A Knowledge Management model for corporate water responsibility

What is it about?

This chapter draws insights from Knowledge Management theory to articulate a conceptual model for clarifying the processes that underlie the involvement of business in the management of sustainable water systems. Corporate water responsibility, it is argued, constitutes a socially oriented (and human‐centric) process characterized by the influence of different categories of knowledge that are either known and codified by the firm, or unknown and un‐codified by the firm. A holistic view of Knowledge Management is adopted that assumes the existence of a diversity of (positivist and socially constructed) knowledge assets that can contribute to sustainable water management.

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Why is it important?

The outcome of this conceptual work is a preliminary Knowledge Management framework for corporate water responsibility, partly grounded in post‐normal science and critical realism. The propositions challenge the mainstream water management orthodoxies by straying from both their positivist bias and their tendency to oversee the social causation processes inherent to water systems.