The water sector of Europe and North America, which provide drinking water and wastewater services to the society, today face a number of significant challenges that are pressuring the existing systems and challenging the current status-quo. With the emergence of new technologies, opportunities for new ways of managing and maintaining these infrastructural systems are enabled. At the same time, many infrastructural systems are difficult to change due to path dependencies, technological lock-ins, and conservative regimes and system cultures (David, 1992; Hughes, 1983; 1992; Kaijser, 2003). This especially applies to the water sector in the global North, which has developed over a very long period of time and consists of a large number of incumbent organisations, which taken together creates significant barriers towards innovation and change.

Transition theory postulates that pressure from the socio-technical landscape, internal momentum from niche-innovations, and growing destabilisation of the regime enhance a window of opportunity (w/o) for a possible transition (Geels and Schot, 2007). However, despite a sector functioning under a well-established “global water regime” (Fuenfschilling and Binz, 2018), the operations of water utilities are in practice situated in different local conditions, creating significantly different window of opportunity dynamics (Tongur and Engwall, 2017). Hence, from a public policy point of view, water and wastewater service provision cannot be treated as a coherent regime of national or global scale but must consider local geophysical and socio-political conditions.

This paper sets out to identify challenges - or innovation pressures - faced by water utilities in the stabilised European regime setting and to outline how these challenges differ depending on local geophysical and socio-political conditions. Our paper is based on a study of the water sector in Sweden, known for its well-functioning societal infrastructures and stable public institutions. Based on the empirical findings, we demonstrate that incumbent regime actors of the Swedish water sector mainly perceive pressure from ageing infrastructures and demographical changes, where the rigidness of the current regime is largely influenced by the political governance and current economic system. Furthermore, the findings illustrated how the regime actors’ abilities to respond to pressures were largely influenced by two local conditions on municipal level; (1) population size, and (2) population density. We suggest that emphasising such differences is important to understand where and how the water sector is most agile to change, and what hinders and facilitate that change.