CECAN Fellowship: Developing a complexity-aware evaluation framework for integrated rainwater management
Integrated rainwater management (IRM) is an approach to managing rainfall more deliberately, more locally, and more strategically across the whole system, from where it lands and across the pathways it subsequently follows. Effective IRM requires coordinated action across multiple actors: water companies, developers, local government, regulators, and communities, which is complicated by fragmented governance, unclear responsibilities across institutional boundaries, misaligned incentives, and the delivery of multiple diffuse benefits that carry different weight for different stakeholders.
These complexities make evaluation particularly challenging. Measuring success requires frameworks that can account for distributed responsibility, long timeframes, non-linear system behaviour, and the structural tensions that shape what the system does and doesn’t invest in. Current evaluation approaches are often not sufficiently holistic or complexity-aware: they struggle to assess system-wide outcomes, to reflect the full range of value that integrated approaches deliver, and to evaluate whether the wider system is developing the capabilities needed to perform coherently over time.
This fellowship will address that gap by developing a complexity-aware evaluation framework for IRM. Rather than starting from conventional evaluation methods and asking how to apply them to a complex system, the fellowship will start from the structural features of the IRM system itself: mapping the system, diagnosing the conditions that make integrated outcomes difficult to achieve, and building an evaluative approach grounded in that diagnosis. The result will be a practical framework that supports a more useful understanding of whether integrated rainwater management is actually working.
About Hannah
Formerly Head of International Operations at the Local Government Information Unit, Hannah is now a Senior Innovation Associate at Ofwat, where she works on the delivery of their £600m Innovation Fund. The Fund supports the development and rollout of innovative water projects while fostering a sustainable innovation ecosystem within the UK water sector. Drawing on her background in local government policy, one of her current focus areas is promoting collaboration between the water sector and local government to address shared challenges such as urban drainage, and she is particularly interested in place-based, catchment scale approaches to water management.
