Regulatory Relationships Are a Pathway to Innovation

Innovation in water and environmental management can help reduce costs and maximize sustainability, but innovation is rare in these sectors.

Our team has produced over a decade of research demonstrating that a lack of technical capability is rarely the main barrier to innovation. Rather, bottlenecks to innovation often arise from the institutions and processes that collectively shape decisions about how wastewater systems are managed.

Crucially, innovative projects may present challenges within the permitting process that must be overcome. The permitting process consists of multiple sets of interconnected relationships – among organizations, but more importantly, among the individuals that comprise these organizations.

A recipe for success at navigating this process is becoming clear. The key lies in approaching permitting as an ongoing series of relationships which require skill and attention for effective engagement.

This site compiles work from to tell the story of how innovation has successfully been implemented and generate lessons for how others can do so as well. We based most of our work to date on detailed case studies from the wastewater sector to develop these concepts, but they are likely applicable in other areas as well.