The water sector is at a critical juncture. The UK government’s recently published Water White Paper, sets out once-in-a-generation reform plans to deliver safe and secure water supplies, and enhance social and environmental outcomes.
Central to these ambitions is reducing water demand – to achieve a 20% reduction in water supplied by 2038 compared to 2019/20 levels. This has led to intense discussions about how to evaluate activities to reduce demand across the water sector. But there’s a fundamental question that deserves more attention: are we measuring what matters?
Reducing water demand is not simply a behavioural challenge. It is a question of which practices are visible, whose needs are recognised and whose voices shape water governance. The tools we use to evaluate demand reduction will shape which interventions are prioritised, and too often they privilege what is convenient to measure over what is socially meaningful.
We can’t let the tail wag the dog
Research evidence shows a stark gap between what we can measure and what really affects demand in people’s homes. From the very start of my career in water (a PhD on ‘reframing water efficiency’ co-funded by ESRC and Thames Water), I’ve been interested in whether we’re evaluating what matters when it comes to water demand. Since then, evaluation methods have progressed substantially, but we still have few tools to understand how water is really valued by people (this isn’t in pounds and pence), how and why it is used in homes and other spaces (think gyms, restaurants, offices, schools) or how wider developments in public life produce demand.
Common methods of evaluation – public opinion surveys, laboratory tests, micro-component analyses – are all limited in their ability to answer these questions. Survey responses rarely capture what people do in their daily lives, even when asked directly, and results from labs struggle to mimic the conditions of ordinary water use such as limescale in taps or the complexity of daily routines that affect how often, and for how long, appliances are used. Similarly, water meters show us how much water is used even down to the use of individual fixtures and fittings but cannot reveal the difference between ‘freshening up’ in the shower or relieving pain under hot water.
Reducing water demand at the scale required for resilience is difficult, as is rigorous evaluation of behavioural interventions in complex, real-world systems. But relying on convenient forms of data risks investment in interventions that are fundamentally limited in their capacity for change.
Instead, we need datasets and methods that enable us to measure sustained demand reduction, that can represent the diversity of everyday water use within and between homes (and other spaces where people use water), and give a sense of how personal consumption links to population level patterns in water use and wider social and infrastructural developments in public life.
Figure 1: Water and wellbeing: Watering plants in an apartment window
1. Represent diversity, not averages
A second critical insight is the need to reduce our reliance on representing water users as “average” – a practice that obscures everyday inequalities in how water is used and who bears the burden of reduction efforts.
Whether we’re talking about average per capita consumption (PCC), average per household consumption (PHC), daily averages, or regional averages, these metrics disguise important variations in consumption.
Averages create an “empty middle” where pathways to demand reduction are, at best, unimaginative and, at worst, risk exposing vulnerable people to unintended but predictable consequences. Research on water practices demonstrates that averages collapse the imaginative space for intervention: high-use households, where bespoke interventions might enable more substantial demand reductions, and low-use households, who may be at risk of water poverty, vanish from analyses. This omission disproportionately affects people whose water use is already constrained by economic circumstances, health conditions, or cultural needs that differ from assumed norms.
Instead, the evidence points to meaningful patterns that should guide evaluation:
- Life stage and household structure
- Work-life routines
- Type of home and ownership model
- Variations in occupancy (daily, weekly, seasonally)
- Personal differences (gender, disability/chronic illness, hairstyles, religious and cultural practices)
People within the same demographic category (e.g. same age, same household size) often use water in very different ways. Diversity runs deeper than demographics, and methods that foreground lived experience can better reveal variations in the meanings and materialities that shape water use. These are the patterns that matter. Let diversity and complexity guide analysis to find them, then use these patterns as baselines for evaluation.
Effective evaluation must begin by recognising and respecting the multiple already existing relationships between people and water – from ritual bathing practices to hair care routines shaped by texture and tradition. These dynamics of trust, power and emotion are vital to environmental policy, affecting the feasibility and long term performance of technological solutions (e.g. energy retrofit and integrated water management).
2. Understand change in complex systems
Evaluation must focus beyond individuals and properties to understand change in complex systems. Research consistently shows that focusing narrowly on individuals risks blaming people for ‘ordinary’ consumption whilst missing the systemic factors that shape demand.
Personal water use doesn’t happen in isolation. Analysis of water in high-use households and broader social practice research demonstrates that water consumption co-evolves with:
- Material conditions and infrastructures: Water systems, urban planning, homes, local amenities, product design, even the characteristics of our hair and bodies
- Time and temporal rhythms: Employment patterns, school schedules, commuting requirements
- Cultural norms and conventions: Religious practices, family traditions, migration patterns, consumer culture
- Policy developments in adjacent sectors: Energy systems, digitalisation, healthcare provision, travel habits, work and employment policies (for more on this see: Tracing Invisible Demands for Water).
This perspective has important implications for evaluation, requiring methods that allow us to track changes in society that work towards or against demand reduction, and creative approaches that represent interactions in complex systems.
Crucially, we need tools that allow the water sector to speak outwards to others about the sorts of changes needed to ensure joined-up approaches to resilience. This means tracking changes beyond water itself: How healthy is the local population? What consumer trends intersect with water? How will developments in housing, energy, or employment affect demand?
Figure 2: Gardens: a space for socialising, playing and planting
3. Track the evolution of demand
Presently, there’s a tendency to evaluate short-term impacts of interventions despite knowing this give an incomplete picture, as effective evaluation requires long-term thinking about how demand evolves. It requires methodological rigour balanced with feasibility and convenience, taking care not to overstretch data beyond what it can reliably tell us.
UK per capita water use increased by around 70% between 1961 and 2016, according to Artesia’s analysis. This dramatic rise resulted from:
- Appliance ownership: A service model that relocated water use to homes and increased the convenience of laundry
- Rise of water-intensive practices: Particularly frequent, lengthy showers and expectations of ‘hyper-cleanliness’
- Changing collective ideas: Shifting from viewing water as for health and hygiene to seeing it as for comfort, luxury and freshness
- Changing work and leisure patterns: Including working from home, gardening practices, bathing rituals and laundry routines
Understanding how demand evolves expands our imaginative capacity for intervention. When we recognize how dramatically demand has changed—and continues to change—we can envision futures where it changes again, in different directions. This imaginative work is not just about maximising the outcome of intervention; it’s essential for protecting vulnerable people. By understanding the diverse pathways through which demand has grown, we can design reduction strategies that preserve the water-using practices people genuinely need (for health, cultural identity, care responsibilities). Without this historical perspective and imaginative capacity, we risk interventions that unfairly burden those already managing with less.
Conclusion
As the saying goes, “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” The challenge is to strike a balance, using established and innovative methods to track warning signs and positive signals of change, understanding the evolution of practices over time, and recognising that practices gain an appearance of stability as they become embedded in infrastructures, service models, expectations and routines. The story of rising per capita consumption is an infrastructural story, one in which the spread of domestic appliances, the design of homes, and shifting service models quietly rewrote what counted as normal water use, and whose ideas about normality were brought into being.
The JUST Centre takes these infrastructural dynamics as its starting point, asking how the systems and relationships that organise everyday life shape what is possible in governance, and what it will take to build evaluation frameworks that are genuinely up to that challenge.
Social infrastructure (the institutions, networks, and relationships that enable collective life) and built infrastructure (the water systems, homes, urban spaces and appliances do not simply provide a backdrop to environmental governance). They actively condition which knowledges become authoritative, whose expertise is recognised, and through what institutional and material arrangements environmental governance is made – and remade.
By making these dynamics visible, JUST’s research aims to support the design of evaluation approaches that are not only more rigorous, but more equitable, capable of identifying who bears the burden of demand reduction and who is missing from the picture altogether.
For more information:
- Change Points Toolkit
- Water Practices Analytical Toolkit
- Patterns of Water Research
- COVID-19 and Water Demand Review
- Social Practice Theory and Household Water Demand
- Tracing Invisible Water Demands
Dr Claire Hoolohan is co-lead of the Social and Built Infrastructures Working Group in the JUST Centre and Senior Lecturer at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, University of Manchester. Contact: claire.hoolohan@manchester.ac.uk
