How Institutional Structures Create Barriers and Incentives for Transformation: the Case of Urban Water Utilities in the United States

Many urban areas across the globe are facing water scarcity issues driven by climate change and continued population growth. To foster a broad transition toward more sustainable urban water management, we must better understand how and why some water utilities transform their management strategies and practices to adapt to these challenges while others continue to rely on short-term coping measures that may have the perverse effect of increasing their vulnerability. Although several factors have been shown to influence water management transitions (Garcia et al. 2019), little attention has been paid to the highly diverse institutional structures of water utilities and how they may create unique incentives for or barriers to urban water management transition (Deslatte et al. 2021). In this paper, we expand upon a conceptual model of dynamic change to investigate how various institutional structures of water utilities in the United States may foster or impede transformation. Drawing on an empirical institutional analysis of sixteen urban water utilities using the institutional grammar approach to derive key attributes of different utility types (Crawford and Ostrom, 1995), we analyze how different institutional arrangements create incentives and barriers associated with water management transitions toward sustainability. Our findings advance theory on the connection between institutional structure and transformative potential, with lessons for water utilities and other entities in urban areas dealing with complex and long-term sustainability challenges. References: Crawford, S. E., & Ostrom, E. (1995). A grammar of institutions. American political science review, 89(3), 582-600. Deslatte, A., Helmke‐Long, L., Anderies, J. M., Garcia, M., Hornberger, G. M., & Ann Koebele, E. (2021). Assessing sustainability through the Institutional Grammar of urban water systems. Policy Studies Journal. Garcia, M., Koebele, E., Deslatte, A., Ernst, K., Manago, K. F., & Treuer, G. (2019). Towards urban water sustainability: Analyzing management transitions in Miami, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles. Global Environmental Change, 58, 101967.