ArticleScientific reports2026
Indicator-based assessment of social sustainability in urban water management across contrasting governance contexts.
Article in Scientific reports, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
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Abstract
Social sustainability is often insufficiently addressed in urban water management, particularly regarding equity, inclusion, and governance processes, which constrain progress toward resilient and socially just urban water systems. This study introduces and applies an indicator-based, framework-driven analytical approach to operationalize social sustainability in urban water management. Four principal dimensions—awareness, water-use practices, equity, and inclusion are assessed using a structured semi-quantitative scoring system, complemented by qualitative interpretation. The framework is implemented in two contrasting urban contexts, Peshawar (Pakistan) and Al-Jouf (Saudi Arabia), to investigate how varying socio-economic, climatic, and governance conditions influence social sustainability outcomes within a unified analytical structure. Descriptive statistics, radar-based visualization, sustainability gap assessment, and scenario-based sensitivity analysis are employed to evaluate indicator performance and relative influence. The aggregated findings indicate that the composite social sustainability index achieves approximately 38% of its normalized theoretical maximum, reflecting moderate to low social sustainability within the assessed framework. Awareness and water-use practices demonstrate moderate indicator performance, whereas equity and inclusion consistently exhibit weak outcomes across both contexts. Sensitivity analysis reveals that hypothetical enhancements in equity and inclusion produce significantly greater improvements in overall index performance (approximately 18–22%) compared to similar changes in awareness or behavioral indicators, underscoring the predominant role of governance-related dimensions in the model. Rather than highlighting numerical disparities between cities, the comparative analysis uncovers structurally similar constraints on social sustainability across cities with divergent development and institutional settings. The results underscore that while improvements in awareness and individual behavior are necessary, they are insufficient to achieve socially sustainable urban water management without equity-focused governance reforms and inclusive institutional mechanisms. By rendering social sustainability dimensions analytically explicit and comparable, the framework facilitates more informed governance reflection and establishes a basis for future empirical integration and policy evaluation in urban water systems.
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