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Institutional Diversity and Safe Drinking Water Provision in the United States

The United States has nearly 50,000 community water systems (CWSs) operating under a variety of governance structures. This level of decentralization may allow for local control, but it has not guaranteed safe drinking water for all, particularly for low-income people of color in rural and indigenous communities. Yet the relationship between system governance and safe drinking water provision remains poorly understood. In this paper, we compile and analyze a novel dataset of California’s CWSs, classified into 26 different institutional types. Our Bayesian mixed-effects model measures the institutional arrangements of CWSs as a predictive factor for Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) compliance. While control variables such as population size largely determine compliance, the model also reports significant differences in the number of SDWA health violations by institutional type. These findings demonstrate that institutional arrangements correlate with SDWA non-compliance, indicating an important role in shaping equitable access to safe drinking water. Institutional characteristics also affect the implementation of important policy interventions to address non-compliance like system consolidation. As such, determining the role of governance in creating and perpetuating disparities in delivering compliant water is an important prerequisite to understanding how different institutional arrangements might best address them. The sheer diversity of institutional types, especially among small systems, and their statistical utility for understanding SDWA violations, provides a strong case for additional investigation. For scholars and policymakers, pursuing solutions to address persistent compliance issues. Doing so will require finally embracing the challenge of analyzing the institutional diversity present in drinking water provision.