There is now a substantial literature defining and encouraging sustainable urban water management. Nevertheless, the responses of urban water utilities to changed demand and supply options have tended to focus on technological solutions, new sources and well-worn approaches to demand management. While there is increasing interest in water-sensitive urban design, whole-of-lifecycle economic consideration and the incorporation of externalities into pricing and cost-benefit analyses, there are significant areas of sustainability that have received scant attention. These neglected areas tend to relate to the difficulty in creating, as opposed to promoting, the concept of sustainability that includes social and cultural assessment, integrated response and key institutional issues in achieving adaptive learning.

From the community’s perspective there are those who will be happy with modest modifications to the status quo. Recently, however, there have been attitude changes towards supporting stronger approaches to sustainable water-resources management. There is also a greater appreciation that holistic approaches will have to be taken as the issues associated with metropolitan growth and climate change have become more evident.

Thus it is realised by many in the community that there are important value judgments that will have to be addressed to establish whether the status quo should be maintained. Alternatively, if strategic social and cultural goals are to be achieved the community are willing to engage in examining what novel institutional structures should be seriously considered to attain them. Community engagement will need to be structured around the drivers of their decision-making and consequent water-supply preferences if procedurally just change is to be achieved.

Research has shown that these drivers include judgments on issues of fairness in allocation, acceptable risk and uncertainty, trust in both government and its agencies, and perceived wellbeing from alternative levels of service. Emotion is also a significant driver of community decision-making. These judgments are underpinned by perceptions of professional roles and knowledge and how they are incorporated in public discussion.

The above issues and the overall prospects and justification for change in decision-making in urban water management are discussed in terms of examples of community water culture in relation to alternative delivery systems and inter-regional transfer of water resources.

The important role that water plays in the urban environment is well documented. The amenity provided by traditional centralised water supplies overcame early water-borne diseases early in our history. Large sewerage systems led, with some isolated exceptions, to a comfortable ‘out of sight and out of mind’ mentality in regards to the inconvenient truths associated with waste disposal. Stormwater management was only an issue during heavy rainfall and if drains became blocked. Local wetlands and parks have been regarded as a metropolitan ‘staple’. Economically, the amenity associated with proximity and access to water bodies in the landscape has been reflected in land and housing prices.

Thus, through its ready availability and largely unseen management, water, as with oil and electricity, has been largely taken for granted by city-dwellers. Recent challenges through drought and climate change, however, have left water planners, politicians and the public with difficult trade-off choices with regard to the costs associated with maintaining current levels of service, how to create acceptable demand management and the ongoing socio-political problems associated with a lesser level of security of supply and imposition of ongoing restrictions of differing degrees of severity.

The debate about levels of service and their ongoing contribution to community wellbeing and environmental sustainability is now on in earnest (for example, Larsen and Gujer 1997). Much of the sustainability-related argument in Australia is discussed in the context of the concept of integrated urban water management (Mitchell 2006). The resolution of this debate is urgent (for example, see Vlachos and Braga 2001). If historical expectations of the community in this regard are to be met, alternative sources of supply need to be identified with some alacrity. While decisions need to be made in a timely fashion, knee-jerk responses which are potentially unsustainable need to be avoided. The merits of ‘quick fixes’ such as the current penchant for desalination plants need careful analysis against alternatives. Some would say that technological ‘fixes’ such as desalination plants are unsustainable (Hurlimann 2007).

This situation reinforces the need for better long-term planning, as the limitations of our past efforts have been exposed. But to improve in this domain we also need to carefully examine the current assumptions upon which long-term demand predictions are made and our expectations of socially acceptable demand-management programs. This examination should, perhaps, occur at a very fundamental level. Currently, our explicit debates around acceptability of levels of service tend to focus around the relatively uninterrupted quantity of potable water provided and the aesthetics and risk associated with the system-level quality of that water. Furthermore, while holistic thinking is being promoted in the sustainability debate, levels of service seem to be discussed and investigated in a component context. That is, for example, required reliability is considered as one dimension, pressure as another, and health concerns and water aesthetics as two others. Regardless of our role in urban water management, the processing of each of these dimensions into an overall level of service is problematic for us all.

There is, of course, no reason to assume that the public expect that traditional levels of service or large-scale central delivery systems should be retained. The water-reform process and the increasingly evident community-based support for water conservation and sustainable development (Syme and Hatfield-Dodds 2007) indicate that the community may be highly supportive of responsible change in this area. Opponents of this view may tend to point to such issues as the rejection of potable supply from recycled water as an example of community conservatism in this regard. An equally plausible explanation may relate to the quality of the decision-making process and the crisis atmosphere in terms of lack of water and therefore confidence in the planning system.

Changes in water-supply delivery are often couched in terms of the need for urgent action to get more giga-litres in the dam. It is the contention of this paper that long-term planning may be better driven by examining the benefits to the urban community and how they can be delivered, rather than from the point of view of the amount of water in the dams. The question should be: Given the degree and range of benefits, how much water needs to be delivered and how can that best be achieved?

In short, the issues associated with the long-term planning of sustainable urban water supply should be addressed by starting with the holistic concept of wellbeing or the related concept of quality of life (Cummins et al. 2003; Pacione 2003) or the benefits to householders provided by active and passive use of water (Moran et al. 2004). Hoekstra et al. ( 2001) and Syme et al. (2008) point out that potentially the same volume of water can provide for multiple benefits. Potentially, therefore, demand management and setting levels of service is about using water most efficiently to retain these benefits. These will not only include the benefits at personal household levels but those which manifest themselves in the context of sustainability. These include the costs to the environment of augmenting current supply or re-allocating water from other users. As Syme and Nancarrow (2007) discuss, there appears to be a significant and strengthening aspiration in the urban community for sustainable urban-water supply and this goes beyond the water supplied to individual households. As has been foreshadowed (Syme and Hatfield-Dodds 2007) and will be elaborated in the following discussion, these wider sustainability concerns extend to institutional and decision-making process, trust and justice concerns.