Bhakti Lata Devi
University of Western Sydney
Co-authored with Zoë Sofoulis and Carolyn Williams
Putting the Users into End Use Analysis: Rethinking Residential Landscape Water Demand Management
End Use Analysis (EUA) is a method of analysing demand for a service (such as energy or water) with a view to quantifying the potential to maximise the service by minimising the demand on the resource being used to provide it. As a tool for planning and evaluating urban water demand management programs, EUA relies on assumptions about ‘participation rates’, that is, the proportion of the population expected to participate in a water savings program. The assumed participation rate is quite arbitrary at the time of planning and development, though assumptions are modified after studying take-up of actual programs.
As is typical of dominant discourses in natural resources management (Shove, 2003, Ch.1), the EUA focuses entirely on the end use of the water and treats the users either as a whole population (or proportion thereof), or as solitary entities who individually decide to participate in programs. Users can become merely the vectors by which houses acquire water-saving technologies. Left out of the picture are the ‘meso-level’ (Sofoulis & Williams, 2006) social structures to which people actually belong: their communities, interest groups, organisations, cultures, sub-cultures, etc.. It is through such social networks that people interact with and influence or support each other to change.
The inadequacies of the individualist conception of people have for several decades been obvious to cultural researchers, the public health sector, and community development workers here and overseas, but this conception reigns almost unchallenged in urban water demand management planning and in expert discourses on water in Australia. One way of helping a cultural approach gain better traction is to critically engage with urban resource management planning tools like the EUA, and to design research and field trials of community- or culture-based approaches to implementing water-savings programs. These could demonstrate how such approaches can produce measurable increases in ‘participation rate’ and thus in water saving—an effect we argue is already demonstrable in the different participation rates amongst communities chosen for trial runs of programs compared to full-scale implementation. With a particular focus on outdoor residential water use, this paper explores putting the users into the EUA model by approaching them as members of groups and communities.
Email:b.devi@uws.edu.au
Email: z.sofoulis@uws.edu.au
Email: ca.williams@uws.edu.au