Institutional Design Principles for Water Reuse: An Analytical Framework

Water reuse and recycling are challenging and risky. One challenge lies in tailoring the institutional design capable of attending to the specific attributes of the existing institutional set-up and similarly preventing potential governance risks. This chapter develops a methodology to enhance the understanding of institutional arrangements for the adoption of water reuse. The approach is rooted in Ostrom's institutional design principles, which provide valuable insights into successful common-pool resource management. However, their effectiveness depends on various contextual factors, requiring careful consideration of specific context characteristics. While clearly defining boundaries helps distinguish community members involved in resource use and governance, misunderstanding this principle can lead to exclusionary practices. Ensuring congruence between appropriation and provision rules and local conditions emphasizes the importance of adapting governance processes to fit the specific characteristics and dynamics of the local context, while following rules and standards set by the central government. This study further develops institutional design principles to water reuse, crucial for ensuring robust water reuse governance, underlying that the understanding of institutional management conditions for water reuse requires the acknowledgment of the policy, planning, and regulatory settings, alongside spatial concerns. Considering the significance of these setting features, the chapter offers a tool, useful for practitioners and researchers interested in the installation of new water reuse loops to assess current conditions, foresee potential challenges, or prevent possible blockages.