High volumes of non-revenue water (NRW) threaten water security in many developing countries. The traditional technocentric water management regime largely neglects social and systemic complexities that need to be addressed for successful reform. This paper explores the challenges of water sector reform and NRW reduction in Malaysia to identify possible drivers that can accelerate the NRW management reform. The analysis uses a system thinking approach, with key systemic relationships represented with causal loop diagrams (CLDs). Findings reveal that the NRW management reform is influenced by technical, environmental, economic, social, institutional, and corporate governance factors. Using the CLDs, leverage points that can accelerate NRW management reform are identified. Policies and strategies that can accelerate the NRW management reform in Malaysia are recommended: (1) water supply security and sustainable development must be emphasised as the main concern for water sector reform; (2) understanding of the socio-economic benefits of water tariff adjustment by stakeholders is necessary to build political alliances for water tariff increments; and (3) the newly privatised water services providers in Malaysia require an integrated NRW reduction plan to optimise the time taken for NRW reduction and at the same time, transforming their current human resources that were inherited from the previous public water utilities.

In contextualising the serious water loss, inefficient resource utilization, and ineffective water utility management in Malaysia, the objective of this study is to understand the public’s perception of non-revenue water (NRW) management in order to provide policy inputs, and to determine ways to improve public participation in NRW reduction. Findings reveal that there is currently only meagre public participation in NRW management in Malaysia, with a majority of the respondents demonstrating a lack of knowledge and awareness on NRW; over-dependence on water utility and government agencies in reducing NRW rates; and failure to submit a report when a leaking pipe is noticed. Educating the public on the importance of reducing NRW and promoting public interests and concerns around water tariffs, is essential to improve NRW reductions in Malaysia. Community-led strategies to better engage the public in addressing NRW-related issues have to be enhanced. To this end, concrete policy implications derived from the findings of the study are outlined.

Due to increased climate uncertainty, political instability and economic turbulence, many interstate river basins are in the midst of transforming their water governance strategies to embrace the aforementioned challenges. A prerequisite of achieving such transformation is to understand various types of rules that build the water governance structure of the river basins. Therefore, we demonstrate an institutional analysis approach that combines the institutional grammar and the institutional analysis and development framework’s rule typology to identify the various type of formal rules regulating the water resources in Australia’s Murray-Darling Basin (MDB). The institutional feature and key actors of the basin’s water governance structure under different water governance situations are also explored. The approach is built on an institutional content analysis tool named institutional grammar and the institutional analysis and development framework’s rule typology. Using the approach, we dissect the Murray-Darling Basin Agreement of Australian Government’s Water Act 2007 to generate data for institutional analysis and subsequently, identifying the number and types of rules that form MDB’s water governance structure. We identify that MDB’s water governance structure stresses on choice rules and information rules that regulate actors’ choice of actions and the flow of information. Nevertheless, there are rules that only present in certain water governance situations, which indicating its institutional features. For instance, the position rules that create the basin’s water resource administrative units are found only in the action situation of administration. The scope rules that delineate the physical outcome to be produced are found dominating the action situations of water resource appropriation. The co-thinking type of aggregation rules that control the requirement of stakeholder consultation are mostly found in the situation of basin planning. In conclusion, the proposed approach able to generate the quantitative and qualitative information that can be used to analyze the complex structure of water resource governance in a river basin. Therefore, the research contributes to the development of a systematic water institution analysis tool.

Many large river basins, such as the Yellow River Basin (YRB) of China, have undergone water governance transformations to resolve long‐standing and emerging challenges. However, how newly introduced water‐related laws and regulations structurally transform internal institutional dynamics—the functions and interactions of institutional elements (e.g., governance rules and actors) within the governance system—and ultimately contribute to improved governance performance remains poorly understood. This knowledge gap limits our ability to explain why some water governance reforms succeed while others fail. Therefore, this paper examines how new water‐related legislation alters governance rules, redefines institutional roles and interactions among basin actors, and drives changes in water governance mode and performance, taking the YRB as a case. To analyze institutional dynamics, we propose an approach that integrates Sankey diagrams, institutional grammar, the rule typology of the institutional analysis and development framework, and a set of rule‐based governance indicators. This approach can decompose, connect, and trace institutional effects generated by legislative variation. Five national‐level legislative documents that have fundamentally transformed the YRB's water governance over recent decades are analyzed. The basin's governance mode evolved from fragmented (1987–1997) to centralized uncoordinated (1998–2001) and ultimately centralized coordinated (2006 onward). The interplay of legislative documents, institutionalized areas (e.g., water allocation and flow regulation), governance rule types (e.g., action‐specific and target‐specific rules), power distribution (e.g., centralization and decentralization), and coordination mechanisms (e.g., prior consultation and joint operation), drives the evolution of water governance modes. These findings offer insights for institutional designs in large river basins worldwide.

Water governance systems in many river basins require improvement to adapt to changes in environmental and socioeconomic landscapes. However, water governance reformation is a complex and challenging process. In particular, policymakers and water managers need a comprehensive understanding of the fundamental components that form the current water governance systems. Only then can new rules be introduced to alter the governance characteristics of these systems. This process is especially challenging in the case of interstate rivers that flow across multiple states, where governance systems are characterized by complex interstate water agreements and/or laws that cover various cross-state water management affairs and regulate stakeholders from different states. We use the institutional grammar (IG) to parse water agreements and laws, generating text-based data for assessing the institutional characteristics of interstate water governance systems. The IG decomposes written statements in the documents into different syntactic components. Based on these components, the functions of the statements can be identified and categorized into one of seven types of institutional rules, as defined by the rule concepts of the institutional analysis and development (IAD) framework. By analyzing these findings with indicators of governance characteristics, we are able to assess the allocation of water governance responsibilities and the degree of coordination within a water governance system to identify its institutional characteristics. We applied this method to analyze the water-related laws that form the governance systems of the Yellow River Basin (YRB) in China. The findings reveal that the YRB’s water governance system has undergone five major stages of structural evolution since 1987. During this process, the basin’s focus in water governance has shifted from flow regulation to water consumption governance, as well as expanding its governance scope to include interstate water administration and drought management. Currently, the YRB’s water governance systems are dominated by centralized governance structures characterized by the centralization of water governance responsibilities and a high degree of stakeholder coordination. The method demonstrates that text-based data generated through parsing water agreements and laws can systematically analyze the complex institutional characteristics of water governance systems. This research contributes to the advancement of text-based method for water governance analysis.