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

该奖项的全部或部分资金来自《2021年美国救援计划法案》(公法117-2)。该奖项是作为NSF社会、行为和经济学博士后研究奖学金(SPRF)计划的一部分提供的。SPRF计划的目标是为学术界、工业界或私营部门和政府的科学职业生涯培养有前途的、早期职业博士水平的科学家。SPRF奖项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。国家科学基金会致力于促进科学界所有阶层的科学家参与其研究方案和活动，包括那些来自代表性不足的群体的科学家；博士后阶段被认为是实现这一目标的专业发展的一个重要水平。每个博士后研究员都必须解决推动各自学科领域向前发展的重要科学问题。在加州大学洛杉矶分校格雷戈里·皮尔斯博士的赞助下，这一博士后奖学金奖项支持一位早期职业科学家，他研究加州社区供水系统性能的社会政治驱动因素，以及对公平获得安全和负担得起的饮用水的影响。实现享有水的人权是加州的一项重要政策优先事项，然而，由于近100万加州人受到不安全水的影响，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，仍有许多工作要做。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决定结果方面发挥关键作用。这项研究旨在通过考察民主代表制、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，并将其与竞争选举和多样化董事会代表等治理考虑因素联系起来。最后，该项目将开发案例研究，将这些发现应用于新出现的政策解决方案。通过这样做，该项目的目的是对加州及其他地区推进饮用水公平的挑战和机遇有更细微的了解。通过将治理特点与体制成果联系起来，该项目不仅将解决饮用水学术领域的治理差距，而且还将推动地方和环境治理文献中的关键辩论。几十年来，代议制官僚制、选举问责和机构分析理论中的关键假设都受到了相互矛盾的发现的影响。以加州为启发式案例，广义线性模型将被用来将社会政治特征与系统性能的各种衡量标准联系起来。使用多个性能指标将允许测试相互竞争的假设，而无需事先将它们设置为相互排斥，从而打开了识别不同驱动因素和性能方面之间的权衡的大门。然后，这些发现将为三项定性调查提供信息，这些调查将把结果与背景联系起来，并确定将结果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智力优势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.