A significant challenge for managers of drinking water infrastructures is to make effective strategic decisions for assets with a long lifetime in an uncertain and changing environment. Water resources, which are part of the drinking water infrastructures, have a special position in this decision making process as they operate at the interface of the socio-technical and the socio-ecological subsystems: water resources are the input for the technical system, consisting of pipes and pumps that interact with different actors; and water resources can be seen as output from the ecological system which is influenced by environmental and political issues like climate change, drought and competing and changing uses of water and space. This paper discusses how to design the water resources in such a way that they function in the desired way at present, but that the design also fits an uncertain future as good as possible. To this extent, a framework was developed based upon the notion of resilience. Existing general design principles for socio-technical systems from literature were used as building blocks in the development of our water resources design principles (WR-DP) framework. Three key characteristics of water resources were distinguished in this framework: water quantity, water quality and the environmental impact of the water resources. In addition, we distinguished two dimensions that allowed us to explicitly describe all possible design principles: system scale and class. The first dimension, system scale, ranges from one water resource to a network of water resources. The second dimension, class, makes a distinction between social aspects and technical aspects. Application of the WR-DP framework in a case of a drinking water company in the Netherlands showed the usability of the framework.

饮用水基础设施管理者面临的一项重大挑战是在不确定和多变的环境中为使用寿命长的资产制定有效的战略决策。水资源是饮用水基础设施的一部分，在决策过程中占有特殊地位，因为它们是在社会技术子系统和社会生态子系统的界面上运行的：水资源是技术系统的输入，包括与不同角色交互的管道和泵；水资源可以看作是生态系统的输出，受到环境和政治问题（如气候变化，干旱以及水和空间的竞争和变化使用）的影响。本文讨论了如何设计水资源，使其以目前所需的方式发挥作用，但是设计也尽可能地适合不确定的未来。在此程度上，基于弹性概念开发了一个框架。文献中有关社会技术系统的现有一般设计原则被用作开发我们的水资源设计原则（WR-DP）框架的基础。在此框架中，水资源的三个关键特征得以区分：水量，水质和水资源的环境影响。此外，我们区分了两个维度，这些维度使我们能够明确描述所有可能的设计原则：系统规模和类。第一维，系统规模，从一个水资源到一个水资源网络。第二个维度，类别，区分了社会方面和技术方面。