Catalyzing Systemic Acceleration: Phased Interventions for Transforming Urban Water Regimes Towards Sustainability

Abstract

Water service provisioning is central to the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Agenda (UN-SDG) that calls for advancing human well-being within planetary boundaries. Yet urban water regimes in the Global South are struggling with climate variability, rapid urbanization, institutional inertia, and a fragmented governance landscape. Many residents remain without a reliable piped water supply, and water regimes struggle to deliver continuous and high-quality water services, causing progress towards UN-SDG6 to be slow and uneven. Typically, these broader and longer-term transformations emerge over a span of 40–50 years. The urgency of transforming towards water sustainability by 2030 calls for catalyzing systemic change. This paper introduces a novel and empirically validated structured three-phase acceleration framework that coordinates targeted interventions to move beyond isolated innovative approaches to catalyze coherent and equitable transformation of urban water regimes towards sustainability. A qualitative in-depth and cross-comparative case study methodology was employed, centered on two different governance models in South Asian cities, Bengaluru (public governance) and Nagpur (public–private partnership). Data sources included institutional reports and semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders. Systemic barriers and innovation pathways were mapped, revealing three non-sequential subphases for acceleration: Enabling Conditions, Behavioral and Societal Shifts, and Systemic Embedding. The results indicated that the public water regime’s strong regulatory oversight ensured early vision alignment with government priorities but lacked adaptive capacity to scale behavioral interventions leading to minimal improvement of non-revenue water. However, the public-private partnership enabled technological advancement in decentralized reuse systems that significantly increased the recycled water use and successfully demonstrated uninterrupted water supply in pre-selected areas, but suffered from weak institutional embedding causing slow uptake of innovative approaches. The comparative analysis highlighted eight governance principles that are necessary, but are not individually sufficient, for acceleration towards water sustainability. Show more