Water Supply Decisions and Institutional Change

Water suppliers across the USA are facing unprecedented challenges arising from a variety of stressors including, but not limited to, climate change, changing demands for water, threats to water quality, and deferred maintenance. Responses to these stressors will occur through a variety of separate yet related decisions, many of which include involve tradeoffs between the multiple concurrent objectives of water suppliers (e.g., reliability, cost effectiveness, environmental stewardship, etc.) and which impact the scope of future adaptations available.

Water suppliers are complex institutions, comprised of multiple divisions and actors who collectively make decisions and do so within vertically and horizontally multi-jurisdictional systems. The presence of multiple actors and sub-groups, as well as potentially differing rationalities for decision-making within and across actors, needs to be taken into consideration. Responding to stressors and adapting to future conditions will require changes that include, yet extend beyond, supply or infrastructure. Transitions in water systems will necessarily entail shifts in the processes and norms used for water-supply decisions, revisions to administrative and operational practices, alterations in financing structures and mechanisms, and development of new paradigms for asset management, among others.

To address these challenges, we need to identify which decisions serve as inflection points, either setting the stage for adaptation or leading to path dependencies that inhibit adaptation. We also need to understand how water suppliers make decisions, including how they shift their own internal processes, expectations, and identities to respond to new conditions. Lastly, we need to identify the barriers that impede water suppliers from making adaptive decisions.

Objectives: This research project seeks improve understandings of water supplier decision-making, particularly when facing difficult or complex decisions that are critical to future adaptability. While there are growing sets of information available to support water suppliers in adaptation to climate change and water supply planning, many of those resources focus primarily on the long-term future and do not account for the complexity of decision-making, including the multiple tasks water suppliers must balance every day. Thus, the research aims to identify the common dilemmas faced by water suppliers, the short-term decisions that have long-term effects, and the varying ways in which water suppliers have worked through those issues.

Methods: Research will be undertaken for a 2 year period, starting in Fall 2021. Activities include interviews, phone surveys and focus groups discussions with mid-sized water systems in the USA.

Outputs and Outreach: Results from the research will contribute to understandings of the institutional dynamics influencing the strength and effectiveness of water infrastructure, including how change occurs within water supply systems and how changes can lead towards or away from path dependency. The project will support both policy making and research by providing generalizable information about water supplier decision-making that can be used to develop policies seeking to steer water supplier actions, to guide development of decision-support tools that more fully capture the decision-making processes of water suppliers, or to guide modeling that provides greater insights as to potential outcomes during transitions.

Questions, Suggestions and Participation: For questions about this research or to volunteer to participate, please contact amilman ‘at’ eco.umass.edu.

This research is based upon work supported in part by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 2120090 Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this paper are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. For questions about this research please contact amilman ‘at’ eco.umass.edu.