Decision-making in urban drainage asset management

Decision-making is at the core of urban drainage asset management (UDAM), but its importance is often underestimated, leading to a lack of improvement of decision quality in practice. Therefore, our objective is to present fundamental concepts and theories of decision-making from literature and compare them with real-world experiences of observing, supporting, and participating in UDAM decisions in the Netherlands. The observations are contrasted against selected observations from other nations to illustrate the potential impact of key factors on decision-making processes and outcomes. From this, we observe that despite the available UDAM literature and experiences suggesting otherwise, decision-making in UDAM practice tends to focus on information acquisition, cognitive processing, and judgmental processes. This can lead to known decision biases such as protection of mindset and following fragmented, path-dependent processes influenced by formal and informal structures or institutions. To improve decision-making in UDAM, it is necessary to look beyond optimization of existing assets within the pre-existing technical paradigm and instead work toward aligning it with governing structures and processes for effective decision-making at a system level. While the existing evidence – although limited and mostly anecdotal – is compelling, it does not allow for generalization or validation of theoretical propositions against practical findings and vice versa. We therefore see a need for strengthened efforts into a more systematic study of current UDAM practices that incorporates existing theories and empirical insights on decision-making from several disciplines. This will foster accumulation of knowledge and mutual learning to enhance the research and practice of UDAM decision-making.