HIGH FLYERS THINK TANK

Innovative technical solutions for water management in Australia

University of Adelaide, 30 October 2006

Social sciences – ethics, attitudes and trust in water management
by Ms Blair Nancarrow, CSIRO Land and Water, Wembley

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The challenges are, firstly, that we have increasingly less water, and there is a lot of uncertainty now in the cities and the bush. I don't think it matters where you go – out to dinner, to the hairdresser, wherever – the minute you mention water, people start to tell you how much water they are actually saving and how their children are spending less time in the shower and so on. It is really quite fascinating to see how water has come to the top of people's minds.

But there are a lot of challenges that come with this scarcity. One of the key things is how we are going to share it. We have got a lot of particular consumptive uses and there are a lot of non-consumptive uses. We enjoy water in many of our recreation activities. But we need to consume so much to maintain our lifestyles.

There is also the question of where we are going to get it from. Surface water, groundwater, artesian water, sea water, recycled water: there is a whole range of ways that we can actually find water and deliver it, but what is best? And what mix of these sources is going to be acceptable, how is it going to be delivered, and in what ways are people prepared to actually use it?

So how to decide who, what, where and how?

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I frequently hear that the community is seen as an impediment to change. It is said that we have got to change but there's a problem out there: there's this great mass of people who actually 'won't change', and we need to get them sufficiently educated so that they can make 'informed' decisions. And so, frequently, we see that if people aren't actually agreeing with the way planners are thinking, then it's just that 'They don't know enough and we have to continually make sure that we can educate them further so that they can really contribute properly to this debate'.

There is a grudging admission that we need to have the community involved, if only to try to avert conflict. But in terms of involving community, it is more often seen as an effort to persuade or even to manipulate, and I find it very interesting to see that there is an increasing use of 'outcomes focused' consultants. There are social science consultancies that say, 'Okay, you want a certain outcome. We'll make sure we get to it.' So there is a process of manipulation that is actually behind this.

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In the past, the decisions made were more or less focused on engineering and economic efficiencies. We have always had the assumption that people expect cheap water. Price is a consideration, but people also expect sustainability and they also expect social justice. And that is the big issue: how do you put those things together to get water management decisions that reflect the values and ethics of people?

There will be trade-offs between price and these various ethics, and people might be prepared to pay more if they feel strongly about an issue. For instance, they may be prepared to pay more for water rather than drink recycled water. But there is an assumption that people make their judgments on price.

I want to present, very quickly, three areas of research in both urban and rural water management that we have done over the past 15 years. This looks firstly at what people think about sharing water, and then the questions of how people make judgments on whether they accept a water supply system or not, and how they make behavioural decisions as to whether they might drink or otherwise use recycled water.

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How do we share a scarce resource? If you look at a lot of our water policies you will see that they advocate 'fair' water allocation. All the policies use the word 'fair'. But in fact what is fair? And whose version of fair? Is it the policy makers'version of fair, is it the irrigators' version of fair, is it the urban community's version of fair?

What we are seeing is that the markets will decide what is fair – that water will go to its highest-value use. We are more likely to see now that there is market speculation occurring, where people just buy water and sell it for the money making. But if you talk to people about water markets, the questions are, 'Well, how do you bring the environment into the market? Who is going to pay for the environment's share? What are the realities of inter-valley transfers, and what are the consequences of activating sleeper licences?' That's what we have seen in a lot of our rural rivers, since we have had water markets: water that has sat quietly underground or in the river is now being activated.

The other aspect of policy is to say, when reallocating water, 'Let's start with history of use.' But in fact people will ask what is the relationship between the past use and the future use. Frequently people have reasons for the way they might have used or not used their water in the past which bear little reality to what they are going to do in the future. And frequently people ask the question, 'Well, what about those who have overused water in the past and have actually created the problem? Why is it that we should go with their past use and others will miss out in the future?'

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There is a whole range of questions there, so we set about asking them of interest groups, users and stakeholders. We talked to irrigators, other industry, urban users, environmentalists, recreators, Indigenous groups and so on. I will bring this research down to about three slides, but it was a lot of work over a lot of years in many states, a number of case studies in both groundwater and surface water.

We found, actually, that the social justice of 'fair' means it is a combination of distributive justice and procedural justice. That is, it is not just who gets what, but how they get it. And both those aspects need to be incorporated if you are going to get a fair decision.

The other thing is that people actually have their own lay ethics and philosophies of fair sharing, and they occur at two levels. One is at the universal level and one is at the actual situation. So people can have their ideas of justice or fair sharing that they will look at it in an 'umbrella' way, but that might change when it comes to a specific situation. And both these issues have to be incorporated when you are thinking about fair sharing.

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Over the years we found that there was consistency in both these levels of fair thinking. So, for instance, in the universal fairness there was consistent agreement with the rights of the environment – all the stakeholders consistently agreed that the environment does have rights – the rights of all sections of the community to have a say, the acceptance of decisions from fair processes, and also that there were no general rules.

There was consistent concern about the use of economic analyses to decide allocations, and consistent disagreement with the use of markets to decide allocations.

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Then when it came to a specific situation, people consistently saw that what was acceptable was the equality of opportunity. It is not the equality of getting of water; it is not the equality of quantity. It is actually the equality of opportunity to be allocated water. So everybody should have an opportunity and after that you go through a decision-making process. They agreed that there should be reward for hard work and investment and there should be reward for efficiency and management.

But it was interesting that unacceptable ways of allocating water were history of use and water markets, which again are the two key things that our policies work on.

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If you look at sharing a scarce resource and what the community considers is fair, and how people make their fairness decisions, you find that current water allocation policy and management is at odds with the community's ethics. In these situations it is not just a matter of, 'Well, let's keep trying to get them to understand the situation and they'll finally get to the same conclusions.'

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If we come now to acceptance of water supply systems and look at this in urban situations, the way that water utilities have decided how to put together water supply systems in the past has really been to look at preferred levels of service. And those levels of service have frequently been looked at separately, so that you might have drinking water quality, or you might have water pressure, or you might have delivery in different ways and so on. But what people want is to look at these things as a whole, so that they can really start to make a few trade-offs and decide what role their values and lifestyles have in the decision-making process.

What we set about to do, then, was to use psychology to develop an attitudinal model to evaluate these water supply systems. This was about four years of work where we looked at developing a reliable attitudinal model which could explain how people made their decisions as to whether a water supply system was acceptable or not.

It involved six case studies and a number of different scales. It was at whole of city scale, neighbourhood scale and even at a high-rise building scale; and across different time scales – current water supply systems or those in the future. This model went through quite a lot of rigorous testing and it is extremely reliable.

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This particular model is a result of structural equation modelling with a particular water supply system. This was looking at a Brisbane neighbourhood stormwater reuse situation. You can see that risk, fairness and community trust were very, very important when people were making their decisions. The subjective assessment and perceived outcomes were also values decisions. Particularly, the perceived outcomes were the way people perceived the system as being a sustainable system. Risk was really important. And in each case whenever we tested this model, these variables consistently came up. You can see that it actually predicts 78 per cent of the variance, and that is really a very high prediction for social science, in terms of how people are making their decisions.

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The point here which really surprised us in the end was that people were making their community judgments on societal values and ethics: fairness, risk perceptions, trust and sustainability. What they didn't use – and this surprised us too, because we expected to see lifestyle values in there as well – were the variables of self-interest, such as the level of service their household was receiving, and what sort of lifestyle it might be supporting. These did not in fact feature in people's judgments of whether a water supply system was acceptable or not. It was fairness, risk, trust and so on, so it was really the way they looked at society and their ethics for society.

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A final case study was to look quickly at behavioural judgments in wastewater reuse. We know that scientifically sound reuse schemes frequently fail throughout the world. And it is not because people don't actually support water reuse, because they do. It is extremely well supported; they see it as being a conscientious way of managing water. But the problem arises when you come to doing it, when you are faced with the actual 'doing it'. So the closer it gets to touching people, the less they actually then support it.

In the past the emphasis has been on persuasion, but that has been found to be ineffective. So what is it, that we can start to understand about how people make their behavioural decisions – not that they might accept it but that they might actually do it?

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This is the work that we are up to now after about four years. You can see again we have got a very high percentage of variance explained there. But the key things still are fairness, emotion and trust. Trust actually governs how people perceive the risk, so quite often when we are thinking about water reuse we immediately think that people think risk, but in fact it is the trust that is governing the way they are thinking about risk. And fairness is very important.

What isn't there, but is perhaps of greatest interest to most people, is the knowledge of the scheme, and people's understanding. All the emphasis in the past has been on trying to persuade people and to make them understand that 'This is a good system and it's very safe and we keep telling you about it and eventually you'll agree to do it.' But in fact that doesn't govern how people are going to make their decisions at all.

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Important in the community behavioural decisions were values and ethics, trust and fairness. And what was not important was the persuasion, or the information as an end in itself.

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Finally, what does this mean for water management? Well, the current way of planning and managing water either ignores or disregards the community's values and ethics. So we can see that in the way we are sharing water, we are using methods that people consider to be unfair. When we are designing a water supply system, what are we trying to do? We are looking at self-interest variables such as price, delivery, service and so on, whereas people are using trust and fairness to make their decisions. Again, in reuse, we think we can just talk to people about it, but in fact it is their ethics and values that are actually important in making their decisions there.

The thing that we have to understand is that values and ethics are not formed overnight. They are deep seated. So persuasion and manipulation towards solutions that do not include community values and ethics are a waste of time and of money.

The take-home message here is that we are not talking rocket science. We are talking about working with the community and understanding where their values and ethics are coming from, and what is important, and therefore working with them to develop ways of sharing or ways of delivering water that everybody feels are acceptable.