The Drinking Water Disparities Framework: On the Origins and Persistence of Inequities in Exposure

Abstract

With this article, we develop the Drinking Water Disparities Framework to explain environmental injustice in the context of drinking water in the United States. The framework builds on the social epidemiology and environmental justice literatures, and is populated with 5 years of field data (2005–2010) from California’s San Joaquin Valley. We trace the mechanisms through which natural, built, and sociopolitical factors work through state, county, community, and household actors to constrain access to safe water and to financial resources for communities. These constraints and regulatory failures produce social disparities in exposure to drinking water contaminants. Water system and household coping capacities lead, at best, to partial protection against exposure. This composite burden explains the origins and persistence of social disparities in exposure to drinking water contaminants.

State and green crimes related to water pollution and ecological disorganization: water pollution from publicly owned treatment works (POTW) facilities across US states

“…Examining POTW emissions and regulation enforcement is also important because, like other pollutants, POTW emissions are likely to be unequally distributed. Using data on water quality from San Joaquin Valley, California, Balazs and Ray (2014) describe the social justice implications of access to clean water, and in particular to publicly treated drinking water. They found that public drinking water quality and water treatment emissions were unequally distributed across race, class and ethnic lines.…”

Water marginalization at the urban fringe: environmental justice and urban political ecology across the North–South divide

“…While Balazs and Ray (2014) have developed a comprehensive framework to explore how built, natural, and sociopolitical factors operating through multilevel actors shape disparities in contaminant exposure in the Valley, there is scope for expanding such analyses further. For instance, although we know that contaminated water access in the San Joaquin Valley is correlated with race, income, and other socioeconomic variables, we know little about the "negotiated reality" (Sultana, 2011) of access which residents of the Valley face on a daily basis.…”

“…In general, the relationship between informality and state power is conspicuously absent in scholarship on the Global North-even if aspects of informal rule, such as selective enforcement (Cory & Rahman, 2009), regulatory discretion (Balazs & Ray, 2014), or the actions of "street level bureaucrats" (Lipsky, 1980), are empirically reported. Nonconforming practices of housing and infrastructure in the United States tend to be labeled as "illegal" or "noncompliant"-naming practices that preclude the existence of gray space.…”

“…over the course of 150 years" (Pulido, 2000, p. 33), including a myriad of regulatory choices. EJ literature has also revealed that racial/class disparities can both be improved and exacerbated by multilevel regulations that impact the routes of infrastructure funding in Tooleville (Balazs & Ray, 2014). The regulatory state in other words has been shown to be a deeply enabling and disabling actor.…”

Potential Health Risks from Uranium in Home Well Water: An Investigation by the Apsaalooke (Crow) Tribal Research Group

“…(4) Interactions. Interactions as understood in an ecological framework include natural, built and sociopolitical factors [88], all of which contribute to local health impacts from water contamination. The interactive direct health effects of uranium with other potentially co-occurring inorganic, organic, radioactive, and/or microbial contaminants in well water are unknown.…”