Design for Dynamic Fitness: Archetypes of urban water systems

TL;DR

This paper identifies institutional archetypes in urban water systems that enhance adaptability to changing conditions by balancing information processing and response diversity, highlighting design tradeoffs and regional strategies.

Contribution

It introduces archetype analysis of urban water institutions, revealing features that enable dynamic fitness amid biophysical complexity and change.

Findings

Institutional archetypes with high information processing and response diversity improve adaptability.

Polycentric regional structures facilitate information sharing and efficiency.

Tradeoffs exist between utility-level flexibility and higher governance control.

Abstract

In an era of accelerating change, urban water infrastructure systems increasingly operate outside of their design conditions, putting new pressure on systems' institutional designs to weather emerging challenges. Water management institutions must therefore be designed to exhibit dynamic fitness, defined by anticipatory capacity and responsiveness. However, we do not yet understand the specific features of institutional design that enable dynamic fitness, especially in relation to the diverse biophysical characteristics of systems that such fitness is contingent upon. We advance research on dynamic fitness in the context of urban water supply systems by drawing on 35-year data sets of stressors and responses for 16 U.S. urban water utilities using archetype analysis. Here we find that institutional archetypes capable of coping with higher biophysical complexity invest in both information processing capacity and response diversity. While dynamic fitness comes at a cost, balance between information processing capacity and response diversity promotes efficiency, which can be expanded through polycentric regional institutional structures that facilitate information sharing. Lastly, careful consideration should be given to tradeoffs across levels of governance, as institutional structures that facilitate dynamic fitness at the utility level may reduce the control and flexibility of higher levels of governance.