Enabling a Circular Water Transition: Identifying Governance Pathways for Wastewater Reuse

ABSTRACT Over 80% of the world's wastewater is discharged untreated, making reuse a widely underutilised strategy for addressing water scarcity. Due to the complexity of implementing water reuse systems, supportive governance conditions are required to steer this process and overcome barriers. Insights from water governance and sustainability transitions literature suggest that configurations of governance‐related conditions, such as the extent of regulatory certainty, economic incentives, social acceptance, innovation capacity and contextual conditions of water scarcity, influence water reuse. Previous research has explored the barriers to water reuse, focusing on isolated case studies leaving the question of how these conditions interact to enable implementation largely unresolved. This study applies Fuzzy Set Qualitative Comparative Analysis across 15 international cases to identify configurations of conditions that enable water reuse, moving beyond individual drivers to map archetypal pathways. We found three distinct pathways to successful implementation. First, low regulatory uncertainty alone was sufficient to enable reuse, underscoring the foundational role of regulatory frameworks. Second, high social acceptance—rooted in public trust, engagement, and participatory design—can compensate for the absence of financial incentives, particularly in European contexts. However, this may be less applicable in resource‐constrained settings. The third and most globally distributed pathway confirms that water scarcity can drive reuse, but only when accompanied by social and technical readiness. The third and most globally distributed pathway confirms that water scarcity can drive reuse, but only when accompanied by social and technical readiness involving technical knowledge, skills training, interdisciplinary collaboration and opportunities for experimentation. Notably, neither water scarcity nor financial incentives emerged as necessary conditions for successful implementation across all pathways. These findings challenge commonly held assumptions about what drives water reuse and offer a more nuanced understanding of the governance configurations that can support water reuse.