2F Digital Water Utilities: What can we learn from foreign predecessors

Background to the project

Within Mistra InfraMaint’s project 2.1 Navigating digital waters , our doctoral student Amelie Bennich is studying the Swedish water and wastewater organizations’ efforts to digitize. The project discusses, among other things, the driving forces behind digitization initiatives, the difficulties of digitizing these activities, and the need to understand that digitization processes can have different logic in different contexts. The project has generated a number of insights that can help to develop the capacity of water and wastewater organizations to exploit new digital technologies.

As a complement to the project’s national focus, it is instructive and important to study what Swedish water and wastewater organizations can learn from digitization initiatives in other countries, where water and wastewater operations are conducted under slightly different forms.

Two examples are Spain and the United Kingdom, where market logic and problems with water shortages, among other things, have created drivers and conditions for digitization that are different from those in Sweden. Studying foreign examples broadens the perspective and puts the Swedish research results in an international context. Swedish water and wastewater organizations can also make better use of these insights.