Transforming to a water resilient future: Place-based wastewater innovation pathways.

In Scotland, the Place Principle embodies collective purpose, encouraging and facilitating collaborative, participative approaches to grow resilience and wellbeing in our communities (Scottish Government, 2019). Planning and working together to create sustainable local economies, manage local assets and drive growth and adaptation empowers resilient local communities. Water management, and in particular wastewater management, is an emerging issue of importance in many places. Where water systems are owned and managed by communities, these water systems can suffer from a variety of increasing challenges. And yet, whilst technological solutions are emerging apace which could support and resolve local wastewater issues, our recent research has found that communities cannot easily access the knowledge and innovations necessary to ensure effective and efficient local wastewater systems that are resilient to future challenges. This project will address this challenge through creating an evidence-based pathway to end the current enduring disconnection between ‘bottom-up’ identified wastewater challenges and the technological innovations that can resolve them. This process will both increase place-based community engagement in wastewater management, and make local wastewater ecosystems – by which we mean not just the infrastructure itself but also its owners, users and the wider local environment - more resilient in the face of shocks. Through a logic model, the project will deliver an outcomes pathway that will not only present causal linkages and logical relationships, but also outline these chronologically in short-term and medium-terms outputs, and longer-term outcomes.