Water user’s mindsets and implications for water management: Review of literature and influences across householders in Urban Punjab

The act of theorizing the “water usage phenomenon” in Indian perspective borrows extensively from the existing literature on the subject matter. The literature identifies the “psychological” basis as guiding the “individual” cognitions, sense making and decision making patterns and scope. The other section of literature calls for the “user’s mindset” as being extensively influenced by the contextual environments, contextual actors as well as contextual influences as operating in nearby environment surrounding the concerned individual. The third reported influence is from across the governmental and non-governmental actors whose directive setting seems to impact the manner in which the water usage and water based conservation bound decisions are made on repetitive terms. This paper hence explores the theoretical paradigms and the respective notions which seem to support the factor based operation in subsequent chapters. This paper first explores the theoretical basis for the phenomenon vis a vis the user’s mindsets and then explore the theme of “contextual impact”, followed by the discussion of “outcomes” in terms of influences of user’s psychology and contextual aspects. The paper reviews the literature on the subject from three distinct perspectives: “user’s mindset”, “contextual influences on user’s psychology” and “outcomes”.