| dc.description.abstract | On a global scale, reports have shown that extreme weather events, such as heavy precipitation and droughts, will become more frequent in the future, thus threatening water supply security. Sweden, a country historically endowed with abundant water supply, is currently facing these challenges. To remedy for this, Swedish municipalities are formulating policies to secure delivery of water to its inhabitants.
While increasing supply has been the traditional approach for water-suppliers, infrastructure investments to increase production are often costly to implement. Instead, end-user-oriented measures have become increasingly salient, for instance incentivizing rainwater harvesting for irrigation or installing water-efficient appliances. In addition, interventions to instigate behavioral change among end-users have been considered. Among these, nudging measures have emerged as a particularly potent policy instrument for lowering drinking water demand. Nudging defers from coercive policy instruments and targets the automatic of the consumer, without forbidding or changing economic incentives. Nudging thus forms a sound complement to traditional supply-side policy.
Resonant with the novel interest among water-suppliers for nudging, a shift within water management can be discerned: from a focus on the supply-side to an emphasis on the demand-side. However, empirical insights on how to successfully implement demand-side measures in the drinking water sector are still emerging and fragmented. To address this knowledge gap, this research project aims to contribute to insights of how a lower drinking water demand can be achieved through the use of nudging. This research project has been carried out jointly with the consultancy WSP and the water company Laholmsbuktens Vatten och Avlopp (LBVA) to address the following research question:
What could be appropriate nudging measures for LBVA to implement in order to reduce drinking water demand in the municipalities Halmstad and Laholm?
The research project has drawn from crucial work on nudge theory, policy transfer and policy theory and has used the concept appropriateness, consisting of transferability, expected effect and expected implementation cost, and conducted done an ex-ante assessment six nudging measures sourced from academic literature.
The results show that issuing a consumption report on end-users’ water and sewage bill, together with implementing smart water meters coupled to a mobile application are two appropriate nudging measures for the contexts of Halmstad and Laholm. In addition, critical perspectives on stakeholder preferences and discrepancies between supply- and demand-side of water management are unraveled. | |
