The Experts below are selected from a list of 56289 Experts worldwide ranked by ideXlab platform
Rebekah Ruth Brown - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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The Institutional Dynamics of Stability and Practice Change: The Urban Water Management Sector of Australia (1970–2015)
Water Resources Management, 2017Co-Authors: Christoph Brodnik, Rebekah Ruth Brown, Chris CocklinAbstract:Even though traditional Urban Water Management practices have been deemed as unsustainable, lacking resilience and ill-equipped to deal with the challenges of the twenty-first century, they continue to dominate Urban Water Management sectors worldwide. This lock-in is rooted in the institutional building blocks of Urban Water Management sectors which represent higher order principles, such as widely shared rules, norms and values that weave around old and new ways of doing. To reveal the institutional foundations of this lock-in and to demonstrate how opportunities for practice change emerge, this paper explores the institutional dynamic of the Urban Water Management sector in Australia with a novel mixed methods and multiple case study approach. The paper identifies six distinct institutional logics, charts their development from 1970 to 2015 and characterises them in their ideal-typical form. The findings demonstrate that logics evolve and co-evolve continuously over time, gradually changing the way they manifest themselves. It is through these processes that stability and practice change as well as wholesale sectoral institutional transformations can be explained.
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Receptivity to sustainable Urban Water Management in the South West Pacific
Journal of Water and Climate Change, 2013Co-Authors: Michael Shane Poustie, Rebekah Ruth Brown, Ana DeleticAbstract:Small Urban centres in the South West Pacific face many challenges regarding Urban Water Management in the light of future uncertainties and climate change. Without implementing sustainable Urban Water Management (SUWM), they risk adverse environmental and public health impacts, but little is known regarding the receptivity of Urban Water professionals towards its principles and practices. This paper assesses the willingness and ability of Urban Water managers from the region to implement SUWM. Results demonstrate that whilst aware of current failures, there was limited awareness of sustainable solutions, and a limited ability to identify benefits arising from SUWM implementation. There is a need to increase the opportunities for Urban Water professionals in the region to acquire skills and implement SUWM. This study identifies the capacity development needed in the region to increase receptivity to SUWM.
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Realising sustainable Urban Water Management: Can social theory help?
Water science and technology : a journal of the International Association on Water Pollution Research, 2013Co-Authors: Joannette Jacqueline Bos, Rebekah Ruth BrownAbstract:It has been acknowledged, in Australia and beyond, that existing Urban Water systems and Management lead to unsustainable outcomes. Therefore, our current socio-technical systems, consisting of institutions, structures and rules, which guide traditional Urban Water practices, need to change. If a change towards sustainable Urban Water Management (SUWM) practices is to occur, a transformation of our established social-technical configuration that shapes the behaviour and decision making of actors is needed. While some constructive innovations that support this transformation have occurred, most innovations remain of a technical nature. These innovative projects do not manage to achieve the widespread social and institutional change needed for further diffusion and uptake of SUWM practices. Social theory, and its research, is increasingly being recognised as important in responding to the challenges associated with evolving to a more sustainable form of Urban Water Management. This paper integrates three areas of social theories around change in order to provide a conceptual framework that can assist with socio-technical system change. This framework can be utilised by Urban Water practitioners in the design of interventions to stimulate transitions towards SUWM.
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Institutional barriers to advancing Sustainable Urban Water Management in Port Vila, Vanuatu
2012Co-Authors: Michael Shane Poustie, Rebekah Ruth Brown, Ana Deletic, Fj De HaanAbstract:To date social research into the institutional aspects of sustainable Urban Water Management has predominately been conducted in developed Urban contexts, resulting in a significant lack of insight into the institutional drivers and barriers in developing Urban centres, which this research begins to address. This research project investigated the understanding, perceptions and motivation relating to the transition to sustainable Urban Water Management practices in the rapidly growing Urban centre of Port Vila, Vanuatu. The need for improved Urban Water Management, practitioners' awareness of potential solutions, barriers and opportunities to implement solutions were investigated through semi-structured, in-depth interviews with more than 40 individuals who were identified as having a significant role in Urban Water Management from national and local government, aid and development agencies, consultants, and the tourism sector. The data analysis revealed that in contrast to developed contexts where socio-institutional barriers are the primary barriers to transitioning to SUWM, in Port Vila there continue to be a number of technical barriers limiting the potential to transition. Skills development regarding both technical and socio-institutional capacity will be essential for enabling the transition to SUWM in Port Vila in the coming years.
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Governance experimentation: A descriptive analysis of translating sustainable Urban Water Management in practice
2012Co-Authors: Joannette Jacqueline Bos, Rebekah Ruth Brown, Megan Farrelly, Fj De HaanAbstract:The necessity of a shift towards more sustainable Urban Water Management is widely advocated. However, how to generate such a fundamental change in practice is poorly understood. There is a growing body of literature claiming that social learning is of high importance in overcoming system lock-in and enabling restructuring of social-technical systems. In particular, governance experimentation which explicitly aims to develop and/or strengthen informal societal networks is seen to enable translation of sustainability ideas into practice. However, this type of experimentation requires a very different dynamic within societal relations when compared to traditional experimentation. Hence, it necessitates a different role for professionals engaged in such a process. This empirical study provides new perspectives on the process of governance experimentation and its outcomes in terms of enabling social learning and structural changes in Urban Water Management at the catchment scale. This experiment, which has taken place in Sydney, offers valuable insight into how to overcome the challenge of traditional technocratic processes that reinforce traditional practices. Analysis of the experience also revealed challenges with participating in the new governance process which has been drawn upon to identify the key factors that may foster and/or hamper the success of governance experiments.
D. Butler - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Futures: an exploration of scenarios for sustainable Urban Water Management
Water Policy, 2008Co-Authors: Christos K. Makropoulos, Fayyaz Ali Memon, C. Shirley-smith, D. ButlerAbstract:The paper discusses issues related to the development of future scenarios appropriate for preparing robust, sustainable Urban Water Management strategies. A discussion of existing approaches to future scenarios and their use in Water Management at an Urban rather than catchment scale is included, from conventional to more radical, and their critical comparison is attempted. The paper presents a framework for scenario-variants generation and provides examples of its possible implementation in a component analysis of Urban Water Management. Four major components of Urban Water are selected (stormWater, drinking Water, wasteWater and their integration through recycling) and their possible evolution under seven different scenarios is examined by means of regulatory, social, economic, environmental and technical drivers. It is anticipated that this work will further support the growing interest in providing tools for long term strategic planning into an uncertain future.
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Decision support for sustainable option selection in integrated Urban Water Management
Environmental Modelling & Software, 2008Co-Authors: Christos K. Makropoulos, K. Natsis, Shuming Liu, K. Mittas, D. ButlerAbstract:Conventional Urban Water Management practices aim to meet Water supply-demands while conveying wasteWater and stormWater away from Urban settings. Alternative approaches which consider Water demands to be manageable and wasteWater and stormWater as valuable resources, although being increasingly sought, lack reliable site specific implementation methodologies. This paper describes the development of a decision support tool (termed the Urban Water Optioneering Tool (UWOT)) to facilitate the selection of combinations of Water saving strategies and technologies and to support the delivery of integrated, sustainable Water Management for new developments. The tool is based on a Water balance model which allows the investigation of interactions between the major Urban Water cycle streams. The model is informed by a knowledge library which is populated with technological options and information on their major characteristics and performance. The technology selection is driven by a GA algorithm allowing efficient exploration of the decision space. Quantitative and qualitative sustainability criteria and indicators are used to compare between alternative composite Water Management strategies while preserving the multiobjective nature of the problem. The tool has been successfully tested on a case study site in the UK, and the results are presented and discussed. It is suggested that ''optioneering'' tools will increasingly become part of Urban Water Management planning toolkits as practice moves towards more decentralised, integrated, context-specific solutions to address issues of sustainability.
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Modelling sustainable Urban Water Management options
Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers - Engineering Sustainability, 2005Co-Authors: I. Sakellari, Christos K. Makropoulos, D. Butler, Fayyaz Ali MemonAbstract:This paper describes the development of a prototype decision-support tool, termed optioneering tool-1 (WaND-OT1), supporting decisions for Urban Water Management, which explores issues of the compatibility of alternative sustainable technologies and sustainability evaluation at a strategic level. TheWaND-OT1 prototype was developed in Excel and Matlab (SIMULINK) to be both computationally strong and user-friendly. The user interacts with the WaND-OT1 through the Excel platform, which exchanges data and user preferences with a SIMULINK-based systems model. To explore its potential and identify research directions, the prototype WaND-OT1 was tested under a variety of Urban Water Management scenarios, including Water recycling, rainWater harvesting and introduction of low Water consumption devices. It is concluded that even at this early stage of its development, the WaND-OT1 can be considered as a flexible tool that successfully represents the main components of the Urban Water cycle and produces plausible ...
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Spatial decisions under uncertainty: fuzzy inference in Urban Water Management
Journal of Hydroinformatics, 2004Co-Authors: Christos K. Makropoulos, D. ButlerAbstract:The endogenous complexity and spatial nature of the problems encountered in the Urban Water Management environment present decision-makers with three major problems: (a) in the Urban environment, every decision is site-specific, almost on a case-by-case basis, (b) the decision-maker must access, simultaneously, a large amount of information, increasing with rising spatial resolution and (c) the information to be evaluated is heterogeneous, including engineering, economical and social characteristics and constraints. The first two problems indicate that Urban Water Management is an ideal field to develop and use spatial decision support systems (SDSS), while the latter promotes the use of fuzzy inference systems as a key mathematical framework. This research discusses the nature of uncertainty in environmental Management in general and Urban Water Management in particular, argues that fuzzy, rule-based, inference systems can be an invaluable tool for uncertainty quantification and presents the relevant elements of a prototype SDSS for Urban Water Management. The examples presented in this paper are based on an application of the SDSS in Water demand Management.
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Fuzzy Logic Spatial Decision Support System for Urban Water Management
Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management, 2003Co-Authors: Christos K. Makropoulos, D. Butler, Cedo MaksimovicAbstract:Urban Water Management is a demanding decision-making environment where optimal planning presupposes a synthesis of heterogeneous information of high spatial resolution to ensure site-specific implementation. To assist the decision maker in this task, the development of spatial decision support systems (SDSS) with a distinct spatial character is considered sine qua non. The paper describes the development of a prototype SDSS supporting strategic planning, providing examples from a particular application in Water demand Management (WDM). A three-stage approach is developed and utilized: After an initial user-defined choice of strategies to be explored, the system produces suitability maps for each individual attribute of the strategies in question using type-1 and type-2 fuzzy inference systems. The results are aggregated using ordered weighted averaging, allowing for the incorporation of the decision maker’s optimism in the final outcome. The last stage consists of an optimization procedure enabling the identification of an optimal composite strategy, from a Water saving point of view, under user defined investment constraints. The results support the case of using SDSS based on approximate reasoning to complement engineering expertise for Urban Water Management applications tailored to user characteristics and site-specific constraints.
Christos K. Makropoulos - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Futures: an exploration of scenarios for sustainable Urban Water Management
Water Policy, 2008Co-Authors: Christos K. Makropoulos, Fayyaz Ali Memon, C. Shirley-smith, D. ButlerAbstract:The paper discusses issues related to the development of future scenarios appropriate for preparing robust, sustainable Urban Water Management strategies. A discussion of existing approaches to future scenarios and their use in Water Management at an Urban rather than catchment scale is included, from conventional to more radical, and their critical comparison is attempted. The paper presents a framework for scenario-variants generation and provides examples of its possible implementation in a component analysis of Urban Water Management. Four major components of Urban Water are selected (stormWater, drinking Water, wasteWater and their integration through recycling) and their possible evolution under seven different scenarios is examined by means of regulatory, social, economic, environmental and technical drivers. It is anticipated that this work will further support the growing interest in providing tools for long term strategic planning into an uncertain future.
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Decision support for sustainable option selection in integrated Urban Water Management
Environmental Modelling & Software, 2008Co-Authors: Christos K. Makropoulos, K. Natsis, Shuming Liu, K. Mittas, D. ButlerAbstract:Conventional Urban Water Management practices aim to meet Water supply-demands while conveying wasteWater and stormWater away from Urban settings. Alternative approaches which consider Water demands to be manageable and wasteWater and stormWater as valuable resources, although being increasingly sought, lack reliable site specific implementation methodologies. This paper describes the development of a decision support tool (termed the Urban Water Optioneering Tool (UWOT)) to facilitate the selection of combinations of Water saving strategies and technologies and to support the delivery of integrated, sustainable Water Management for new developments. The tool is based on a Water balance model which allows the investigation of interactions between the major Urban Water cycle streams. The model is informed by a knowledge library which is populated with technological options and information on their major characteristics and performance. The technology selection is driven by a GA algorithm allowing efficient exploration of the decision space. Quantitative and qualitative sustainability criteria and indicators are used to compare between alternative composite Water Management strategies while preserving the multiobjective nature of the problem. The tool has been successfully tested on a case study site in the UK, and the results are presented and discussed. It is suggested that ''optioneering'' tools will increasingly become part of Urban Water Management planning toolkits as practice moves towards more decentralised, integrated, context-specific solutions to address issues of sustainability.
-
Modelling sustainable Urban Water Management options
Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers - Engineering Sustainability, 2005Co-Authors: I. Sakellari, Christos K. Makropoulos, D. Butler, Fayyaz Ali MemonAbstract:This paper describes the development of a prototype decision-support tool, termed optioneering tool-1 (WaND-OT1), supporting decisions for Urban Water Management, which explores issues of the compatibility of alternative sustainable technologies and sustainability evaluation at a strategic level. TheWaND-OT1 prototype was developed in Excel and Matlab (SIMULINK) to be both computationally strong and user-friendly. The user interacts with the WaND-OT1 through the Excel platform, which exchanges data and user preferences with a SIMULINK-based systems model. To explore its potential and identify research directions, the prototype WaND-OT1 was tested under a variety of Urban Water Management scenarios, including Water recycling, rainWater harvesting and introduction of low Water consumption devices. It is concluded that even at this early stage of its development, the WaND-OT1 can be considered as a flexible tool that successfully represents the main components of the Urban Water cycle and produces plausible ...
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Spatial decisions under uncertainty: fuzzy inference in Urban Water Management
Journal of Hydroinformatics, 2004Co-Authors: Christos K. Makropoulos, D. ButlerAbstract:The endogenous complexity and spatial nature of the problems encountered in the Urban Water Management environment present decision-makers with three major problems: (a) in the Urban environment, every decision is site-specific, almost on a case-by-case basis, (b) the decision-maker must access, simultaneously, a large amount of information, increasing with rising spatial resolution and (c) the information to be evaluated is heterogeneous, including engineering, economical and social characteristics and constraints. The first two problems indicate that Urban Water Management is an ideal field to develop and use spatial decision support systems (SDSS), while the latter promotes the use of fuzzy inference systems as a key mathematical framework. This research discusses the nature of uncertainty in environmental Management in general and Urban Water Management in particular, argues that fuzzy, rule-based, inference systems can be an invaluable tool for uncertainty quantification and presents the relevant elements of a prototype SDSS for Urban Water Management. The examples presented in this paper are based on an application of the SDSS in Water demand Management.
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Fuzzy Logic Spatial Decision Support System for Urban Water Management
Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management, 2003Co-Authors: Christos K. Makropoulos, D. Butler, Cedo MaksimovicAbstract:Urban Water Management is a demanding decision-making environment where optimal planning presupposes a synthesis of heterogeneous information of high spatial resolution to ensure site-specific implementation. To assist the decision maker in this task, the development of spatial decision support systems (SDSS) with a distinct spatial character is considered sine qua non. The paper describes the development of a prototype SDSS supporting strategic planning, providing examples from a particular application in Water demand Management (WDM). A three-stage approach is developed and utilized: After an initial user-defined choice of strategies to be explored, the system produces suitability maps for each individual attribute of the strategies in question using type-1 and type-2 fuzzy inference systems. The results are aggregated using ordered weighted averaging, allowing for the incorporation of the decision maker’s optimism in the final outcome. The last stage consists of an optimization procedure enabling the identification of an optimal composite strategy, from a Water saving point of view, under user defined investment constraints. The results support the case of using SDSS based on approximate reasoning to complement engineering expertise for Urban Water Management applications tailored to user characteristics and site-specific constraints.
Ali Meshgi - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Valuing flexibilities in the design of Urban Water Management systems.
Water research, 2013Co-Authors: Yinghan Deng, Michel-alexandre Cardin, Vladan Babovic, Deepak Santhanakrishnan, Petra Schmitter, Ali MeshgiAbstract:Abstract Climate change and rapid Urbanization requires decision-makers to develop a long-term forward assessment on sustainable Urban Water Management projects. This is further complicated by the difficulties of assessing sustainable designs and various design scenarios from an economic standpoint. A conventional valuation approach for Urban Water Management projects, like Discounted Cash Flow (DCF) analysis, fails to incorporate uncertainties, such as amount of rainfall, unit cost of Water, and other uncertainties associated with future changes in technological domains. Such approach also fails to include the value of flexibility, which enables managers to adapt and reconfigure systems over time as uncertainty unfolds. This work describes an integrated framework to value investments in Urban Water Management systems under uncertainty. It also extends the conventional DCF analysis through explicit considerations of flexibility in systems design and Management. The approach incorporates flexibility as intelligent decision-making mechanisms that enable systems to avoid future downside risks and increase opportunities for upside gains over a range of possible futures. A Water catchment area in Singapore was chosen to assess the value of a flexible extension of standard drainage canals and a flexible deployment of a novel Water catchment technology based on green roofs and porous pavements. Results show that integrating uncertainty and flexibility explicitly into the decision-making process can reduce initial capital expenditure, improve value for investment, and enable decision-makers to learn more about system requirements during the lifetime of the project.
Cedo Maksimovic - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Fuzzy Logic Spatial Decision Support System for Urban Water Management
Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management, 2003Co-Authors: Christos K. Makropoulos, D. Butler, Cedo MaksimovicAbstract:Urban Water Management is a demanding decision-making environment where optimal planning presupposes a synthesis of heterogeneous information of high spatial resolution to ensure site-specific implementation. To assist the decision maker in this task, the development of spatial decision support systems (SDSS) with a distinct spatial character is considered sine qua non. The paper describes the development of a prototype SDSS supporting strategic planning, providing examples from a particular application in Water demand Management (WDM). A three-stage approach is developed and utilized: After an initial user-defined choice of strategies to be explored, the system produces suitability maps for each individual attribute of the strategies in question using type-1 and type-2 fuzzy inference systems. The results are aggregated using ordered weighted averaging, allowing for the incorporation of the decision maker’s optimism in the final outcome. The last stage consists of an optimization procedure enabling the identification of an optimal composite strategy, from a Water saving point of view, under user defined investment constraints. The results support the case of using SDSS based on approximate reasoning to complement engineering expertise for Urban Water Management applications tailored to user characteristics and site-specific constraints.
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Frontiers in Urban Water Management: Deadlock or Hope
2001Co-Authors: Cedo Maksimovic, J.a. Tejada-guibertAbstract:The challenge of Urban Water Management Urban Water as a part of integrated catchment Management Interactions with the environment Infrastructure integration issues Emerging paradigms in Water supply and sanitation Problems of developing countries Economic and financial aspects Social, institutional and regulatory issues Outlook for the 21st Century
