Sustainability, Water and Future Resource Security

This PhD studentship - 50% funded by a grant of £48k from United Utilities (UU) - builds on UoB's 20-year research portfolio in sustainability, resilience, liveability, and business models advanced and led respectively by Dr Hunt and Professor Rogers. The primary outcome will be a methodology for developing a transparent, robustly-evidenced governance framework for any infrastructure intervention, tested using industrially-supported case studies in water and wastewater systems. With senior co-supervision from UU, the research will explore all 'formal' forms of governance that shape engineering interventions in the water sector (legislation, regulation, taxation and financial incentives, codes & standards, etc.) as well as the 'informal' forms of governance (citizen and societal attitudes and behaviours, societal norms, practice norms, etc.). All of these forms of governance need to be identified, analysed and where necessary re-engineered to align with the scientific evidence, the case for change in the systems in question, and the alternative business models that deliver multiple forms of value (accounting for system interdependencies) when the intervention is implemented, otherwise the intervention will prove ineffective or fail. Industry is desperate for this missing research, as evidenced in UKCRIC's mission maps; the doctoral research is consequently expected to yield very considerable follow-on funding. All other project funding (equipment, facilities, consumables, T&S) is already secured; Lis will join, and complement, the Pipebots RF/PhD team throughout her PhD.