EAGER: SAI: Water Supplier Decisions & Institutional Change During Transitions

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Strengthening American Infrastructure (SAI) is an NSF Program seeking to stimulate human-centered fundamental and potentially transformative research that strengthens America’s infrastructure. Effective infrastructure provides a strong foundation for socioeconomic vitality and broad quality of life improvement. Strong, reliable, and effective infrastructure spurs private-sector innovation, grows the economy, creates jobs, makes public-sector service provision more efficient, strengthens communities, promotes equal opportunity, protects the natural environment, enhances national security, and fuels American leadership. To achieve these goals requires expertise from across the science and engineering disciplines. SAI focuses on how knowledge of human reasoning and decision making, governance, and social and cultural processes enables the building and maintenance of effective infrastructure that improves lives and society and builds on advances in technology and engineering.This research project examines the dynamics of water supplier decision-making to determine which decisions are critical to future adaptability and how tensions regarding the differential impacts of alternative responses to stressors on water supplier objectives are resolved. Water suppliers across the USA are facing unprecedented challenges arising from a variety of stressors including, but not limited to, climate change, changing demands for water, threats to water quality, and deferred maintenance. Responses to these stressors occur through a variety of decisions, many of which include involve tradeoffs between the multiple concurrent objectives of water suppliers (e.g., reliability, cost effectiveness, environmental stewardship, etc.) and which affect the scope of future adaptations available. Results from the research contribute to understandings of the institutional dynamics influencing the strength and effectiveness of water infrastructure, including how change occurs within water supply systems and how changes can lead towards or away from path dependency. Results support decision making and research by providing a parsimonious model that can be used to steer water supplier actions, to guide development of decision-support tools that more fully capture the decision-making processes of water suppliers, and to guide computer modeling of water supply systems.Specifically, the project investigates decision-making in mid-sized water systems in the USA that have experienced disruptions, have declining populations, or both. Data for the project are collected through interviews, focus groups, and secondary materials. These are used to develop a framework of water supplier decision-making that can be used to identify critical events or decisions within water supply planning and operations that serve as inflection points, either setting the stage for adaptation or leading to path dependencies that inhibit adaptation. The research also uncovers the potentially competing institutional logics occurring at these inflection points and identifies the ways in which individuals, norms, and institutional processes within the water supplier interact to influence how tensions are resolved, and thus the adaptations the system moves.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.