title: Design of an institutional decision-making process: the case of urban water management.
abstract: Urban water infrastructure expenditures cause a major financial burden to municipalities. In the opinion of many policy-makers, public funds may alleviate this burden and facilitate environmental policies. However, practice has shown that despite ambitious policies, funding often follows traditional cost-dominated thinking. In Austria, national policy-makers were interested in new guidelines for funding that increase the transparency of the planning, ensure the adequate treatment of ecological problems, and foster stakeholder involvement, but keep the process as simple as possible, and require minimal changes of the current guidelines. An interdisciplinary project team conducted such a study. Its outcome was tested in two pilot projects. Based on these experiences, policy-makers finally implemented the recommended guidelines for the funding of communal urban water infrastructure projects. A general observation about the policy-making process was a conservative attitude of policy-makers. They prefer simple constraints (precautionary principle) and flexible negotiations (delegation) to complex assessment and decision-aid methodologies.
authors.affiliation: Competence Centre for Decision-Aid in Environmental Management, University of Natural Ressources and Applied Life Sciences/DIB, Gregor Mendel Wien, Austria. markus.starkl@boku.ac.at
authors.forename: Markus
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Starkl
authors.forename: Norbert
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Brunner
authors.forename: Werner
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Flögl
authors.forename: Johann
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Wimmer
mesh_terms: D001317:Austria; D003659:Decision Making, Organizational; D017408:Guidelines as Topic; D009937:Organizational Objectives; D016730:Program Development; D018505:Waste Management; D014881:Water Supply