Sustainable Consumption Institute

Abstract

Developing a comprehensive picture of the nature of current water demand is important as it is on this basis that forecasts for future water demand are currently made, as well as it being used as a way to inform demand management interventions and water efficiency programs. One way that water companies in the UK are starting to develop this picture is through the use of proxy variables such as demographics that are then used to segment people to explain patterns in people’s water use based on values, attitudes, and behaviours. However, as is the case with many environmental management settings, this current approach to attitudinal or behavioural segmentation fails to take into account the constantly observed value/attitude behaviour gap in water use, and offers little to the idea of intervention beyond a simple provision of technology and information to similarly ‘averaged’ customers. This paper offers an alternative theoretical and methodological perspective to the idea of segmentation based on depth of understanding of everyday practice, and highlights how a change of the unit of analysis from ‘individuals’ to ‘practices’ opens up a wealth of possibility for understanding water demand, and conceptualising forecasting and intervention for the water industry.

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