No abstract

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

As concerns around water scarcity and energy security increase, so too has interest in the connections between these resources, through a concept called the water–energy nexus. Efforts to improve the integration of water and energy management and to understand their cross-sector relevance are growing. In particular, this paper develops a better empirical understanding on the extent to which governance settings hinder and/or enable policy coherence between the water and energy sectors through a comparative analysis of two case studies, namely, Los Angeles County, California, the United States, and the city of Beijing, China. This paper examines the extent to which the institutional context enables policy coordination within (vertically) and between (horizontally) the water and energy sectors in Beijing and Los Angeles. To do so, we propose a framework for analyzing policy integration for the water energy nexus based on environmental policy integration (EPI). The results highlight the multiple and flexible approaches of EPI in nexus governance, not least with regards to horizontal and vertical policy integration, but also in terms of explicit (i.e., intended) and implicit (i.e., unintended) coordination. The level of nexus-focused policy integration is highly dependent on the motivation at the local context and the criteria to evaluate policy success in each sector.