Local adaptations in a changing water climate : small-scale infrastructures

Editorial outlining the theme of the special issue. The theme of “Local adaptations in a changing water climate: small-scale infrastructures” aims to encompass diverse studies of how people think, feel and act about small-scale and/or novel systems of water provision and sanitation. In contrast to most studies of the introduction of small-scale water systems, these papers have first-world settings. The emphasis is on rainwater tanks (RWTs) in urban or suburban contexts (Sofoulis, Garcia et al, Walton and Gardner), although thematic examples include a combination of small-scale (or “micro”) infrastructures in an off-grid community (Woelfle-Erskine). These small-scale infrastructures present challenges to users, water managers, and social water researchers due to their novelty as “not-Big Water” systems (Sofoulis). Whereas people’s interactions with conventional infrastructures can largely be understood tacitly through shared familiarity with the system’s parameters and usage conventions, novelties can stimulate systems change, prompt emergent behaviours, and throw open previously settled questions about what counts as an appropriate technology or constitutes an acceptable practice. Moreover, because novel small-scale infrastructures such as RWTs actively involve their user-operators at home (or workplace), they put the focus on everyday practices as a site of water resource governance. This everyday, small-scale and site-specific character poses quandaries for policy-makers and technocrats used to centralised management of large-scale infrastructures: how can, or how should, local and autonomously operated facilities be regulated? (Some options are canvassed by Walton and Gardner in this issue.)