EAGER: SAI: Water Supplier Decisions & Institutional Change During Transitions

EAGER：SAI：水供应商决策

基本信息

批准号：
2120090
负责人：
Anita Milman
金额：
$ 29.87万
依托单位：
University of Massachusetts Amherst
依托单位国家：
美国
项目类别：
Standard Grant
财政年份：
2021
资助国家：
美国
起止时间：
2021-09-01 至 2024-08-31
项目状态：
已结题

来源：
https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2120090&HistoricalAwards=false
关键词：
EAGER SAI Water Supplier Decisions

项目摘要

Strengthening American Infrastructure (SAI) is an NSF Program seeking to stimulate human-centered fundamental and potentially transformative research that strengthens America’s infrastructure. Effective infrastructure provides a strong foundation for socioeconomic vitality and broad quality of life improvement. Strong, reliable, and effective infrastructure spurs private-sector innovation, grows the economy, creates jobs, makes public-sector service provision more efficient, strengthens communities, promotes equal opportunity, protects the natural environment, enhances national security, and fuels American leadership. To achieve these goals requires expertise from across the science and engineering disciplines. SAI focuses on how knowledge of human reasoning and decision making, governance, and social and cultural processes enables the building and maintenance of effective infrastructure that improves lives and society and builds on advances in technology and engineering.This research project examines the dynamics of water supplier decision-making to determine which decisions are critical to future adaptability and how tensions regarding the differential impacts of alternative responses to stressors on water supplier objectives are resolved. Water suppliers across the USA are facing unprecedented challenges arising from a variety of stressors including, but not limited to, climate change, changing demands for water, threats to water quality, and deferred maintenance. Responses to these stressors occur through a variety of decisions, many of which include involve tradeoffs between the multiple concurrent objectives of water suppliers (e.g., reliability, cost effectiveness, environmental stewardship, etc.) and which affect the scope of future adaptations available. Results from the research contribute to understandings of the institutional dynamics influencing the strength and effectiveness of water infrastructure, including how change occurs within water supply systems and how changes can lead towards or away from path dependency. Results support decision making and research by providing a parsimonious model that can be used to steer water supplier actions, to guide development of decision-support tools that more fully capture the decision-making processes of water suppliers, and to guide computer modeling of water supply systems.Specifically, the project investigates decision-making in mid-sized water systems in the USA that have experienced disruptions, have declining populations, or both. Data for the project are collected through interviews, focus groups, and secondary materials. These are used to develop a framework of water supplier decision-making that can be used to identify critical events or decisions within water supply planning and operations that serve as inflection points, either setting the stage for adaptation or leading to path dependencies that inhibit adaptation. The research also uncovers the potentially competing institutional logics occurring at these inflection points and identifies the ways in which individuals, norms, and institutional processes within the water supplier interact to influence how tensions are resolved, and thus the adaptations the system moves.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

美国基础设施（SAI）是一种NSF，试图刺激以人为主的基本变革性，增强美国的基础设施为社会经济的生命力和广泛的质量F寿命提供了强大的基础。经济创造工作，使公共部门服务的效率更高，自然环境增强了国家安全，并在整个科学和工程学科中提供了美国的领导才能。关于技术和他的研究项目，供水的动态确定哪些决策对未来至关重要，以及如何解决对压力源对供水物目标的替代响应的紧张局势。，但不限于不断变化的水需求，对水的威胁以及递延的维护。可用的研究有助于研究机构的力量和有效性，包括在水suppry系统中发生变化，以及如何将变化导致或远离路径依赖性。进行水的过程，并指导水供应系统的计算机。特别是，该项目调查了美国讨厌披露的中型水系统，这两者都在下降。焦点小组和次要材料。路径依赖性也可以在通货膨胀上发现潜在的竞争性logi cs，这是个人，规范和机构的方式，以影响水供应商的解决方案基金会的智力优点和更广泛的影响评论标准。