Institutional Entrepreneurs Transitioning the Swiss Wastewater Sector

Today’s highly centralized wastewater infrastructures face challenges such as climate change, increased population growth and urbanization that could impede the reliable provision of wastewater services. Creating hybrid wastewater systems by integrating modular, non-grid technologies into existing centralized, grid-dominated infrastructures could provide systematic variation, and therefore the necessary resilience and flexibility to overcome those challenges. This could entail treating and potentially even reusing wastewater on-site, rediscovering wastewater as a valuable resource. However, such transitions occur rarely and slowly in high- and middle-income countries, which have heavily invested into their centralized infrastructures in the past. Based on the economic principle of increased returns to scale, the current systems have led to large sunk costs and status quo bias of political actors. To overcome this socio-technological lock-in, transitions might necessitate changes in the established governance arrangements e.g. in the form of new regulations, agencies or even new normative principles. According to theories on institutional change, transitions might still occur due to the presence of institutional entrepreneurs, which challenge the existing institutions by creating precedence cases that ultimately lead to institutional transformations. Especially, bottom-up initiatives with active institutional entrepreneurs have already shown their potential impact for sustainable transitions in other sectors such as e.g. farming collectives impacting the agricultural sector. However, much remains unknown about institutional entrepreneurs especially in the context of sustainable transitions of wastewater infrastructures and their activities, enabling bottom-up initiatives to successfully incorporate modular technologies in their housing projects. Ultimately, this leads to the question: What are the activities of institutional entrepreneurs and how are they enabling bottom-up initiatives to implement projects containing modular wastewater technologies? The case of Switzerland is a particularly interesting case study for examining this research question. Although Switzerland is a consociational democracy, where major decisions can only be made with a consensus, making transitions at the national level very lengthy, participatory spaces for innovation and experimentation have developed at the local level. Within these participatory spaces, bottom-up initiatives in the form of housing collectives manage to implement projects with modular wastewater technology despite the lack of supportive cantonal or national regulations. The aim is to open the “black box” of institutional entrepreneurship in the context of institutional change and sustainable transitions by drawing on literature from the fields of organization studies, sociology, public administration and social movement theory. In order to investigate how infrastructures and institutional arrangements change through the activities of institutional entrepreneurs (leading potentially to new socio-technological systems), the paper will compare two Swiss cases, one successful (Geneva) and one unsuccessful case (Zurich), from two different regions (canton Geneva and canton Zurich) but with the same project objectives. In this rather explorative approach, I use process-tracing, collecting the necessary information through interviews with institutional entrepreneurs from the bottom-up initiatives and involved public servants, as well as analyzing cantonal regulations addressing wastewater management and screening local media outlets for additional insights.