Avoiding a water crisis, one nudge at a time
to understand societal dynamics that were affecting water consumption. The ERPU then set out to design and roll out an intervention across 400 000 Cape Town households that was evaluated through a randomised control trial.
Following the success of the collaboration and nudge intervention, further funding was sought from the municipality and water research commission to enable a second phase of the project that aimed to institutionalise the learnings from the initial engagement, and to build capacity within the city to undertake similar initiatives in future. This turned out to be a particularly vital part of the project, as it was during this period that the water crisis was at its peak.
Visser’s close relationship with the city during the height of the crisis enabled the ERPU to provide strategic guidance and analysis of the drought interventions formulated by the city, such as personal letters sent to high consumption households, as well as to collaborate on the design of new interventions, such as the Cape Town Water Map.
Extensive, sustained tracking and in-depth analysis over thousands of Cape Town households tracked the affect of events taking place around the drought, such as changes to the tariffs, the introduction of water restrictions and PR campaigns, and the findings were shared with the city to enable decisionmaking on where to direct future efforts.
Visser oversaw all aspects of this extensive, multi-faceted research engagement. She was responsible for sourcing funding from multiple local and international sources for both phases of the project, obtaining buy-in from a variety of stakeholders inside and outside of government and ensuring that academic and municipal timelines and requirements were adhered to.
From a research perspective, she steered the design of the intervention, the methodology and analysis of data, and created policy guidelines from the findings to enable the city to apply the learnings at a wider scale in the future.
The behavioural interventions implemented for this project resulted in reductions in water usage of between 15% and 26%.
In 2017/2018, she also worked closely with associate professor Thinus Booysen from Stellenbosch University on a collaboration between the respective universities, the Western Cape Government and Shoprite involving behavioural nudges and the installation of smart water meters in 354 schools in Cape Town. This work was a flagship social engagement event for the EPRU research unit, and over 360 megalitres of water has already been saved in the year that it has been operational.