EU Water Policy: Pollution source control by water companies in England and Wales

Water management is undergoing a transformation towards integration, source controland ecological thinking. In the EU, the Water Framework Directive can be consideredas a driver towards this new approach to water management. Innovations are deemednecessary to deliver this ideal of water management. In this thesis efforts by watersewerage companies in England & Wales to rectify agricultural pollution at source areviewed as an organisational innovation towards more sustainable water management.These source control interventions can help achieving the goals of the WaterFramework Directive by reducing diffuse pollution from agriculture, fosteringparticipation in water management and by reducing overall cost of implementation.This thesis contributes to understanding the process of change in water management bydeveloping a model of the innovation-decision process. Insights about how innovationand therefore change can be influenced is generated by applying this model to theprocess of source control intervention adoption by water and sewerage companies.This research employed a flexible research design using comparative case studies. Eachof the 10 water and sewerage companies in England and Wales represented anindividual case. Data were collected in two phases using semi-structured interviewswith selected water and sewerage company representatives. Thematic analysis,recurrence counts and content analysis were applied to analyse interviews.It was found that water companies are likely to contribute towards integratedapproaches to water management, since there is a trend to adopt source controlintervention. Change in water management is influenced by the interaction of factorsfrom the domains: ‗Natural-Physical‘, ‗Organisational Characteristics‘, ‗Regulatory-Institutional‘ and ‗Innovation Attributes‘. The rate of change by water and seweragecompanies is governed by a combination of asset characteristics, environmental statechanges and the funding cycle. Furthermore, innovation is triggered by direct regulationand regulation that requires the gathering of information. Contrary to this flexible orframework regulation performs better in guiding the direction of change.