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Water management increasingly focuses on tackling stormwater pollution to improve waterway health. Community members have a role in adopting pollution-reduction practices and supporting technologies such as water sensitive urban design. However, because communities are unfamiliar with these practices and technologies, little is known about how they make sense of these 'water sensitive innovations'. Drawing on Diffusion of Innovations theory, we conduct focus groups across different regions of Australia. Our findings indicate that key barriers to adoption included poor understanding of the relative advantage of these practices and technologies, and perceived poor compatibility with community members' lifestyle and local geography. In turn, appraisals of relative advantage were constrained by limited observability of stormwater pollution and the benefits that innovations generate for people and the environment. Our findings suggest engagement strategies should emphasize the relevance and advantages of water sensitive innovations, and help individuals visualize the intangible elements of stormwater pollution management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Delivering urban water security requires community engagement and participation. But, there are varying levels of interest in water-related issues within a population, the use of technical language can complicate effective communications, and achieving consensus between stakeholder groups can be difficult. This research used a survey of adults from Australia (n = 140) to show that community members can be very willing to engage in urban water security and especially desire active involvement in establishing objectives. However, they clearly demonstrate preferences for how they want to be involved and on which issues. Participants reported that they could understand complex 'level-of-service' objectives for water security, and urban water security priorities include water quality, reliability, accessibility and sustainable quantity of supply across both short and long timeframes. The findings support the call for public participation in sustainable urban water security management, and provide rich insights for water providers in urban locations across the globe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recycling water is not new. Yet, there are many examples from around the world of recycled water projects that have failed because of public opposition. This article reviews the literature investigating factors associated with public acceptance of recycled water, as well as publicly accessible reports and case studies, which have developed or tested approaches to increase public acceptance. The article concludes by summarizing the state of knowledge in this area, and advancing key research questions relating to public acceptance of recycled water that urgently need to be investigated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As approaches to water management begin to encompass broader social and environmental goals, new technical terms have entered the field of water management. Effective communication across professional disciplines, and with community stakeholders, is essential for sustainable urban water management. However, use of technical terminology has the potential to undermine effectiveness of communication. We surveyed professionals and community members to examine these issues. Findings indicate that water-related technical terms may not be well understood by the community. Professionals most likely to overestimate community understanding were influenced by their own understanding rather than experience with communities. For communities, individuals with poor topic knowledge or low education were less likely to seek information about terms, highlighting the importance of reducing reliance on technical terms when collaborating with diverse stakeholders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Environmental activist leaders play a critical role in organizing grassroots activism. They often do so in a voluntary capacity while enduring long periods of failure in their quest to achieve environmental goals. Through 21 interviews we investigate how environmental activist volunteer leaders experience failure and the strategies they use to overcome it. Using a two-stage reflexive thematic analysis approach, four dimensions of failure were identified: movement, campaign, organization, and individual. Participants used three overarching strategies to manage these experiences of failure: Re-evaluating outcomes, emphasizing individual benefits, and changing tactics. Our findings suggest that environmental activist volunteer leaders regularly experienced failure across all four dimensions. The strategies they used to manage failure enabled them to maintain belief that success is achievable. We conclude with a discussion of how these findings can be used to develop tools and resources to enhance activist leaders’ capacity to prevail in the face of failure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To identify pathways to lower environmental impacts, this research examined the motivation and antecedents of motivation (autonomy, relatedness, competence), of environmentally active people. Previous research suggests that people with more self-determined motivation for pro-environmental behavior (PEB) should carry out more PEBs, and have lower environmental impacts, than people whose motivation is more externally regulated. Path analysis in Sample 1 (N = 261) confirmed that self-determined motivation was positively related to both easy and difficult PEB. The more participants judged that their needs for autonomy and relatedness were met in relation to performing PEB, the more self-determined their motivation. Higher perceived relatedness was also directly related to reporting more engagement in difficult PEB. Perceived competence was not related to self-determined motivation or PEB. The pattern of results was largely supported when re-tested with a sample (N = 320) who completed a 'carbon footprint' measure of environmental impact as well as the questionnaire completed by Sample 1. In this sample, autonomy, relatedness, and competence were related to self-determined motivation. The research is the first to our knowledge to examine and find a relationship between higher self-determined motivation and lower selfreported environmental impact. These findings point to new approaches to increasing PEB. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]