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

该奖项全部或部分根据2021年美国救援计划法案（公法117-2）资助。该奖项是NSF社会、行为和经济科学博士后研究奖学金（SPRF）计划的一部分。SPRF计划的目标是为学术界，工业或私营部门和政府的科学事业准备有前途的早期职业博士级科学家。SPRF的奖励包括在知名科学家的赞助下进行两年的培训，并鼓励博士后研究员进行独立研究。NSF致力于促进来自科学界各部门的科学家，包括来自代表性不足的群体的科学家参与其研究计划和活动;博士后期间被认为是实现这一目标的专业发展的重要水平。每个博士后研究员必须解决推进各自学科领域的重要科学问题。格雷戈里·皮尔斯在加州洛杉矶大学的赞助下，这个博士后奖学金支持早期职业科学家调查社区水系统性能的社会政治驱动因素在加州和公平获得安全和负担得起的饮用水的影响。实现水权是加州的一项重要政策优先事项，然而，近100万加州人受到不安全用水的影响，多达三分之一的加州人受到负担不起的饮用水价格的影响，显然，要实现这一愿景还有许多工作要做。关于这一主题的现有研究和政策解决方案主要集中在解决饮用水危机的工程和其他技术方法上，但越来越多的证据表明，社会和政治因素也在形成结果方面发挥着关键作用。本研究旨在通过研究民主代表制、选举和制度设计在社区饮用水供应中的作用来解决这一差距。该项目将制定若干系统业绩衡量标准，并将其与竞争性选举和董事会代表多元化等治理考虑因素联系起来。最后，该项目将开展个案研究，使这些研究结果对新出现的政策解决办法产生影响。在这样做的过程中，该项目旨在促进对加州及其他地区促进饮用水公平的挑战和机遇的更细致入微的理解。通过将治理特征与机构成果联系起来，该项目不仅将解决饮用水学术领域的治理差距，还将推动地方和环境治理文献中的关键辩论。代议制官僚制、选举问责制和制度分析理论中的关键假设都受到几十年相互矛盾的研究结果的影响。使用加州作为一个启发式的情况下，广义线性模型将被用来链接社会政治特征与各种措施的系统性能。使用多个性能指标将允许测试相互竞争的假设，而无需先验地将它们设置为相互排斥的，从而为确定不同驱动因素和性能方面之间的权衡打开了大门。这些发现将为三项定性调查提供信息，这些调查将对结果进行背景分析，并确定将其应用于潜在解决方案的机会和障碍。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.