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Abstract As climate change increases water supply variability, urban water utilities must adopt innovative strategies to enhance water system sustainability. Groundwater banking (GWB), or the storage of water in aquifers for later use, is a relatively novel water management strategy that can help utilities adapt to such challenges while providing several benefits over more typical resilience actions. However, its slow and unevenly distributed adoption suggests a need to better understand the drivers of and barriers to GWB adoption. We use a mixed-methods approach to analyze conditions that may promote, or hinder, GWB adoption in 16 urban water systems in the United States in order to draw lessons for other systems. We find that specific environmental and legal conditions are necessary to facilitate GWB adoption, though they must coincide with context-dependent policy, economic, social, and/or technical conditions. We also identify several potential barriers to GWB adoption, which may be more easily overcome by water utilities with access to financial and technical resources. These findings can help resource managers assess the viability of adopting GWB and similar innovative water resilience strategies in their unique management contexts. 

ABSTRACT Amidst 21st‐century climate‐related threats, municipal elected officials (EOs) may outsource public services to third parties to avoid the political costs of adopting “unpopular” sustainability policies—a strategy known as political decoupling. However, decoupling raises accountability concerns and may not improve sustainability, leading some municipalities to “recouple” services. To help understand the political impacts of these decisions, we assess how public scrutiny toward EOs in US municipalities changes after varying degrees of coupling in the water provision sector (i.e., how much service delivery shifts away from or toward municipal oversight). Analysis of local media coverage shows public attention toward EOs decreases after higher degrees of decoupling and recoupling, public opinion becomes polarized toward EOs after decouplings, and the public links sustainability‐related issues to EOs after high degrees of decoupling. The results highlight how reforming public services relates to political accountability‐related factors and raise critical questions about the political decoupling strategy. 

Abstract 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. 

Abstract Urban water management is increasingly challenged by the need to balance cost-effectiveness with equity considerations. This study presents a multi-objective approach to water conservation within the Las Vegas valley water district, analyzing a comprehensive dataset of water consumption and socioeconomic indicators across all single-family residences. We assess policy scenarios under two primary objectives: maximizing water savings to enhance economic efficiency and improving water affordability to promote equity. Our analysis reveals that while strategies focused on water savings reduce water use more efficiently, they tend to favor higher-income, predominantly white neighborhoods whereas prioritizing water affordability shifts resources towards lower-income, communities of color. The analysis of intermediate policy scenarios reveals the trade-offs and potential synergies between water savings and affordability. Our findings suggest that local water sustainability can be achieved by allocating resources to both high-demand and socioeconomically disadvantaged households. Highlighting the importance of integrating equity considerations into water management policies, this study provides insights for policymakers in crafting more inclusive and sustainable urban water management practices. 

Abstract Designing urban water systems to respond to the accelerating and unpredictable changes of the Anthropocene will require changes not only to built infrastructure and operating rules, but also to the governance arrangements responsible for investing in them. Yet, inclusion of thispolitical‐economic feedbackin dynamic models of infrastructure systems and socio‐hydrology has lagged behindoperationalfeedback concerns. We address this gap through a dynamical systems application of the Coupled Infrastructure Systems (CIS) Framework, which provides the conceptual building blocks for analyzing social‐ecological systems through various classes of infrastructure and the flows of material and information among them. In the model, political‐economic feedback involves three decisions—infrastructure investment, rate‐setting, and short‐term demand curtailment—and each decision is constrained by institutional friction, the aggregation of decision and transaction costs associated with taking action. We apply the model to three cities in the Phoenix Metropolitan Area to compare how institutional friction interacts with a city's water resource portfolio and financial position to determine its sensitivity, or the degree to which its performance (e.g., providing sufficient supply to meet demand) changes given reductions in Colorado River water availability. We find that the slowing effect of institutional friction on investment and rate‐setting decisions can increase the sensitivity of a city's supply, but it can also promote objectives that compete with over‐response (e.g., rate burden). The effect is dependent on the initial operating capacity of the CIS and flexibility within the institutions, highlighting the need to consider political‐economic and operational feedback together when evaluating infrastructure systems. 

Abstract In complex, polycentric environmental governance systems, actors may choose to collaborate with one another to reduce their collective vulnerability and enhance system function. However, collaboration can be costly, and little evidence exists for how particular collaborative forums impact the broader governance system in which they are embedded. To address this gap, we investigate the role of intermediate collaborative forums, which support collaboration among a subset of system actors, in polycentric governance systems. Empirically, we analyze the structural and functional role of an intermediate collaborative forum called the Arizona Municipal Water Users Association (AMWUA) within the municipal surface water governance network for the Phoenix Metropolitan Area (PMA) in Arizona, United States. To do this, we draw from 21 interviews with water professionals in the PMA, which we analyze through a combination of network analysis and qualitative coding. We find that AMWUA facilitates strong bonding capacities among members, allowing for streamlined bridging to the rest of the network that enhances information processing and advocacy of member needs. Our findings advance theory on the role of collaboration in polycentric systems and inform the design of collaborative institutions to improve environmental governance. 

Abstract 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. 

Feedback is ubiquitous in complex systems and critical to the process of designing public policies to solve problems such as climate adaptation. However, well‐known cognitive and institutional constraints can impact information feedback processes, limiting a system's ability to incorporate feedback into policy designs. This study analyzes the role that institutions play in regulating feedback in coupled infrastructure systems (CIS) to support the development of climate‐adaptive policies. Focusing on urban water systems, we ask:how do multilevel institutions governing information processing influence urban water systems' climate‐adaptive policy responses?Using the CIS framework, we develop a theoretical argument for policy design based on the cognitive model of active inference. Drawing on hydrological, administrative, media, interview, and institutional data, we trace two urban water systems' policy design processes over a decade. We find that successive waves of state‐level changes to water planning rules prompted more “exploratory” information processing during the study period. Moreover, an urban water utility's ownership type (public vs. investor‐owned) influenced how expected climate impacts were incorporated into policy designs. These findings provide insight into how institutional arrangements shape policy designs and suggest ways such arrangements may be altered to enable adaptive responses in the face of environmental uncertainty. 

This dataset contains: Values for 42 variables related to topography, climate, vegetation, geology, and anthropogenic activities collected from 2001 to 2020. These variables were used to assess the drivers of streamflow drought deficit and duration across 2,550 stream gauges in the contiguous United States, including both natural and human-impacted sites. The computation method for each factor is detailed in Table 1. The dataset also includes trend analyses of drought duration and deficit from 1980 to 2020, performed using the Mann-Kendall test under three conditions: independence, short-term persistence, and long-term persistence. The complete analysis and findings are presented in Vicario, S.A., Hornberger, G.M., Mazzoleni, M., Garcia, M. (2025), "Drivers and trends of streamflow droughts in natural and human-impacted basins across the contiguous United States," Journal of Hydrology, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhydrol.2025.132908.