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

加强美国基础设施(SAI)是一项NSF计划，旨在刺激以人类为中心的基础性研究和潜在的变革性研究，以加强美国的基础设施。有效的基础设施为社会经济活力和广泛的生活质量改善提供了坚实的基础。强大、可靠和有效的基础设施刺激私营部门创新，增长经济，创造就业机会，提高公共部门服务提供效率，加强社区力量，促进机会均等，保护自然环境，增强国家安全，推动美国的领导地位。要实现这些目标，需要来自科学和工程学科的专业知识。SAI侧重于人类推理和决策、治理以及社会和文化过程的知识如何能够建立和维护有效的基础设施，以改善生活和社会，并建立在技术和工程进步的基础上。本研究项目考察供水供应商决策的动态，以确定哪些决策对未来的适应性至关重要，以及如何解决关于对压力源的替代反应对供水供应商目标的不同影响的紧张局势。美国各地的自来水供应商正面临来自各种压力因素的前所未有的挑战，包括但不限于气候变化、不断变化的水需求、对水质的威胁以及延迟维护。对这些压力源的反应是通过各种决定作出的，其中许多决定涉及到水供应商的多个同时目标(例如可靠性、成本效益、环境管理等)之间的权衡。并影响到未来可用改编的范围。研究结果有助于理解影响水基础设施强度和有效性的体制动态，包括供水系统内如何发生变化，以及变化如何导致路径依赖或远离路径依赖。结果通过提供一个简约的模型来支持决策和研究，该模型可用于指导供水公司的行动，指导决策支持工具的开发，以更全面地捕捉供水公司的决策过程，并指导供水系统的计算机建模。具体地说，该项目调查美国中型供水系统的决策，这些系统经历了中断，人口减少，或两者兼而有之。该项目的数据是通过访谈、焦点小组和二手材料收集的。它们用于制定供水供应商决策框架，可用于确定供水规划和运作中的关键事件或决定，作为转折点，为适应奠定基础，或导致抑制适应的路径依赖。这项研究还揭示了在这些转折点上发生的潜在的相互竞争的制度逻辑，并确定了个人、规范和自来水供应商内部的制度流程相互作用的方式，以影响如何解决紧张局势，从而影响系统的适应。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.