When Decentralization Fails: Governance and Inequity in California’s Drinking Water System

In the United States, there are more than 151,000 drinking water systems which operate at a variety of decision-making scales and under various governance and ownership structures (US EPA, 2015). This extreme level of decentralization and fragmentation may allow for local control and flexibility, but it has not guaranteed safe drinking water for all (Hughes & Mullin, 2017; Pannu, 2012). In California alone, there are more than a million people each year receiving unsafe drinking-water. To further our understanding of how system governance contributes to these drinking water disparities, we compile and analyze a novel dataset including all 2,886 of California’s active Community Water Systems and their health-based Safe Drinking Water Act violations (2012-2018) in order to answer two important questions: 1) how is California drinking water governance organized at the system level? 2) Do certain types of governance structures out-perform or under-perform compared to others? We find that while control variables such as population size remain most determinative of system performance, there are significant differences in SDWA compliance between distinct governance arrangements. These findings highlight the important role that governance, in its broader conception, plays in contributing to SDWA noncompliance and leads us to argue that determining the role of governance in creating disparities, therefore, is an important prerequisite to understanding how different arrangement might best address them.