Although water is considered a renewable resource, there is only a fixed amount of water available. No additional water can be made, and we cannot easily control how fast water is recycled or in what form it will appear and where. With expected growth in the world’s population and economy, the same amount of water must supply more needs. Taking into account climate change projections and water-related environmental stresses, even less water might be available for human uses. People will need to decide how to serve a multitude of water needs. This dissertation uses the Southern Nevada Water Authority’s (SNWA) Groundwater Development Project to investigate how water policy designs handle the challenges of meeting urban and rural as well as human and ecological water needs when allocating scarce water supplies. The Southern Nevada Water Authority (SNWA) plans to build a pipeline to transfer groundwater from five rural basins in northeastern Nevada 300 miles south to the Las Vegas metropolitan area in Southern Nevada. SNWA has asked the Nevada State Engineer to approve its water right applications to develop and use groundwater from these rural basins. One of the basins, Snake Valley, straddles the border between Nevada and Utah. An interstate agreement allocating the groundwater between the two states is required before the State Engineer can approve water rights that would be diverted from Snake Valley. We found that policy debates and people’s rationales for how water should be allocated revolved around disagreements over beneficial use. In addition, water agreements need to be designed so that the risks from hydrologic uncertainties and impacts from other users are also apportioned clearly and equitably. Policy designs are purposefully crafted and have enormous impact, yet analysis of the actual contents of policies and their societal impacts has not received adequate attention within the policy sciences. The significance of this research is that it focuses on the foundational principles and rules for the allocation of scarce water resources that must necessarily balance urban and rural interests as well as human and environmental needs.

In order to mitigate climate change, human activity needs to be decarbonised through a phase-out of fossil fuels, replaced by renewable energy sources. Here, sustainable business models can play an important role through connecting niche renewable technologies to the wider system and thereby allowing them to diffuse. Alternative business models towards the traditional centralised utility model have emerged, but remain poorly developed, and understood, especially their impact on transition dynamics over time. Therefore, this study combines business model research with the multi-level perspective on socio-technical transitions, in order to investigate how emerging sustainable business models in Germany co-evolve with the country’s energy system over time. The three studied business models are tenant electricity, community microgrid and virtual power plant. To this end, the study applied a qualitative research approach, involving an interview, survey and document review in order assess with which transition pathways, based on the multi-level perspective, the three studied business models share most characteristics with. The results suggest that community microgrid currently follows a substitution pathway, in which old regime structures are replaced over time. The business model of tenant electricity is still stuck in its niche, but under adjusting regulatory structures expected to follow a transformative pathway with minor regime adjustments, while the basic regime architecture remains unchanged. Lastly, virtual power plants as a symbiotic business model shares most characteristics with a reconfiguration pathway, in which it triggers internal change and over time can result in major structural reconfigurations. These results underline that not only the type of employed technology plays a crucial role, but also how it is made available to society in form of business models. Further, the alignment with different transitional pathways provides a more nuanced perspective on how different business model types co-relate and impact transition dynamics and thereby provides a basis for future discussions around how a sustainable energy transition can be steered towards a more democratic and inclusive energy system.