How Policy and Local Capacity can Overcome the Rural Drinking Water Challenge
Reflection by Grete Gansauer.
In this commentary and reflection, Grete Gansauer connects our recent Water Justice panel discussion (video and summary at links, all part of our Rural Infrastructure series) to her own work on regional-scale water infrastructure and rural development in Montana. Grete Gansaur is a PhD student in Ecology and Environmental Sciences (Geography) at Montana State.
Like all Commentary here on the Rural Review, this post expresses the personal opinions of the author.
“An estimated 2.2 million Americans live without reliable access to safe drinking water and sanitation.”
For most households in the US, turning on the tap and filling a glass of water is second nature. It might be surprising, then, that environmental injustices parallel to the Flint, Michigan, drinking water crisis are a daily lived reality for millions of Americans disproportionately clustered in rural and tribal communities. An estimated 2.2 million Americans live without reliable access to safe drinking water and sanitation, and over 44 million Americans are served by water systems with Safe Drinking Water Act violations. The EPA estimates that 13 million residents rely on private wells for household drinking water access, most of which are in rural regions where households are not accessible by networked public water systems. Private wells are mostly unregulated by federal and state drinking water standards, which is concerning given that the USGS estimates more than one in five private wells contain contaminants which would be regulated by the Safe Drinking Water Act.
Such challenges can be generally characterized along three axes, each with unique legal landscapes: crises of water quality, crises of source-water supply or quantity, and crises of infrastructure. Unfortunately, the case of Flint–and the challenge facing much of rural America–exemplifies the convergence of all three.
The Rural Reconciliation Project recently hosted a panel to discuss legal drivers of water injustice in rural communities. Panelists described how a paucity of regulation for private well contamination effectively shifts environmental costs of industrial production onto households, and how competitive grants and loan award procedures are biased against rural communities with low financial capital. Listening to the conversation as a human geographer, it struck me how rural drinking water deficits are not only a function of policy. They are also a function of local capacity and governance.
Capacity essentially describes the suite of assets which enable communities to adapt to change, including embedded knowledge, technical ability, institutionalization of durable and democratic processes, environmental quality, and financial capital. The regulatory environment surrounding drinking water quality, supply, and infrastructure is one where decision making and program implementation is often carried out at the local level–meaning an individual community’s capacity is central to closing the rural drinking water access gap and to developing resilience in the long run. Because capacity is so broadly understood, it necessarily intersects with social, economic, and environmental trends facing remote and isolated regions.
Rural places are universally characterized by, if nothing else, low population density. Such population thinness translates into a paradox for local governments as the costs of service provision are higher per capita while public revenues rely on narrow tax bases. In a public administration climate which values rationalization and efficiency, rural services are often the first to get cut. Privatized water services are also loathe to engage in low demand rural markets where settlement patterns are spread out. As Katherine Garvey remarked on the panel, there is a reason American Water Works (a large private water utility provider serving the Eastern US) isn’t already serving rural West Virginia: it isn’t profitable to do so.
Beyond market constraints, low population regions face known barriers to regulatory and financial program administration because there are simply fewer people to carry out the work of implementation. While public water provision is one of the most basic functions of local governments in the US, it requires a high degree of knowledge, leadership, and technical capacity from local civic personnel–who, especially in rural locales, may be volunteers. A recent review found that Small Drinking Water Systems in the US and Canada that serve less than 500 people are more likely to exhibit noncompliance with national water quality standards, and often lack the financial capital necessary to carry out infrastructure upgrades which would bring them into regulatory compliance. Rural communities may have trouble accessing state and federal grant and loan programs when the giving capacity of the program is overdrawn or when localities lack technical capacity at the local level to navigate the application process.
Forthcoming research carried out by myself, Dr. Julia Haggerty and Jennifer Dunn (all at Montana State University) unearths the intersecting policy and capacity barriers of rural drinking water governance through a regional case study in Montana. Working in the central region of the state, we study small agriculture and ranching towns of 50-250 residents where crises of water quality, quantity, and infrastructure converge. More than a century of intensive agriculture coincides with endemic soil chemistry in the region to create low-quality and unreliable municipal source water resources which pose public health and quality of life concerns. The externalities of natural-resource based production diminish the region’s environmental capital– a common challenge for rural regions which host primary production industries. Against this unfavorable environmental context, our research demonstrates how adaptive local drinking water management is limited by existing policy frameworks and highly contingent on feedbacks between social, economic, and environmental capacities.
Water quality standards dictated by Safe Drinking Water Act programs often require towns to retroactively mitigate contamination issues through infrastructural upgrades. Not only are such requirements often beyond the fiscal capacity of communities, but they are difficult to plan for and implement when communities face uncertainty about their economic and demographic futures. Rural counties in the US have experienced population decline since 2000, which makes investing in capital improvements with lifetimes of seventy years or more a planning quagmire. The result is that communities risk overbuilding for future needs and outstripping their financial capacity in the process.
Towns usually seek financial assistance in the form of grants and loans from state and federal programs to assist with infrastructure upgrades, but the process is not without challenges. Our findings show that the funding process can be drawn out and success is uncertain, especially because a single project often requires multiple funding sources and application processes. The process of applying again and again–and often waiting several years to be successful–creates a significant drain on local leadership capacity and at the same time, prolongs environmental vulnerabilities. The outcome is that local decision makers are constrained from taking action to mitigate environmental risks and to develop local capital assets.
Placing this forthcoming research from Central Montana alongside RRP’s recent panel discussion demonstrates how the problem of subpar rural drinking water access is not going to be solved through legal reform alone. Although policy changes are certainly needed, rural drinking water deficits are shaped by intrinsic challenges facing contemporary Rural America, including: diffuse environmental hazards and industrial externalities, social and financial capacity constraints inherent to low population regions, and, potentially, capital improvement planning for population decline rather than growth. Each challenge requires rural communities to leverage capacity at the local and regional level to adapt.
Therefore, legal solutions and program design will need to consider the practical barriers to sustainable and universal implementation of drinking water quality, supply, and infrastructure policy–recognizing that associated programs are often implemented (at least in part) at the local level. Improving drinking water access is not merely a technical problem, rather, it is a multidimensional and governance process which involves complex interplays between social, economic, and environmental capacities at the local level. Emergent policy frameworks must reflect that.
Continue the Conversation!
The Rural Reconciliation Project thanks Grete Gansauer for this thoughtful reflection on water quality, infrastructure surrounding drinking water, and what this means for rural communities. We welcome similar contributions from a range of rural and non-rural voices here on The Rural Review and have posted submission guidelines here.
