Sustaining Risk Management: A Social-Technical Analysis in Canadian Water Utilities

Water utilities need to consistently manage risk to provide reliable and safe water. However, we have limited understanding of how social, organizational, technical, and regulatory conditions combine to enable sustained risk management. This study uses fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis to identify configurations of conditions associated with sustained risk management across 16 medium-to-large drinking water utilities in Canada. Cases were drawn from Alberta, Ontario, British Columbia, and Nova Scotia, to capture variation in regulatory approaches; two of these provinces mandate formal risk management systems and two do not. Our analysis revealed three distinct pathways to sustained risk management. All pathways included two common conditions: operating cost coverage and experiential knowledge transfer. Two pathways combined these conditions with high rates of preventive maintenance and either intrinsic staff motivation or practices to learn from near misses and simulations. A third pathway, comprising utilities subject to regulatory accountability to implement a risk management system showed the importance of dedicated leadership, systematic risk assessment and prioritization, and intrinsic staff motivation. The solution consistency of 0.93 indicates strong reliability across cases. These findings offer guidance for utilities and can be used to advocate for resources and inform organizational practices to strengthen risk management.