Thus far, the connection between policy, institutions and governance and human behaviour has been discussed at a broad level. Now consider the realities of real human behaviours in real human settings in real time. Contemporary ideas in water policy and management do imply significant changes in human behaviour. So it needs to be considered what such changes entail, against the many other factors that impinge on individual and household behaviour. Picture an ‘average’ or at least a believably typifiable Australian household. It contains two adults, both of whom now work full jobs to maintain a house and debt, the value of which has been increased significantly in line with the logical impacts of behavioural changes driven by policy interventions in the housing finance system such as negative gearing. Finances are tight. They collectively work longer hours than they did 10 years ago and than their parents ever contemplated. With retrograde funding of public education, one parent is committed heavily to helping at the local primary school and the other manages a junior sports team; commitments that each take six–eight hours out of a crowded week.

Enter a serious commitment to using water and energy more sustainably, with an eye not just to immediate use but whole-of-production-chain use (embedded energy and water). Water tanks are expensive to buy and install and require maintenance (and the embodied energy in that metal or plastic!), and the reinstallation of all light fittings, small subsidies aside, costs money. Doing installation oneself is cheaper and might be rewarding, but who can find the time, let alone plumb it into the toilet? Managing the internal temperature manually via shutters and scheduled closing and opening of windows takes 10-times longer than using the air-con. Negotiating rebates and green-energy subscriptions seems to take even more time than managing the kids’ mobile phone plans. Finding reliable information on the embedded energy and water in all those products is hard work amidst a deluge of commercial, government and NGO claims. Water prices do not really drive frugality and would need to treble to really stand out in the household budget: energy prices are larger, but the gains are hard to make to the extent that they really show dollar benefit. Composting the wastes is yet another everyday responsibility, and using greywater on the garden keeps slipping because a quick half-hour hit with the sprinkler is much easier. So it goes on.

Such constraints apply beyond the household scale. Many prescriptions for sustainability require time-intensive collaborative endeavours — landcare and waterwatch groups, neighbourhood gardens, clean-up days —and all when traditional and important voluntary enterprises such as charities, junior sport and school fund-raising struggle to find human resources and time. And we expect people to do more?

This is a crucial and often-overlooked point — more ecologically sustainable behaviours generally replace external sources of energy and other resources such as water with metabolic (muscular) energy and labour time, and the intellectual effort to organise and manage (for the fundamentals, see Boyden 1987). Conservatively, can we propose that the time-cost of running a considerably more sustainable household may be six–eight hours per week? That is, roughly, another day’s working time. Interestingly, there appears to be a convergence when one anecdotally surveys the time-cost of serious non-paid work activities such as chairing a Landcare group, being an active P&C executive member, coaching a junior cricket side, or getting real about household sustainable management — about an extra day’s work per week. Sure, down-shifting or dropping out might square the circle, reducing expenditure to match reduced income, but that is not currently a widely available option. Reliable part-time work is not is easy to find.

This is obvious stuff, and has been since the onset of the industrial revolution — fossil fuel and other external uses of energy extend and supplant the metabolic energy used to do things manually (Boyden 1987). That is the time-saving magic of each instance of using energy and technology, even if the cumulative impact adds up to a tail-chasing feedback between expense, work and time. However, the necessary changes in human behaviour implied by many prescriptions for water and energy frugality seem not to mesh at all well with household realities and weekly time budgeting.

Of course, it is not only people’s time-scarcity that weighs against behaviour change — the conservatism and inertia of water- and energy-supply agencies, the locked-in patterns created by past urban planning, the constraints or at least lack of encouragement in building codes, an economic and taxation system that does not particularly encourage frugality, and of course — and perhaps most powerfully —the active anti-sustainability that is carried in the aggressive marketing in a consumer society. The daggy ‘stop the drop’ adverts in low-ratings slots are up against the flash, prime-time spa and air-con ones. Economic growth and water and energy use are tightly coupled. Those six–eight hours a week of pro-sustainability time and efforts entail flying in the face of the inevitable logic of the inherited urban system, market-defined social expectations, the inertia and discouragement of powerful organisations, and the growth imperative of the economic system.

So, small adjustments in financial and other policy settings to encourage frugality aside, what prospect for behaviour change at the individual and household level? The playing field is not even. Recall that not to act in a policy sense is a conscious act of ensuring that current behaviours exist. This means that, unless pro-frugality policy interventions significantly outweigh these multiple anti-frugality policy messages, then on balance there is no reason to expect other than changes at the margin.