INNOVCITIES

The research project will address the problem of the currently insufficient level of institutional innovation in water governance systems in the context of climate change. This is a critical problem because the single most significant way that climate change will be felt by human society is through impacts on water systems. Climate change creates an urgent need for adaptive water governance that can anticipate and respond to increasing pressures on water systems within human society. Specifically, the project focuses on the urgent need for institutional innovation to create sustainable and resilient urban water supply-demand systems.

Institutional innovation might include policy change, new organisational setups, and new inter-organisational arrangements. However, the specific types of institutional innovation required, and why and how they emerge, is poorly understood. Therefore, the project addresses the question: What types of institutional innovation are required for adapting to climate change in water governance within cities, and how can we better understand why and how they emerge? Even though institutional innovation and change is increasingly called for in order to adapt to climate change, it is difficult to achieve and remains under-studied and not well understood. The project will study ‘innovative’ cities across the world through a global survey and comparative case studies.

The project is a pure research project and the outcomes include 1 report collecting surveys from 96 cities worldwide and several academic papers avaible on the website.