Decentralised Environmental Technology Adoption: The Household Experience with Rainwater Harvesting

Abstract

With regional rainfall of good volume and quality, and growing demand on the urban water supply in South East Queensland, rainwater harvesting (RH) is increasingly considered as a potential household supplement to the mains supply. RH is attractive because it offers households access to control over an augmented water supply. It also constitutes a form of demand management on the mains water supply and offers beneficial externalities to the environment. The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) (Cat No. 4602.0: 2005) reported that household adoption of RH systems was limited to fewer than eight percent of households across South East Queensland in 2004. Yet, as our society has become more cognisant of its impact on the environment and of our dry continent, household adoption of RH systems has boomed. By the end of 2008, almost 40% of South East Queensland households had adopted RH systems. Understanding the issues that influence household adoption can significantly contribute to regional water security. So, what factors influence household RH adoption? Two perspectives applicable to decentralised environmental technology adoption provide insight. Ecological modernisation (EM) provides a systemic perspective on households as consumers in a market context that is shifting to greater recognition of the economic, environmental and social advantages of more sustainable technologies. EM recognises the importance of systemic influences such as the environment, governance and regulation and the economic availability of appropriate technologies on household adoption. But EM fails to reach the fine-grained experience of individual households and its construction of social consumption issues as a ‘lifestyle choice’ is stepwise and clumsy. Diffusion of innovation (DI), conversely, emphasises temporally diffuse adoption and idiosyncrasies of the Adopter experience which are neglected in the EM perspective. But by concatenating the advantages households obtain through adoption, it does so at the conceptual expense of systematically differentiating among the specific social, economic and environmental factors that contextualise the household in its membership of a community and that may independently influence the adoption decision. The experiences of 560 surveyed South East Queensland households that consider, adopt or reject RH systems were compared with the perspectives offered by EM and DI. The thesis extended the analysis by proposing and interrogating an original synthesis of the EM and DI perspectives. The proposed synthesis sought substantial conceptual improvements to the weaknesses identified in each of the component perspectives. The aim was to provide a comprehensive actor-based lens, sensitised to the systemic context, as a tool for understanding the issues that catalyse and influence household adoptions of RH. Through a series of analytical stages, the synthesis was refined into the Decentralised Environmental Technology Adoption (DETA) Model. The DETA Model provided a significant improvement over the component perspectives in its capacity to identify the issues that influence household adoption, accommodating 100% of the issues and influences reported by households. Moreover, in a discriminant function analysis, the DETA Model correctly allocated 89.2% of households as RH adopters or nonadopters and 84.2% in cross validation.