Water Unaffordability in the United States: Using Principles of Organizational Learning to Understand Municipal Capacity to Safeguard Water Access

Northeastern University, Boston MA

Investigators

Abstract

Water Unaffordability in the United States: Using Principles of Organizational Capacity to Understand Municipal Variation in Providing Water Access The United Nations has recognized access to sufficient, safe, acceptable, physically accessible, and affordable water and sanitation as fundamental human rights. Nevertheless, the cost of household water and sanitation services for U.S. consumers has risen much faster than the general cost of living in the 21st century. Nonpayment of water bills is increasing and water utilities in some cities have responded by shutting off water delivery to households with unpaid bills. This project will identify the historical, ecological, demographic, technological, political, and legal factors that contribute to water unaffordability, and assess the consequences of escalating water costs for vulnerable populations. The project will show how a city’s organizational capacity, e.g., fiscal and economic resources, formal policies, physical infrastructure, information system resources, and the skill and professional training of city employees, affects the design and implementation of city policies on water affordability. The project will also illustrate the extent to which certain types of policies and practices disproportionately affect elderly, disabled, low-income, and non-white Americans. The project will help government officials identify forces that create variations in water affordability policies, and will also develop educational materials to facilitate partnerships between municipal officials, water utility managers, and the public, to help them improve local water affordability and assistance programs. The costs of household water and sanitation services has risen sharply in the 21st century, and nonpayment of water bills has affected some households. The study uses mixed methods and a comparative case study design to understand how a municipality’s organizational capacity and discretion among water resource managers interact with state-level legal and economic factors to shape decisions about cost relief policies for low-income, non-white, and other socially vulnerable groups, and enforcement mechanisms that secure payment of water and sanitation bills. The project will first collect administrative and archival data on water policies in a sample of 12 cities in 2 states: Massachusetts and Pennsylvania. Next, the project will select 6-8 cities for semi-structured, in-depth interviews, with 9-10 interviews in each city, for a total of approximately 80 interviews. The comparative case study design, which nests municipal decision making in the context of state-level legal, political, and economic constraints, will advance research on sustainability that focuses on how place-based dynamics contribute to sustainable and just management of human needs and ecological resources. The project will advance sociological theories on organizational capacity and organizational learning by showing how public sector organizations integrate multiple types of knowledge--technical, bureaucratic, and ethical--in developing policies that facilitate or constrain access to basic human needs. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.