Socio-political drivers of performance in community water systems and their implications for advancing safe drinking water access

Dobbin, Kristin B, Davis CA

Investigators

Abstract

This award is funded in whole or in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2). This award was provided as part of NSF's Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellowships (SPRF) program. The goal of the SPRF program is to prepare promising, early career doctoral-level scientists for scientific careers in academia, industry or private sector, and government. SPRF awards involve two years of training under the sponsorship of established scientists and encourage Postdoctoral Fellows to perform independent research. NSF seeks to promote the participation of scientists from all segments of the scientific community, including those from underrepresented groups, in its research programs and activities; the postdoctoral period is considered to be an important level of professional development in attaining this goal. Each Postdoctoral Fellow must address important scientific questions that advance their respective disciplinary fields. Under the sponsorship of Dr. Gregory Pierce at University of California Los Angeles, this postdoctoral fellowship award supports an early career scientist investigating the socio-political drivers of community water system performance in California and the implications for equitable access to safe and affordable drinking water. Achieving the human right to water is an important policy priority in California, yet, with nearly a million Californians impacted by unsafe water and as many as a third of Californians impacted by unaffordable drinking water rates, clearly much work remains to be done to achieve this vision. Existing research and policy solutions on this topic focus heavily on engineering and other technical approaches to solving the drinking water crisis, yet mounting evidence indicates that social and political factors also play a key role in shaping outcomes. This research aims to address this gap by examining the role of democratic representation, elections, and institutional design in community drinking water provision. The project will develop several system performance metrics and link them to governance considerations such as competitive elections and diversified board representation. Finally, the project will develop case studies to bring these findings to bear on emerging policy solutions. In doing so the project aims to contribute a more nuanced understanding of both the challenges and opportunities for advancing drinking water equity in California and beyond. By linking governance characteristics with institutional outcomes this project will not only address the governance gap in drinking water scholarship but also advance key debates in the local and environmental governance literatures. Key hypotheses in theories of representative bureaucracy, electoral accountability and institutional analysis have all been subject to decades of conflicting findings. Using California as a heuristic case, generalized linear models will be used to link socio-political characteristics with various measures of system performance. Using multiple measures of performance will allow for the testing of competing hypotheses without a priori setting them up as mutually exclusive, opening the door to identifying trade-offs between different drivers and facets of performance. These findings will then inform three qualitative investigations that will contextualize the results and identify opportunities and barriers for their application to potential solutions. 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.