Pushing the governance boundaries: Making transparent the role of water utilities in managing urban waterways

Integrated Water Resource Management (IWRM) requires simultaneous consideration of the multiple benefits that attend water. IWRM can also be more challenging in regulatory environments where the resource manager must justify choices and elements of each intervention. This is particularly challenging in the context of urban waterways that have many uses including an ecological function and a source of human amenity. To justify expenditure on maintaining and improving urban waterways for ecological and/or amenity changes regulated utilities must be able to articulate and measure these types of values with at least some degree of precision. This paper presents a generic and systematic framework for understanding the ecological and amenity values of urban waterways. We illustrate deployment of the framework in the case of Melbourne, one of Australia’s fastest growing cities and a location ranked as amongst the most liveable since 2011. We also explore how the results could improve the way we measure benefits in dollar terms.