New Water Policy and Practice Volume 1, Number 2 - Spring 2015 | Page 25

New Water Policy and Practice

specific skills to be developed), practising new approaches, gathering feedback from
colleagues, and getting assistance from a coach and/or mentor.

The role descriptions also represent a potentially useful communication and
learning tool. For example, a coach or trainer may use a case study to highlight some
leadership lessons. Water leadership case studies often involve a number of people
interacting to collectively drive a process of influence (Brown and Clarke 2007; Taylor
2011; Vedpuriswar and Kolakaluri 2009). The role descriptions in this paper could
be used to identify water leaders playing specific roles in a case study and foster a
discussion that explores the importance of each role, keys to success in each role, why
certain roles were needed, and the interplay between leaders playing different roles.
4.3. Implications for researchers and opportunities for future research

The role descriptions also provide a conceptual framework that researchers who
are interested in institutional change, leadership, capacity building, and governance
could use when exploring aspects of change in the water sector. It is common for such
researchers to broadly highlight the importance of leadership capacity to successfully
driving change (e.g., Herrick and Pratt 2012; Mukhebir et al. 2014). It is, however,
rare to see an analysis of the factors contributing to a leadership process in the water
sector, including a description of the different leadership roles being played and how
they are interacting over time. This is an exciting opportunity for future research and
learning. The roles described in this paper provide a framework that researchers could
use to help structure an analysis of a leadership process. Such research could explore
the importance of specific roles in different situations, the relationships between each
role (e.g., the potentially symbiotic relationship between the enabling and champion
leader roles), and whether some patterns of interaction between roles are consistent
across different contexts.

Future research could also explore different leadership roles being played in
circumstances where ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ processes of influence are combining
to produce more sustainable water management outcomes. The effective combination
of top-down and bottom-up processes of influence has been frequently cited in the
sustainability leadership literature (see Benn et al. 2006). It is hypothesised that this
pattern of leadership creates a demand for certain leadership roles, such as projectlevel champions driving change from below and senior enabling leaders facilitating
change from above, as well as the necessity for people in these roles to operate in
concert. Indeed, recent case studies have highlighted the need for leaders operating at
multiple levels of governance and interest to effectively shepherd change in the water
industry (Daniell et al. 2014), and should inspire further research as to how these
multi-level, multi-role networks might be developed.

24