Anticipating water infrastructure renewal: A framing perspective on organizational learning in public agencies

Abstract

Water authorities in Western countries are increasingly confronted with waterway renewal. Ageing waterway infrastructures put the reliability of the existing network under pressure. Similarly, they open up the need to anticipate long-term uncertainties to ensure network performance. Aligning organizational practices to this new context can be considered an organizational learning process, which concerns improving current practices as well as reconsidering underlying values. Against the background of public management reforms, we aim to understand the organizational learning process in a case study of the Dutch authority Rijkswaterstaat, which is facing a major waterway renewal challenge. By developing a framing perspective on organizational learning, our analysis theoretically provides more insight into agencies anticipating change and empirically into waterway renewal in practice. Our research demonstrates that waterway renewal is primarily framed from a New Public Management viewpoint in which change is approached rather pragmatically. Accordingly, we observed a refinement of existing practice that protects the agency's mission. Higher levels of learning were discarded as potentially disruptive to waterway management, leaving more fundamental change untouched. We therefore question to what extent water authorities are capable of fully addressing waterway renewal. Nevertheless, the repositioning process resulted in opportunities for reflecting on dominant frames and introducing new concepts. To better seize such opportunities and thus improve alignment to waterway renewal, water authorities can, in addition to improving existing practices, re-interpret dominant frames and construct a new narrative in which future, long-term uncertainties are acknowledged as inherent conditions for agencies to cope with.

Estimativa de Emissões de GEE para FIOL e FICO: Certificação de Ferrovias Estruturantes para Obtenção de Títulos Verdes no Brasil

“…É preciso garantir reservas de água a fim de construir resiliência no longo prazo. É um desafio combinar perspectivas antropocêntricas e ecocêntricas nos projetos de infraestrutura, em que aspectos técnicos, financeiros e utilitaristas predominam no ambiente de tomada de decisão (JANÁČ et al, 2016;WILLEMS et al, 2018). Aponta-se para a necessidade de rever esse ambiente, no sentido de adotar novas práticas mais inclusi-vas na formulação de políticas de infraestrutura hidroviária (WILLEMS, 2018).…”

The promise of proximity: The politics of knowledge and learning in South–South cooperation between water operators

“…Based on the operators’ perspectives about their experiences in the partnership, in this section we provide an account of how learning can be characterized and the multiple ways in which learning supported operational changes. The question of how learning happens and the connections between different forms of knowledge have been a central concern to scholars of organizational learning (Argote, 2013; Argyris and Schön, 1996; Choo and Bontis, 2002; Willems et al., 2018). Such scholarship typically distinguishes between basic forms of learning related to the apprehension of concepts, techniques, and practices, and higher-level forms that entail re-interpretation, reflection, and creative adaptation (Anderson et al., 2001; Argyris and Schön, 1996; Nielsen, 1993; Tosey et al., 2011).…”

Beyond maintenance: Emerging discourses on waterway renewal in the Netherlands

“…The storyline pursued by MultiWaterWorks demonstrates how ageing assets are perceived as a potential danger to the manageability of the waterway network (cf. Willems et al, 2018). Accordingly, it takes a rather operational or managerial perspective on renewal, which underscores that renewal is considered apolitical.…”

“…Sometimes already built in the early stages of the 20th century, assets, such as weirs, bridges, and navigation locks, have to be maintained well and, eventually, have to be renewed. Recent research has stressed the importance of strategic, functional considerations once infrastructure reaches its end-of-lifecycle (Frantzeskaki and Loorbach, 2010;Bolton and Foxon, 2015), but renewing infrastructure networks is typically the responsibility of waterway authorities responsible for the day-to-day operation (Willems et al, 2018). Operators responsible for a wellfunctioning waterway system will consider the renovation or replacement of waterworks if infrastructure is technically written off.…”