Who has rådighet? An agency-centred perspective on water conservation

Jesper Knutsson 

Water conservation is usually catalogued by technology, efficient fixtures, leak control, reuse, metering, process integration. That framing hides a stubborn fact: realised savings consistently fall short of engineering potential and often fade with time. Rebound, poor maintenance and behavioural decay explain part of the gap, but not all. We argue that a large share is an agency mismatch: the actor who would benefit from a measure lacks the authority, capacity and incentive to deploy it, while the actor who holds them does not benefit. Using the Scandinavian concept of rådighet (agency), we map water-conservation measures to the actors holding primary and secondary agency. Clear patterns emerge: agency is concentrated for network measures and fragmented for building-scale ones; the largest potentials sit with the weakest-agency actors; and standards, pricing and digital infrastructure act as agency bridges. Two Swedish field trials show why misaligned agency undermines otherwise sound technology, and we set out what an agency-first approach means for policy.