In Search of the Elusive Triple Bottom Line: Turbulent Infrastructure Policy at the Sydney Water Board Glen Searle University of Technology Sydney Abstract: Potential conflicts between economic, social and environmental sustainability can cause turbulence in policy-making within infrastructure authorities as they seek to simultaneously accommodate the three sustainability dimensions. The paper explores this issue through an analysis of recent infrastructure policy in the Sydney water board. After 1988, neo-liberal policies were used to address water pollution problems caused by modernist ‘hydraulic paradigm’ infrastructure provision. These involved a special remediation levy, higher developer and user charges, and private sector funding of infrastructure, as well as urban consolidation, to simultaneously address economic and environmental sustainability. But the failure to solve water pollution problems, plus national competition policy, led to increased state control over the triple bottom line via corporatisation and accountability to separate pricing, public health and environmental agencies. A public health crisis arising from the failure of a private sector filtration plant resulted in the establishment of a new catchment authority and increased powers for state ministerial and health department intervention. Construction of a new dam was avoided by tapping into a river catchment outside the Sydney region, but with environmental river flow costs. Then a drought-induced water supply crisis caused the government to propose, abandon, and re-propose a desalination plant that would meet its business goal of reliable water supply at purported lower cost and perceived health safety than recycling, but with potentially greater environmental costs than recycling alternatives. Overall, the state’s needs to reduce expenditure and meet health standards have generally prevailed over environmental goals, but this has become increasingly contested, with correspondingly increased turbulence in policy outcomes. Introduction This paper explores the way in which the more complex operating environments of the post-Fordist, post- welfare state era have shaped water and sewerage infrastructure provision in Sydney. The paper does this through the frame of the triple bottom line of economic, environmental and social sustainability as a distillation of the major conflicts involved in contemporary water and sewerage planning. Contemporary forces have seen the ‘hydraulic paradigm’ of state-based water resource regulation for cheap water and sewerage availability (Kallis and Coccossis, 2003, p. 245; Sauri and Del Moral, 2001, p. 351) replaced by a much more business-driven model that has also had to take more account of community demands for better environmental outcomes from this infrastructure. Recent trends in urban water and sewerage provision in Europe and North America include such influences. For example in European water policy, common trends identified by Kallis and De Groot (2003) are the increasing importance of environmental protection in urban water management; state retreat from the regulation and provision of water and increased emphasis on market-assigned values; and more comprehensive forms of planning and management, taking into account multiple objectives, criteria and means at national-regional and urban-water utility levels. Some of the implications of such trends for urban sustainability have been explored by Swyngeduw, Kaika and Castro (2002). Commercialisation of water agencies has generated conflict between calls for restricted water use and maintaining profits via an expansion of supply. Discourses of water ‘scarcity’ generate investment in expanding water supplies and ‘technological fixes’ via water-saving devices of dubious cost-effectiveness, but also greater willingness to pay higher prices that are approved by the environmental movement. Privatization has been accompanied by new regulatory and decision-making bodies that comprise a new multi-scalar constellation of governance. This has fuelled social and political conflicts arising from the consequences of an increasingly private-oriented governance model for the sustainability of socio-environmental systems. While sustainable urban environments require a comprehensive and integrated approach in which water supply is integrated with health and sanitation policy, ecological considerations, urban planning and governance and the like, the increasing fragmentation of policy domains means this becomes more difficult to achieve. ISBN 978-0-646-48194-4 SOAC 2007 99