The foregoing has traversed some issues around human behaviour and water use in Australian human settlements. Currently Australia is in a water panic, but faced by significant path dependencies and inertia in water and sanitation systems, statutory and organisational dimensions of the institutional system, and human behaviours both individual and collective. There are also countervailing policy and commercial messages weighing against the prospects of significant change to water behaviours. How long the current policy panic will last is unknowable, but there is a greater chance now, with a focus on climate change and variability, of attention being maintained for longer than in previous dry spells. Actually, things are fine in metropolitan Australia (although not in some smaller towns and rural areas), but we have no idea how the politics of really severe or even absolute (as opposed to the current inconvenient) scarcity would play out, when whole categories of use become either impossible or grossly unviable from an equity point of view. Things may not get so bad, and whether we should seriously prepare for such a state of affairs is a matter of individual risk-aversion as well as careful projection.

The current water panic is characterised by a contest between a range of singular policy and technological responses with very different behavioural implications. Large-scale supply-side options lessen the need for behaviour change, whereas significantly greater household responsibility for capture and storage of water and treatment of wastes implies large behavioural adjustments. In between is a mix of these, mediated by various technologies. Many specific policy interventions are proposed — regulatory, economic, communicative — but all have the same intent of changing human behaviours, which is not a trivial undertaking.

What is not discussed as much are meaningful shifts to other policy sectors so that all that determines water use is as consistent as possible. Or, should another social and policy goal be considered to override water issues, then the inconsistency in policy and technological messages are transparent. Water policy needs to be connected to other policy domains, the agendas and mandates of over agencies and portfolios. Attempts to alter individual and household behaviours would take account of the other determinants of those behaviours: technological, commercial advertising, countervailing financial measures, available urban form, energy issues, and more. That would require connections at present poorly developed in both the research and policy-and-management domains.

It would also require reviewing and revising the statutory frameworks and thus socially-mandated parameters of function of key organisations, and most particularly water utilities — both directly state-run and corporatised. Similarly, a wide and deep review of the statutory framework surrounding water management is overdue (for example, Fisher 2007). Serious attention to whole-of-chain water demand in systems of production and consumption would be needed, to address embedded as well as direct water use. Planning regimes, and especially strategic planning, might be reviewed for their consistency with water issues. In a pro-sustainability institutional system, strategic environmental assessment or some equivalent would be applied to major policy proposals to assess cross-sectoral impacts on environment, society and economy in a precautionary manner (Dovers 2006).

In all the above, it would be best to include broader sustainability imperatives rather than only water — the issues are linked, and not many reviews are likely to be possible. None of these reviews and institutional reforms will save a single drop of water; rather, they would reorder the operating environment of the policy intervener and their subject, whose behaviour is meant to change in the interests of greater clarity and possibility. They would treat water and related issues as complex and systemic, rather than simple and thus suited to singular responses. They would allow for strategic rather than silver-bullet responses to water scarcity.

In the 16 years since the integrated agenda of sustainable development (prefixed as ‘ecologically’ in the Australian term ‘ESD’) was first formally adopted in policy (UN 1992; Commonwealth of Australia 1992) and the two decades since the idea was first clearly articulated (WCED 1987), we have seen principles of ESD enunciated in countless policies and laws in Australia and internationally. However, serious policy attempts to implement it in sectors have been rare and partial — in Australia, Regional Forest Agreements and now the NWI are examples (for example, Dovers 2002; Dovers and Wild River 2003). In urban water, National Competition Policy has been more influential that ESD ideas, and carry a particular set of assumptions and reliance on market-oriented instruments. While we might well get by with disintegrated and ad hoc approaches to urban water, with the odd drought-induced catch-up, climate permitting, it is worth considering the merits of something more integrated.