Urban water systems worldwide need integrated, cross-sectoral innovations to anticipate developments like climate change and population growth. Development and implementation of such innovations is challenging due to the operational and sectoral mindset of organizations in which these innovations take place. This study uses the concept of ambidexterity to get a better understanding of how organizations responsible for urban water management deal with the tension between operation and the need for innovation. We focused on Amsterdam and Rotterdam, two Dutch cities that are global frontrunners in urban water management. Combining a desk study with 25 semi-structured interviews, we found four mechanisms to manage innovation and operation tensions: network, hierarchical, process and human-resource mechnanisms. Different from the literature on ambidexterity, our empirical findings show that the connection between operation and innovation is dominated by networks rather than by executives. Hierarchical mechanisms could be used to complement this, catalyzing innovation or formalizing it.

Urban water systems are under increased pressure from ongoing developments like climate change, population growth and urbanization. While it is clear that current urban water challenges need a more integrated approach, practitioners disagree on what such an integrated approach means exactly. Integration could therefore be described as a wicked problem, with practitioners having different understandings of integration, as well as the opportunities and challenges they should focus on; e.g., climate adaptation, resource recovery or collective replacement. This lack of consensus challenges decision-making, and thus the implementation of integration. To foster urban water systems integration, this study uses Q methodology to explore the different perspectives that Dutch urban water practitioners have on integration for future urban water systems. Our analysis reveals four salient perspectives: perspective 1 sees coordination as a means to make the system future-proof, perspective 2 focuses on climate adaptation, perspective 3 aims for recovery, and perspective 4 is all about efficiency and being in control. While all perspectives acknowledge that traditional urban water practices need to change, they differ on which sustainability challenges are considered most important and what means should be used. Practitioners need to understand these differences to deal effectively with the wicked nature of integration.

Climate change and urbanization, as well as growing environmental and economic concerns, highlight the limitations of traditional wastewater practices and thereby challenge the management of urban water systems. Both in theory and in practice, it has been widely acknowledged that the challenges of the twenty-first century require solutions that address problems in a more integrated way. Although the demand for integration is obvious, implementation has proved challenging because of the complexity and uncertainty involved. In addition, the urban water literature contains a wide diversity of approaches to integration, each contribution having its own understanding of the term, as well as how to deal with the complexity that comes with it. In this article, we take a first step in supporting both decision-making and decision-makers in urban water systems integration. First, we work towards a more comprehensive perspective on integration in urban water management; one that uses and structures the variety of existing approaches. In so doing, we introduce a typology of urban water systems integration that distinguishes between geographical, physical, informational, and project-based forms. Second, we explore the implications that such integrated solutions bring for decision-makers. They will be faced with additional uncertainty arising (1) at the interfaces of previously unconnected systems and (2) from the social and institutional changes that systems integration requires. Finally, we draft three decision-making challenges that come with integration and provide some possibilities for dealing with them.

In Energy Social Science (ESS), the concept of imagined publics is used to describe how energy actors perceive societal groups around new energy technologies and projects. Findings indicate that imagined publics often build upon deficit assumptions; people are (unjustly) considered unknowledgeable, incapable, unwilling and irresponsible agents in governance. While insightful, deficit-based explanations insufficiently capture the broad diversity of publics imagined around energy system change. In this paper, we share the results of a Q-study, designed to systematically identify diverse imagined publics in the Dutch heat transition. We found five imaginaries: 1. “Meaningful participation in a diverse society” 2. “Strong and enthusiastic communities in the lead” 3. “NIMBYs, social contestation and the threat to decarbonisation” 4. “Collectivism & vulnerable groups at risk” 5. “Unburdening individual user-consumers in the transition”. Each imaginary builds upon a different set of epistemic, action and normative assumptions, which construct public agency and responsibility in transitions in distinctive ways. We explore how these constructions come to justify roles and obligations for publics as well of other actors in the heat transition. One of our main contributions is that we explicitly move beyond the analysis of singular imaginaries as we consider imaginaries to be interactive, holistic, and contextual. In comparison, key social, ethical, and political tensions and trade-offs in the heat transition become visible.

Energy controversies have been widely studied. Such studies are, however, generally based on either single case studies, providing rich and in-depth understanding of (local) dynamics of planning and implementation processes, or they focus on understanding responses to a specific technology (not bound to a location). Therefore these studies tend to overlook a key dynamic in controversy, namely that publics respond to projects by drawing on earlier experiences with a similar technology elsewhere, or with earlier experiences with other technologies in their vicinity. We refer to this dynamic as controversy spillover. The notion of controversy spillover helps to understand how the discursive space of controversy changes over time. In case studies, other controversies are usually considered as context, i.e. as an external condition. However, in order to understand the temporal dynamics of public engagement with energy projects, spillover from other controversies deserves to be investigated more as an object of interest, rather than as an external condition. The aim of this paper is to conceptualize controversy spillover as an important dynamic in controversies and to develop a research agenda. We identify three different types of spillover: 1) geographical (i.e. between the same energy technology in different locations), 2) historical (i.e. with respect to earlier experiences at the same location), 3) technology (i.e. between different technologies). Three empirical examples serve to illustrate the three types of spillover. We finalize the paper with a research agenda for further conceptualization and empirical analysis of the notion of controversy spillover.