Networked adaptive capacities and community resilience in public drinking water management: A regional case study from the Northern Great Plains

Keywords: community resilience, drinking water, governance, adaptive capacity, rural
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Saturday
Session Start / End Time: 2/26/2022 03:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/26/2022 05:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 78

Abstract

Drinking water management is a highly regulated space where federal-level policies shape local social, economic, and environmental outcomes. Local political actors rely on leadership, knowledge, and financial capacity to comply with federal public health and fiscal policy provisions, and as such, outcomes in public drinking water provision are highly contingent on local adaptive capacity. While this relationship has been identified in the literature, little work has been done to explicate the connection between drinking water governance and community resilience, which is theorized to rely on the same set of adaptive capacities critical to drinking water governance. This paper fills this gap, using a qualitative analysis of the drinking water policy and key informant interviews from a rural region facing longstanding environmental and economic vulnerabilities. We demonstrate that social, economic, and environmental capacities are inextricably networked through the process of drinking water governance such that negative feedbacks are produced when environmental values are upheld above others. In particular, social capacity and local financial capital are traded-off in the process of complying with federal safe drinking water policies. Our analysis illuminates consequences of policy design, and suggests a basis for using community resilience as a policy evaluation tool to ensure social and economic variables are not sacrificed in the process of mitigating environmental risks.