to identify locally-relevant, systemic approaches to manage water supply and demand challenges. Applying a novel mixed-method approach, Stage 1 involved a combination of practitioner interviews, installation of residential smart water meters, household surveys and in-depth community interviews to establish a systemic baseline and story of water in the community. Results showed a highly complex set of factors contributing to unsustainable and inefficient water supply and management that was unsatisfactory to both community members and service providers. Factors included: reliance on energy intensive and intermittent or costly sources to meet community water demand leading to high costs, greenhouse emissions and vulnerability of the community to shocks; lack of understanding of available alternative water sources; multiple drivers for high residential water use; limited data availability leading to reactive management responses; low awareness, understanding or concern by community members of water using practices or alternatives; poor communication, coordination and lack of accountability between relevant agencies; and lack of skills and knowledge of how to do management differently. Stage 2 drew heavily on end-use data and participant input in designing a tailored demand management approach as a foundation for ongoing social learning processes. Preliminary findings indicate these strategies on their own have had impact on water demand and could be effective as a part of an ongoing, comprehensive community education program, however without a concerted and coordinated effort to overcome institutional barriers and capacity constraints to deeper forms of collaboration and partnership with community sustained and sustainable outcomes for the community more broadly may remain elusive.
KEYWORDS: Systemic approach, community-based, collaboration, sustainable water, sustainable energy, indigenous.
9c. Public participation, role of stakeholders
