Development of a Wellbeing Performance Framework for Asset Management Investment Analysis on Three Waters Infrastructure Networks

Abstract

Water infrastructure world-wide is facing a number of pressures, including increasing demand due to population growth and urbanisation, increasing legislative requirements, climate change, and ageing infrastructure. Making decisions on infrastructure investments have become more complex and fraught with wider implications to society than just simple delivery outputs. The need for a three waters wellbeing performance monitoring framework for infrastructure investment analysis is needed now more than ever to help decision makers better understand the performance of their three waters infrastructure in relation to delivering on our community’s wellbeing. Current performance and decision-making frameworks and assessment tools rely heavily on economic analysis and frameworks that utilise sustainable and wellbeing variables tend to be limited in scope and focus on macro, policy, and micro, infrastructure, level performance. The issues we are experiencing in water infrastructure investment originates from an asset (physical base), infrastructure decision making (holistic investment analysis), and the ability to comprehensively analyse and query information (data type and quantity). This thesis works to understand the problem created by a lack of a holistic investment decision-making model considering social, environmental, economic and infrastructure variables leading to investment decision that are unable to deliver sustainable intergenerational wellbeing in three waters infrastructure. Significant work has been undertaken by organisations to develop macro-level wellbeing frameworks that support policy setting at the national level. The development of a novel meso level wellbeing performance framework and a suite of indicators that will integrate with macro and micro levels will provide a valuable resource for decision-makers when considering performance and investments in the three waters infrastructure. The initial development of a three waters wellbeing performance framework and conceptual model has been completed with the identification of indicators and measures that cover the environmental, social / cultural, human, economic and infrastructure wellbeing capitals. This research and initial testing with Stats NZ and the Waikato Regional Council has identified the value of utilising a framework like the NZ LSF and how it could be integrated with the UN SDGs for use at a regional/local level to understand the most appropriate three waters infrastructure solution and the impact on intergenerational wellbeing. This initial work has successfully developed a wellbeing performance framework and conceptual model and identified the potential usefulness for three waters infrastructure asset managers and owners in assessing wellbeing performance and investment decisions but iii requires further research to develop a supporting mathematical model and analysis of the data obtained from the two agencies to test and further develop the framework and conceptual model. This is only the first step in the development journey, with further work required to explore the concepts and better define the interactions, systems dynamics, modelling, and indicators that can be utilised to understand the current and future state of wellbeing