Policy Conflicts, Framing, and Advocacy: Water Shutoff Politics in Detroit

• In Event: Environmental Justice: Assessing Problems and Remedies

Abstract

Universal water access is central to social and environmental justice, human rights, and sustainable development; household-level water shutoffs by utility providers, and the policies and infrastructures that produce them, are a barrier to achieving these goals. Drinking water service provision is a core function of government, and constitutes an intimate and vital relationship between governments and constituents. Accordingly, how and for whom water utilities operate, or fail, is a key indicator of the social and political values embedded in these political and infrastructural systems. The use and experience of water shutoffs as a policy tool thus offer an entry point for examining how environmental injustice transpires and persists.

In this paper, we use the case of Detroit’s mass water shutoff event in 2014 – the largest residential water shutoff in US history – to examine how governments and publics differently and interactively understand, explain, and respond to such events. Previous studies of water shutoffs and unequal access have mainly focused on their implications for water security, public health, and psychosocial wellbeing; we add to this work by further investigating the infrastructural politics that shutoffs bring to light and magnify: how physical water infrastructures hold sociopolitical roles and meanings, which shutoffs – as an experience of infrastructural exclusion – illuminate.

We use historical document and media analysis to scope the history of drinking water service politics in Detroit, to understand the key points of contention in the broader debate, and to characterize the arguments of both government and resident-activist actors. We then analyze government and civil society organization documents to characterize the rationales and strategies of key actor groups and gain insight into how and when they engage with one another. We identify three key themes of controversy: 1) contested definitions of ‘affordability’ and responsibilization of residents; 2) competing framings of water access as a human right and public health issue vs. water access as the product of purely technical and fiscal decision-making; and 3) whether billing practices may obscure mechanisms by which the municipal government produces unaffordability. These points of contention emerge as resident-activists continually (re)politicize shutoffs, including through leveraging ‘elite’ expertise, as government simultaneously depoliticizes and ‘technocratizes’ them using anti-poor fiscal rationalities. Through building understanding of the politics of water shutoffs in Detroit, we offer insight into how, why, and to whom shutoffs occur, and link these insights to environmental justice scholarship more broadly. We conclude by offering recommendations for policy analysis and advocacy toward constructing more just and equitable water provision systems in Detroit and beyond

Authors

• Olivia David, University of Michigan

• Sara Hughes, University of Michigan