Emma McAteer, MSc BSc

The Southwestern delta of the Netherlands is experiencing a water transition, motivated by challenges brought by regular drought, freshwater scarcity and salinized groundwater and aggravated by climate change and growing water demand. This water transition represents the move away from water managers working autonomously in a closed technical community and towards the new evolution of water management as a more open and communicative policy field. Interdisciplinary, multi-stakeholder and multi-level collaboration within the water system is already taking place but the complexity of the current system and the interdependency of users and institutional bodies on each other has caused innovative solutions and trials to fail. A new water system approach to help tackle the complexity and challenges is proposed within the NWO KIC project STURDI-Water (STorage, Upgrade, Reuse and DIstribution of Water in regional collaborative networks). The proposed solution takes the form of a water bank to balance demand, supply, storage and treatment. A water bank is foreseen as a central legal entity which ideally organises the right water quality in the right place and time in the right amount at an affordable price. In order for such a water bank to represent the needs of all its stakeholders and end users, a value sensitive design approach will be taken, aiming to answer the main question: how can a water bank be made value-sensitive? The ideal end product from this work will be a values hierarchy for the design of a water bank, which can help to bridge the gap between a theoretical values based approach and practical implementation.