State Role in Local Politically Decoupled Water Conservation Policy Adoption

• In Event: Water Governance Issues

Abstract

In response to increasing climate variability, aging infrastructure, growing debt, and other novel stressors, US local governments must often adopt politically unfavorable policies, such as water rate hikes, to enhance water conservation. To avoid potential electoral punishment as a consequence of unfavorable policy adoption, local governments may choose to “decouple” or transfer water system ownership from the local government to a private firm. However, evidence about the willingness of private firms to adopt unpopular water conservation measures appears mixed. Guided by the literature on political decoupling within a principal-agent federalism framework, we argue that state-level regulatory factors may moderate local public and private water systems differently and may explain conflicting findings in previous studies regarding the adoption of water conservation policies. Using two datasets on US local government water conservation policy adoption – including the 2015 International City/County Management Association survey of Local Government Sustainability Practices and Vanderbilt Water Conservation Index – we test if (1) privatized water systems adopt more conservation policies than local government-owned systems when controlling for state-level regulatory differences and (2) state-level conservation-based regulatory stringency moderates local policy adoption. By examining the links between political decoupling, state regulatory stringency, and local water conservation policy adoption, this study aims to identify if water system decoupling may be a feasible governance solution to increasing local water conservation policy adoption overall or strictly a feasible solution in key states depending on their regulatory governance stringency.

Authors

• Jesse L Barnes, University of Nevada, Reno

• Elizabeth Koebele, University of Nevada, Reno