Drought, Risk, and Institutional Politics in the American Southwest

Abstract

Although there are multiple causes of the water scarcity crisis in the American Southwest, it can be used as a model of the long-term problem of freshwater shortages that climate change will exacerbate. We examine the water-supply crisis for 22 cities in the extended Southwest of the United States and develop a unique, new measure of water conservation policies and programs. Convergent qualitative and quantitative analyses suggest that political conflicts play an important role in the transition of water-supply regimes toward higher levels of demandreduction policies and programs. Qualitative analysis using institutional theory identifies the interaction of four types of motivating logics-development, rural preservation, environmental, and urban consumer-and shows how demand-reduction strategies can potentially satisfy all four. Quantitative analysis of the explanatory factors for the variation in the adoption of demand-reduction policies points to the overwhelming importance of political preferences as defined by Cook's Partisan Voting Index. We suggest that approaches to water-supply choices are influenced less by direct partisan disagreements than by broad preferences for a development logic based on supply-increase strategies and discomfort with demand-reduction strategies that clash with conservative beliefs.

Measuring Urban Water Conservation Policies: Toward a Comprehensive Index

“…We used the categories of residential and commercial/industrial because the distinction appears in the policy descriptions themselves, in urban codes and ordinances, and also in existing scorecards that employ the distinction. We separated requirements and rebates because our previous research with a subset of cities indicated that more conservative cities may have a preference for rebates (Hess et al, 2016). We retained a separate category for billing structure because of the attention to the topic in the literature and the fact that billing categories were frequently implemented across customer types.…”

“…Strategies to increase water supply include building pipelines to distant water sources, constructing or expanding existing reservoirs, increasing the number of groundwater wells, and recharging aquifers. However, the strategy of expanding water sources can encounter political opposition from rural communities, environmentalists, and urban constituencies concerned with the costs of new investments (Hess et al, 2016). In this context, water conservation has become increasingly popular because it can avoid political opposition from rural communities, offer an environmentally sound solution to the water-shortage problem, and provide a source of water that is frequently less expensive than alternatives.…”

“…Nevertheless, water conservation can trigger its own types of opposition. For 1 example, utilities are concerned with revenue loss from diminished demand, and urban growth coalitions sometimes prefer to pursue new water sources where available (Kenney, 2014;Hess et al, 2016).…”

“…This study is methodological rather than empirical: we compare a summary WCI developed from our dataset with a WCI that we developed from a survey of the American Water Works Association (AWWA). We have completed empirical analyses elsewhere that use our dataset to understand factors that predict a high score on a city's WCP index (Hess et al, 2016;Gilligan et al, 2017). In this study, we provide details of the methodology used to develop our comprehensive WCP dataset as part of a general contribution to the problem of developing better measures of WCPs.…”

The Political Economy of the Water Footprint: A Cross-National Analysis of Ecologically Unequal Exchange

“…at least 1 month of the year" [8] (p. 3). With climate change, these issues are expected to worsen with time, especially in regard to drought [9,10]. While it may be tempting to attribute water problems solely to population growth, the United Nations Development Program [11] points out that since the Second World War, water use has been growing twice as fast as population.…”