Examining the variation in local water sustainability practices

Abstract

As sustainable development is becoming more important to ensure the economic success and social well-being of any government, without regard to its level, the efficient use and protection of natural resources has increased in importance. And local governments are at the forefront of developing sustainability policy in many ways. This study investigates the factors that influence the variation in local sustainability practices in one critical area, water conservation. The variation in adoption of water sustainability programs in municipalities across the U.S. is hypothesized to rely on three key factors: environmental condition, form of government, and fiscal condition. Our findings from an ordered logistic regression model indicate that municipalities with high drought level, high environmental policy priorities, and high community wealth are likely to adopt more water conservation programs.

Keywords:

• Water sustainability
• Water conservation policy
• Environmental condition
• Local governments

Notes

1 In this study, we define and measure sustainable local water policy as conservation efforts aimed primarily at increasing water resource. This meaning is somewhat broad, but we are based on the previous research. Most public administration and policy scholars use the term of sustainability as a broad concept as it is very difficult to provide a specific and detailed meaning of sustainability (Bulkeley, 2013; Feiock & Coutts, 2013; Fiorino, 2010; Krause, Feiock, & Hawkins, 2014). Also, we approach our analysis of water conservation policy — as operationalized as water conservation programs focused on increasing the amount of water resource – following the lead of many municipal sustainability scholars (for example, Opp & Saunders, 2012; Opp, Osgood, & Rugeley, 2014).

2 This present study does not aim to explain the direct management of public water supplies by professional public administrators, such as the directors of municipal public water departments or actors in state-level water agencies, nor does it examine the outcomes of the adoption of these water conservation practices on municipal water supplies. Both of these important research directions are beyond the scope of this study.

3 For example, the city of Wichita Falls in West Texas where water has been a critical scarce resource recently constructed a system to begin the reuse of wastewater directly for potable use by its citizens; the entire system costs the city 13 million dollars (Direct Potable Reuse Project. Department of Public Works, City of Wichita Falls, Texas. http://www.wichitafallstx.gov/index.aspx?nid=1595, accessed November 30, 2014.)

4 For example, the Citizens’ Alliance for Property Rights, the Protect Water Rights Coalition, and the American Land Rights Association.

5 It includes a battery of questions surveying local authorities’ attitudes and actions on water conservation, recycling, and transportation, among others.

6 The ICMA survey asks respondents: “Is your local government responsible for water services?” Given that we are interested in municipal water conservation policy, we removed from the data those cities that indicated they were not responsible for water services.

7 Although during this time period – from January 2009 to June 2010 – drought featured prominently in many areas of the U.S., most cities in the data did not suffer under drought conditions consistently during the 18 months included in the analysis. This accounts for the low mean drought condition score calculated using the weekly drought scores over these 18 months while some cities experienced the overall extreme drought level as shown in Table 1.

8 Interestingly the correlation between the drought level and the environmental policy priority is 0.05. This suggest that the overall level of environmental awareness is not influenced by any one factor such as the scarce water resource; rather it shows the more overall and comprehensive understanding of environmental issues in each city, supporting our approach to test these two environmental condition variables together.

9 The data on median income was also collected, but the correlation between these two variables is significantly high (0.75). Thus, we include only median home value.

10 We also ran OLS, negative binomial, and Poisson models for the variables in addition to this main ordered logit model and found that the significant variables are the same among the models.

11 The inclusion of state dummy variables to control for state-level effects did not alter the substantive outcome of the statistical analysis, and for brevity sake we do not report the results. The overall percentage of correctly predicted cases for our ordered logistic regression with 5 outcomes is 34%, which suggests that a municipality’s choice of the number of water sustainability actions is roughly 1/3 correctly predicted.