Abstract
In various Western European countries pilot projects have been set-up in which new waste water management technologies are being experimented in a domestic setting. Domestic end-users often play a crucial role in these projects: ranging from being the main initiators to being the key factor in their collapse. This chapter presents a theoretical appreciation of end-user roles and perspectives in sanitary niche experiments, and develops a toolkit to better understand and experiment with end-user roles and perspectives in new sanitation projects. Subsequently, this theoretical framework is used to analyze two pilot projects in the Netherlands (Sneek and Culemborg). The chapter concludes that an end-user view is instrumental in getting demonstration projects realized as it opens up new ways to link sanitary solutions to end-users’ socio-cultural concerns. Furthermore, such an end-user view allows for the successful development and implementation of new sanitation concepts, linking sanitation systems and end-users in various ways.
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Notes
- 1.
Conducted within the EET ‘Economy Ecology Technology’, research program funded by the ministries of Economic Affairs; Education, Culture and Science; and Housing, Spatial Planning and the Environment.
- 2.
The pilot project was set up in the framework of the EET-DESAR project. EET is a Dutch abbreviation which stands for ‘Economy Ecology Technology’. It was a research program funded by the Ministries of Economic Affairs; Education, Culture and Science; and Housing, Spatial Planning and the Environment and executed by SenterNovem. DESAR stands for ‘Decentralized Sanitation and Reuse’.
- 3.
The project partners in Sneek deliberately chose for a management structure similar to the situation where conventional waste water management systems are applied. That is: the municipality is responsible for the ‘conventional’ sewage pipes used for the collection of grey water in the neighborhood; the Waterboard for waste water treatment (but not of the black fraction of the waste, which was managed by the company installing the anaerobic digester). See also: Hegger (2007) (on Wageningen and Emmen), Van Vliet and Stein (2004) (Wageningen).
- 4.
For both cases project executors (three in Sneek, five in Culemborg) and end-users (18 in Sneek [October 2006], 15 in Culemborg [March 2003]) have been interviewed. Other data collection methods include desk research, participatory observation of project team meetings and site visits.
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Hegger, D., van Vliet, B. (2010). End User Perspectives on the Transformation of Sanitary Systems. In: van Vliet, B., Spaargaren, G., Oosterveer, P. (eds) Social Perspectives on the Sanitation Challenge. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-3721-3_13
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