Session 1: Foundation Panel — The Changing Role of Water Regulation

Water regulation is at a turning point. Regulatory frameworks designed for an era of relative water abundance and predictable supply must now respond to scarcity, climate uncertainty, new technologies, and increasingly diverse water portfolios. As utilities combine conventional sources with desalination, reuse and demand management, regulators are no longer simply overseeing existing systems, they are helping shape how future water supplies are developed, financed and secured.

Why regulation is changing

The regulatory model built through the 1990s and 2000s was constructed around a defined set of tasks: setting tariffs, issuing licenses, and monitoring compliance against them. It was a coherent answer to the conditions of its time, and those conditions have since changed. Social expectations have moved, so that legitimacy, affordability and public trust now shape the space in which regulators operate as much as economic considerations do. Technology has advanced, so that data, metering, digital operations and manufactured supply have expanded what a regulator is able to observe and therefore able to require. And the configuration of water systems has altered, so that supply is increasingly drawn from a portfolio of conventional, desalinated, reused and demand-managed sources, each carrying a different cost, contractual and risk profile.

The question this session puts to the Exchange is not whether regulation should be improved, but why an approach that worked is proving harder to sustain. The foundational question is therefore: how must water regulation evolve to enable innovation, investment, resilience and public value while maintaining trust and accountability?

The three themes

The session sets out the three themes that structure the Exchange. Each is introduced here, carried through the regional and thematic sessions of the day, and returned to in the closing synthesis.

• Theme 1. Why approaches that once worked are proving harder to sustain. What assumptions behind established regulatory approaches are proving hardest to sustain?
• Theme 2. The implications of the emerging use of desalination for the regulation of water and wastewater services. As desalination and reuse grow, where does regulatory influence weaken across the water value chain?
• Theme 3. From integration in principle to integration in practice. What does effective, system-wide regulation need to deliver in practice, in efficiency, resilience, investment confidence and public value?

What the panel is asked to do

Beyond the diagnosis, the panel is asked to look forward, deliberately at the opening rather than at the close. Panelists are asked to describe the regulation they expect to be needed a decade from now: the mandates regulators will have to hold, the instruments they will need, the capacities they will have to build, and the institutional arrangements that do not yet exist.