Rapidly‐growing concern among scholars and policy makers over residential drinking water affordability in the United States highlights the need to identify and assess the efficacy of potential solutions to address this problem. Accordingly, in this advanced review of the literature, we examine the state of scholarly evidence over the last 30 years on the prevalence and effectiveness of strategies to address household drinking water affordability in the United States. We classify interventions into four categories: rate structure designs, water efficiency programs, recurring bill assistance, and crisis relief. Our findings are twofold. First, the conceptual literature on affordability interventions is fairly robust, but demonstrates both tradeoffs and complementarities across the four approaches. Second, despite employing a PRISMA approach, we identify few empirical studies that demonstrate the effectiveness of affordability interventions in practice, especially the targeted approaches of recurring bill assistance and crisis relief. The literature on affordability interventions thus appears to lag considerably behind scholarship identifying and defining the problem of affordability. Accordingly, we suggest key questions throughout our review that need to be answered, thereby providing an agenda for future research on drinking water affordability solutions. This article is categorized under: Engineering Water > Planning Water Human Water > Value of Water

Stormwater infrastructure substantially impacts water quality and supply. In the U.S., local agency investments rely on public support from taxes or fees. Assessing individuals' knowledge and willingness to pay helps inform potential pathways to funding and green infrastructure implementation. Using a 2018-2019 survey of 868 University of California students and staff, we analyze stormwater knowledge and willingness to pay or support public fund allocation for green infrastructure, especially natural treatment systems (NTS). Results of three separate regression models, each with a one-campus random sample and an all-campus convenience sample, show the majority of respondents supported allocating personal and campus funds for NTS. Preexisting environmental attitudes (on the New Ecological Paradigm scale) were the most common driver in nearly all models, but with inconsistent results and low explanatory power across models. Harnessing public support to increase stormwater investment may require tailored benefit messaging or other motivational frameworks, particularly in semiarid environments.

Pro-environment stormwater managers prioritize environmental co-benefits in projects more than traditional technocrats, with implications for the use of stormwater policy for greening urban land.

U.S. public university campuses are held directly responsible for compliance with many of the same federal-and state-level environmental regulations as cities, including stormwater management. While operating as 'cities within cities' in many respects, campuses face unique constraints in achieving stormwater regulatory compliance. To compare the abilities of campuses to comply with stormwater regulations to municipalities, we conduct mixed-methods research using primary data from five University of California (UC) campuses. Public universities constituted over 20% of California's "nontraditional" permittees under the municipal separate storm sewer system (MS4) regulation regime in 2013. We utilize semi-structured interviews with campus and regulatory officials, a survey of campus students and staff around support and willingness to pay for innovative stormwater management, and content analysis of campus stormwater management documents to examine challenges to public university stormwater compliance. We find that, despite their progressive environmental practices in other areas like energy and water conservation, even as compared to cities, stormwater management practices on the evaluated campuses are constrained by several factors: infrastructure financing limitations, lack of transparent and coordinated decision-making, a lack of campus resident involvement, and regulatory inflexibility. Our study provides new insights, both for understanding campuses as sustainable 'cities within cities' and more broadly for urban environmental compliance regimes globally.

Sea‐level rise is a “nascent subsystem” with policy actors actively developing initial policy preferences through participation across multiple policy forums in a polycentric system. This paper uses item‐response models to empirically analyze how actors, perceived problems, and preferred policy solutions are related in a latent “policy space”. We focus on California's San Francisco Bay region, where in the last decade, sea‐level rise emerged to become one of the most salient climate adaptation issues. We find that actors and policy preferences are arranged in a two‐dimensional space, with highly engaged actors more likely to consider environmental justice and ecological aspects of sea level rise. Our findings have implications for theories of nascent subsystems within the Advocacy Coalition Framework, and for understanding how a local policy subsystem develops to address and prioritize the multi‐faceted impacts of climate change.

No abstract