Design for dynamic fitness: archetypes of urban water systems

Abstract Infrastructure systems were largely designed for a world of environmental stationarity, and the Anthropocene – characterized by accelerating change that often produces more dynamic and extreme stressors – challenges infrastructure robustness. Urban water supply systems epitomize the pressures of socio-environmental change on infrastructure as they increasingly operate outside their physical design conditions, putting new pressure on their institutional designs to weather emerging challenges. Water management institutions must therefore be designed for “dynamic fitness,” defined by anticipatory capacity and responsiveness. However, we do not yet understand the specific institutional design features enabling dynamic fitness and their relation to infrastructure and environmental (i.e. biophysical) characteristics. We advance research on dynamic fitness in urban water supply systems by synthesizing theory and analyzing 35-year data sets of stressors and responses for 16 U.S. urban water utilities using archetype analysis. We find that institutional archetypes capable of coping with higher biophysical complexity invest in information processing capacity and response diversity. While these features of dynamic fitness come at a cost, balancing these promotes efficiency, which can be expanded through polycentric regional governance structures. Institutional designs for dynamic fitness must weigh tradeoffs in flexibility across governance levels and between quick responses and slow transformative changes.