Decentralized sanitation and reuse in Dutch Society: social opportunities and risks : final report for the EET-DESAR project, Wageningen, 1 January 2008

The diffusion and acceptation of decentralized sanitation and reuse (DESAR) technologies requires major changes in the social technological systems of water provision and wastewater treatment. The radical shift away from the basic principles of sewer technology justifies the term technological transition. Technological transitions encompass much more than a change of hardware. The new techniques require a different technological regime as well: the set of rules and regulations and institutional organisation are until now perfectly geared to manage sewer systems, not DESAR systems. Equally radical are the changes that users, suppliers, plumbers and service managers need to make in their daily (professional) practices. In 2001 a consortium of environmental engineers and sociologists, municipalities, utilities and housing developers started to develop, study and implement several techniques of on-site anaerobic wastewater treatment in the built environment. The social scientific component in this E.E.T. funded project addresses social problems of implementation and provider- and consumer acceptance of DESAR technologies. [Aim]: The aim of this research is to analyse the role of citizen-consumers in the niche management of DESAR and other sustainable sanitation technologies. The changing relations between citizen-consumers and providers of sanitation services that result from implementing these new technologies will be assessed. The improved insights into socio-technical routes of design, diffusion, implementation and use of Desar technologies gathered from this research will be very useful for the future application of such technologies and will thereby contribute to the ecological modernization of urban water management. [Research]: The research uses a comparative case study approach. The case studies will be executed in the Netherlands, both in new building projects and in situations of retro-fitting of existing infrastructure. The cases will be selected using a matrix with 4 variables, which allows for the categorisation of the cases into conventional systems, alternative systems and modernized mixtures. The 10 final case studies will mainly fall in the last two categories although some conventional cases will be included to serve as a reference. For these cases, the social barriers and opportunities of Desar technologies will be assessed, using a refined version of Gidden's Social Practices model. The advantage of this model is that end-users are not studied in isolation, but in relation to the provider network they are being served by.