Balancing institutional and participatory space in the management of water imbalance: a dual institutional and design perspective

Contemporary water usage exceeds the safe operating space of the planetary boundary (Richardson et al.,2023). Sustainable liveability is threatened by an increasing imbalance between water supply (rivers; rainfall) and demand (by local area actors; droughts). Moreover, water quality levels have been declining, exceeding minimum levels (WFD,2000) and exacerbating water scarcity (Van Vliet,2023). Climate change threatens to further aggravate the imbalance.

Together, institutional and participatory design approaches can remediate water imbalance (cf. Kempenaar et al.,2022; Huybrechts et al.,2017). Institutional approaches can identify where enduring systems of established and embedded humanly devised rules and norms necessitate change (Hodgson,2006; North,1991); participatory approaches can encourage collaborative decision-making and active engagement of local communities, incorporating local knowledge and context (Hajer,2017).

However, these approaches can be either complementary or conflicting: institutions embed and perpetuate distributions of interests of particular actors, distributions that may differ from actors of (potential) participatory processes. The perpetual co-constitutive dynamic of ‘the institutional’ and ‘the participatory’ requires balancing. This study explores the tensions and complementarities of institutional and participatory design approaches to address water imbalances by balancing institutional and participatory spaces.

We dovetailed an institutional and participatory design approach in a case study in the south of The Netherlands where water supply from road infrastructure is buffered to fulfil water demand from local stakeholders. The Institutional Analysis and Development Framework (Ostrom,2005) identified institutional rules that prescribe participation processes for the water-road infrastructure nexus. Subsequently, a Participatory Action Research methodology employed contextually designed tools (Aguirre et al.,2017) in workshop settings to tangibly engage local actors in multi-stakeholder collaborations. Lastly, the complementarities and conflicts of this participatory space are compared with the identified institutional space to alleviate institutional barriers and develop tools for fostering inclusive participation.

The results provide a framework and tools that aid decision-makers and local actors in the process of balancing institutional space and participatory space. Additionally, the results facilitate the integration of local activities into trans-local patterns.

This assists practitioners to align participation processes with project requirements and area-specific needs.

The results can be tailored to European-regional levels where local actor engagement and dominant area-oriented spatial functions must be combined.