Skip to main content
Metropolitan Governance and Management Transitions Laboratory
IU

Coupled Infrastructure Systems

Dynamics of Urban Water Systems

In an era marked by significant socio-environmental shifts, the Dynamics of Urban Water Infrastructure project focuses on heavily engineered resource systems, such as urban water systems, facing both gradual changes and sudden extreme events. It explores the challenges of allocating resources and attention between crisis response and long-term planning. Decision-makers often lean towards reactive strategies, potentially increasing vulnerability to future failures. This research seeks to establish a new resource governance paradigm, encompassing redesigning “soft” social and informational infrastructure alongside traditional built infrastructure. By integrative cognitive, collective action, and robust control theories, the project aims to enhance the resilience of Urban Water Coupled Infrastructure Systems (UW-CISs) in the face of dynamic climate change impacts. 

This research delves into the complex interactions within urban water systems, examining how individuals, groups, and networks respond to environmental changes, focusing on predictive capabilities aiming to reduce surprises by aligning actions with anticipated future conditions. Through this approach, the project aims to understand better risk perception, collective action dynamics, and robustness-fragility tradeoffs within UW-CISs. By incorporating hydroclimatic data, physical infrastructure, and institutional design, the research offers scenario planning and predictive modeling for future water reliability and affordability, addressing the immediate need for decision support in navigating the challenges of the Anthropocene.

Publications:

Azizi, Koorosh, Jesse L. Barnes, Aaron Deslatte, Elizabeth A. Koebele, John M. Anderies, and Margaret Garcia. "Balancing Effectiveness and Equity in Sustainable Water Management Transitions: Case of the Miami-Dade Water and Sewer Department." Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management (2024): 151(1).

In response to diverse socioenvironmental challenges, urban water utilities in the United States are transitioning to more sustainable management practices that are often designed to reduce total water consumption. Although these practices can effectively maximize the use of limited water supplies, they may simultaneously exacerbate socioeconomic disparities if their implications for equity are not fully considered. This research examines the potential tradeoffs between effectiveness and equity in urban water transitions by analyzing Miami-Dade County’s high-efficiency toilet (HET) voluntary rebate program (VRP) as an example of a sustainable water management practice. Using data on HET-VRP participation, water consumption and billing, and socioeconomic indicators, we analyze the relationship between HET-VRP uptake and benefit distribution among residents. Through parametric and spatial statistical analyses, we find that areas with higher income and education levels have both higher water consumption and more HET-VRP participation, indicating potential program effectiveness. However, lower participation in vulnerable communities raises equity concerns, underscoring the need for targeted outreach and policies that consider distributional impacts. These findings suggest that urban water systems should better incorporate equity considerations in the planning and implementation of water conservation policies intended to promote sustainable water management.

Deslatte, Aaron, Jeffrey A. Adams, Faisal S. Cheema, Sara Alonso Vicario, Jesse L. Barnes, and Elizabeth A. Koebele. "How state-reinforced knowledge infrastructure influences adaptive urban water governance." Ecology and Society (2024): 29(4).

Resilience and environmental governance scholars have long studied and debated the role of the state in driving or coordinating responses to the varied dimensions of adaptive governance. In this study, we empirically analyze how multilevel, state-reinforced institutional designs impact the adaptive governance of urban water systems by structuring information production and use. Specifically, we analyze the multilevel institutional designs of “knowledge infrastructure systems,” defined as the rules and capacities within a system that allow actors to “produce, curate and communicate” information for governance. Drawing on a novel compilation of hydroclimatic data, media content, interviews, planning documents, and institutional designs, we empirically examine a typology of multi-level institutional arrangements in four U.S. urban water systems. Drawing from scholarship that considers the reflexivity of legal avenues and system performance, we conclude that state-reinforced rules governing the production and use of knowledge can clarify capacity-needs and support the efforts of managers responding to climate stressors through adaptive governance processes. They do so by formalizing planning types, timelines, and sanctions for noncompliance, while allowing local users and providers flexibility to innovate within these processes.

Deslatte, Aaron, Elizabeth A. Koebele, and Adam Wiechman. "Embracing the ambiguity: Tracing climate response diversity in urban water management." Public Administration (2024). 

Climate change is a management and governance challenge requiring diverse potential responses. This article highlights the critical role public managers play in navigating the response diversity of such governance systems. Response diversity is the rule-based set of options available for responding to unexpected service disruptions and is distinguished from ambiguity, which holds a negative valence within public administration. We first develop theoretical propositions about how institutions influence response diversity, drawing on public administration, resilience, and cognitive science research. Then, we use the Institutional Grammar and Institutional Network Analysis tools to empirically trace the rate-making processes in two U.S. urban water utilities. We conclude that institutional designs do distinctively influence response diversity and are therefore key for evaluating the climate adaptability of heavily engineered infrastructure systems. Specifically, we identify important differences in the diversity of information, participation, and heuristics used for selecting investment strategies.

Deslatte, Aaron, Elizabeth A. Koebele, Lauren Bartels, Adam Wiechman, Sara Alonso Vicario, Celeste Coughlin, and Desi Rybolt. "Institutions, Voids, and Dependencies: Tracing the Designs and Robustness of Urban Water Systems." International Review of Public Policy (2023): 5(5:2), 180. 

Urban water systems across the United States are facing a variety of challenges to existing supply and demand dynamics. Responding to these challenges in complex socio-environmental systems (SES) requires integrating various types of information – ranging from hydrologic data to political considerations and beyond – into policy and management decisions. However, the design of institutions, i.e., the formal rules in which urban water utilities are embedded, impact the flow of information, especially across diverse actor groups critical to developing and implementing policy or programmatic responses to signal error. This study develops a Bayesian application of the Robustness of Coupled Infrastructure Systems (CIS) Framework to analyze how the institutional design of a major U.S. urban water system impacts information flow and, ultimately, the goal of resource-delivery robustness. We utilize process-tracing along with an institutional analysis approach called the Institutional Grammar Tool (IGT) to parse formal institutions into their semantic and syntactic components and assess how they may influence a system’s capacity to respond to changing stressors. Our findings have important implications for the (re)design of institutions that better facilitate information flow among key policy actors and support policy changes that promote sustainable long-term urban water supply.

Deslatte, Aaron, Margaret Garcia, Elizabeth A. Koebele, and John M. Anderies. "Assessing the robustness of institutional arrangements." Routledge Handbook of Urban Water Governance (2022): 284.

-

Deslatte, Aaron, Laura Helmke‐Long, John M. Anderies, Margaret Garcia, George M. Hornberger, and Elizabeth Ann Koebele. "Assessing sustainability through the Institutional Grammar of urban water systems." Policy Studies Journal 50, no. 2 (2022): 387-406.

Urban water supply systems in the United States are designed to be robust to a wide range of historical hydrological conditions in both their physical infrastructure and in the institutional arrangements that govern their use. However, these systems vary greatly in their capacity to respond to new and evolving stressors on water supplies, such as those associated with climate change. Developing a more precise understanding of the complexity of interactions between the environmental and human components of urban water systems, specifically via their institutions, has the potential to help identify institutional design choices that can foster proactive transitions to more sustainable operating states. This article adapts the Institutional Grammar (IG) within the Robustness of Coupled Infrastructure Systems Framework to assess how a heavily engineered system's institutional configuration may impact its ability to transition to more sustainable management practices. While use of the IG has historically been limited in larger-N studies, our application demonstrates its flexibility in revealing variation in specific components across cases. The analysis finds the structure of formal institutions shape the interactions between actors differently, and that institutional diversity exists across environmental contexts. The extent to which this institutional diversity drives transitions remains an open question. The results highlight both the importance of and challenges involved with developing longitudinal data on social and natural system interactions.

 

Deslatte, Aaron, Katarzyna Szmigiel-Rawska, António F. Tavares, Justyna Ślawska, Izabela Karsznia, and Julita Łukomska. "Land use institutions and social-ecological systems: A spatial analysis of local landscape changes in Poland." Land Use Policy 114 (2022): 105937.

Understanding the complex impacts of human settlement patterns on social and natural systems is critical for immediate and long-term policy decisions and ecosystem preservation. Land-use patterns can be conceptualized as a form of integrated natural-human system within urban regions. However, extant scholarship on urban development and sprawl often overlooks the institutional diversity which exists across countries and regions. Development and land-use are politically charged governance issues, and these studies have rarely examined the influences of local political institutions on land-use changes across countries and over time. To help build cumulative knowledge on such urban systems, this study examines landscape change in Poland, which has undergone significant institutional evolution since the fall of the Soviet Union. Drawing from the urban and social-ecological systems (SES) literatures, we estimate spatio-temporal models of the interactive effects of socio-economic and political variables on land-use intensity. Consistent with an SES approach, the analysis finds that characteristics of the institutional design of land-use regulation – local autonomy, the productivity of the resource, and the predictability of land-use dynamics – influence more-intensive landscape changes over the study period (2006–2018). Specifically, both the electoral stability of the mayor and wealth of the community have a positive interactive effect on the conversion of landscapes to more urban uses. Development is also influenced by spatial and temporal dependency, and the availability of European Union “cohesion” investments intended to address economic inequality and promote sustainable development. The findings advance our understanding of the complexity of urban land-use patterns and sustainability goals.

Garcia, Margaret, Elizabeth Koebele, Aaron Deslatte, Kathleen Ernst, Kimberly F. Manago, and Galen Treuer. "Towards urban water sustainability: Analyzing management transitions in Miami, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles." Global Environmental Change 58 (2019): 101967.

As climate change challenges the sustainability of existing water supplies, many cities must transition toward more sustainable water management practices to meet demand. However, scholarly knowledge of the factors that drive such transitions is lacking, in part due to the dearth of comparative analyses in the existing transitions literature. This study seeks to identify common factors associated with transitions toward sustainability in urban water systems by comparing transitions in three cases: Miami, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles. For each case, we develop a data-driven narrative that integrates case-specific contextual data with standardized, longitudinal metrics of exposures theorized to drive transition. We then compare transitions across cases, focusing on periods of accelerated change (PoACs), to decouple generic factors associated with transition from those unique to individual case contexts. From this, we develop four propositions about transitions toward sustainable urban water management. We find that concurrent exposure to water stress and heightened public attention increases the probability of a PoAC (1), while other factors commonly expected to drive transition (e.g. financial stress) are unrelated (2). Moreover, the timing of exposure alignment (3) and the relationship between exposures and transition (4) may vary according to elements of the system’s unique context, including the institutional and infrastructure design and hydro-climatic setting. These propositions, as well as the methodology used to derive them, provide a new model for future research on how cities respond to climate-driven water challenges.

Treuer, Galen, Elizabeth Koebele, Aaron Deslatte, Kathleen Ernst, Margaret Garcia, and Kim Manago. "A narrative method for analyzing transitions in urban water management: The case of the Miami‐Dade Water and Sewer Department." Water Resources Research 53, no. 1 (2017): 891-908.

Although the water management sector is often characterized as resistant to risk and change, urban areas across the United States are increasingly interested in creating opportunities to transition toward more sustainable water management practices. These transitions are complex and difficult to predict – the product of water managers acting in response to numerous biophysical, regulatory, political, and financial factors within institutional constraints. Gaining a better understanding of how these transitions occur is crucial for continuing to improve water management. This paper presents a replicable methodology for analyzing how urban water utilities transition toward sustainability. The method combines standardized quantitative measures of variables that influence transitions with contextual qualitative information about a utility's unique decision making context to produce structured, data-driven narratives. Data-narratives document the broader context, the utility's pretransition history, key events during an accelerated period of change, and the consequences of transition. Eventually, these narratives should be compared across cases to develop empirically-testable hypotheses about the drivers of and barriers to utility-level urban water management transition. The methodology is illustrated through the case of the Miami-Dade Water and Sewer Department (WASD) in Miami-Dade County, Florida, and its transition toward more sustainable water management in the 2000's, during which per capita water use declined, conservation measures were enacted, water rates increased, and climate adaptive planning became the new norm.