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Scholars and policy makers alike frequently promote drinking water system consolidation as a solution to the longstanding struggles of small water systems and the related consequences of service fragmentation, including vulnerability to climate change and persistent racial and economic inequalities in access to safe and affordable drinking water. Despite enthusiasm for the concept, however, our understanding of how, why, and where consolidations occur has remained stubbornly limited such that the promise of drinking water system consolidation remains theoretical at best. This study analyzes all known water system consolidations (n = 206) in the state of California over a 7‐year period (2015–2021). We find empirical support for certain theoretical claims about consolidation, including an overall reduction in the number of regulated systems, with the largest reductions occurring among particularly underperforming, climate‐vulnerable, and unrepresentative system types. Other findings, however, do not align with the literature on the subject. We find limited evidence of either water service privatization or remunicipalization trends and seemingly limited prospects for economies of scale benefits through consolidations. Moreover, roughly half of consolidations during the study period involve non‐residential water systems. Among the consolidated community water systems, systems serving higher‐resourced communities are overrepresented compared to those serving lower‐resourced communities by a margin of two‐to‐one. It is time to move beyond the blanket assumption of positive consolidation benefits toward a more nuanced understanding of the associated opportunities and limitations. Depending on their goals, policymakers may need to support more specific types of consolidation.

 

Rapid adaptation is necessary to maintain, let alone expand, access to reliable, safe drinking water in the face of climate change. Existing research focuses largely on the role, priorities, and incentives of local managers to pursue adaptation strategies while mostly neglecting the role of the broader public, despite the strong public support required to fund and implement many climate adaptation plans. In this paper, we interrogate the relationship between personal experiences of household water supply impacts from extreme weather events and hazard exposure with individual concern about future supply reliability among a statewide representative sample of California households. We find that more than one-third of Californians report experiencing impacts of climate change on their household water supplies and show that these reported impacts differently influence residents’ concern about future water supply reliability, depending on the type of event experienced. In contrast, residents’ concern about future water supplies is not significantly associated with hazard exposure. These findings emphasize the importance of local managers’ attending to not only how climate change is projected to affect their water resources, but how, and whether, residents perceive these risks. The critical role of personal experience in increasing concern highlights that post-extreme events with water supply impacts may offer a critical window to advance solutions. Managers should not assume, however, that all extreme events will promote concern in the same way or to the same degree.

 

Assumptions of trust in water systems are widespread in higher-income countries, often linked to expectations of “modern water.” The current literature on water and trust also tends to reinforce a technoscientific approach, emphasizing the importance of aligning water user perceptions with expert assessments. Although such approaches can be useful to document instances of distrust, they often fail to explain why patterns differ over time, and across contexts and populations. Addressing these shortcomings, we offer a relational approach focused on the trustworthiness of hydro-social systems to contextualize water-trust dynamics in relation to broader practices and contexts. In doing so, we investigate three high-profile water crises in North America where examples of distrust are prevalent: Flint, Michigan; Kashechewan First Nation; and the Navajo Nation. Through our theoretical and empirical examination, we offer insights on these dynamics and find that distrust may at times be a warranted and understandable response to experiences of water insecurity and injustice. We examine the interconnected experiences of marginality and inequity, ontological and epistemological injustice, unequal governance and politics, and histories of water insecurity and harm as potential contributors to untrustworthiness in hydro-social systems. We close with recommendations for future directions to better understand water-trust dynamics and address water insecurity.