Poster #33 - Effects of State Steering Strategies on Development of Inter-Organizational Partnerships by Small Community Water Systems

• In Event: Saturday Poster Luncheon

Abstract

Collaboration across organizations (in the form of partnerships) has the potential to benefit both the organizations involved and those they serve. Partnerships can increase organizational capacity through sharing of knowledge and expertise; enabling capture of benefits from economies of scale; and helping mitigate or avoid externalities. These outcomes can lower the cost of a product or increase its quality. Yet despite the potential benefits, partnerships often fail to emerge spontaneously among public service providers. Where partnerships do not autonomously emerge, or to increase their prevalence, upper levels of government may seek to steer their development. To do so, upper levels of government shape policies that are then carried out by lower levels of government or other organizations. Policymakers can utilize a variety of means to steer the formation of partnerships: some steering seeks to increase the benefits or lower the costs of collaboration, while other forms of steering are directed at facilitating the process, negotiating the level of shared or transferred responsibility, or influencing the dynamics of potential partnerships.  

One set of organizations that may benefit substantially from partnerships are small community drinking water systems (CWS). In the USA, small CWS provide an essential public service yet often face challenges in maintaining high quality service provision. Small water systems struggle not only with meeting regulatory requirements, but also with finances, with finding and retaining certified operators, and with management and administration. Partnerships have been promoted as a potential solution to this problem by the US EPA as well as a variety of professional associations, think-tanks, and scholars. All states in the USA have adopted one or more policies to encourage partnership formation by water systems. Those policies adopt a variety of approaches to steer partnerships, including enabling, authority-based, information-based, and incentive-based steering. 

This paper examines the response of small CWS to state-level policies seeking to steer development of partnerships. Drawing on results from a survey of small CWS across the USA (initial response rate = 4,085, reflecting about 9% of the total population of small CWS), findings describe the effects of state steering on partnership formation, including how multiple concurrent steering approaches combine to influence partnerships. In doing so, this paper also depicts how effects vary with the institutional structures of small CWS (e.g., municipal, special district, community-owned, private), the needs of small CWS (overcome existing diseconomies of scale, benefit from new economies of scale, build capacity through shared expertise, leverage additional resources, and mutual aid), and the forms of partnerships developed. Findings provide insights regarding the points of intervention that serve to catalyze differing forms of partnerships and the impacts of linking multiple concurrent policies. They also serve to illuminate the potential partnerships to support small CWS and barriers to developing them. 

Author

• Alice Lubeck, University of Massachusetts at Amherst
  Presenting Author