What happens when governments ask the public to report water waste?

Rainfall has been low, the mountain snowpack is thin, and Californians are bracing for another year of scarcity. But this time we've got a raft of data from the historic 2014-2017 emergency to inform drought management in 2021.*

As the drought ravaged California in 2014, the State Water Resources Control Board (SWRCB) issued several orders restricting discretionary outdoor water use like lawn watering and car washing. A revival of these restrictions may be coming this summer, so it’s useful to look at their implementation during the last drought.

If you see something, say something

As with any regulation, enforcement of water use restrictions requires monitoring--after all, you can't enforce a rule if you don't know who is breaking it. Water management agencies sometimes use inspections or patrols to spot violations. Citizen participation can augment agencies’ monitoring capacity, and so often governments invite the general public to join in the effort. Public management researchers call this implementation strategy participatory surveillance.

Participatory surveillance became part of the Golden State’s water conservation regulatory regime during the 2014-2017 drought, as state and local agencies provided telephone hotlines and websites for the public to report water waste anonymously. California communities responded with gusto: over the 32-month emergency, water utilities logged more than 485,000 water waste reports. In a new Water Resources Research paper, Youlang Zhang, David Switzer, and I analyzed water waste reporting across 408 water systems during the 2014-2017 emergency—with important implications for 2021 and beyond.

What kinds of communities get the most water waste reports?

We marshaled a variety of data to explore the factors correlated with water waste reporting, measured as monthly reports per thousand population. Unsurprisingly, the drought severity and the strictness of local water restrictions were among the strongest predictors of complaints: as the drought worsened and restrictions tightened, reports of water waste increased. But our analysis also identified significant social, institutional, and political correlates of reporting.

Education. Water waste reports correlated positively with the share of a community’s population with a college degree—even after adjusting for income, poverty, and racial/ethnic composition. A more educated public, it seems, generates more water waste complaints:

Institutional structure. A clear ordered relationship between utility ownership/organization and water waste reports emerged in the data: all else equal, municipal utilities got the most participation, followed by special districts, with investor-owned utilities getting the lowest participation:

We think that these disparities mainly have to do with familiarity. Municipalities are in most situations far more visible to the public than special district governments and investor-owned systems, and so garner greater media attention and citizen participation.

Party competition. We expected higher voter turnout to correlate with greater water waste reporting, but our analysis didn’t find any significant relationship between the two. However, we found that the composition of the local electorate predicted participatory surveillance in a surprising way: water waste reporting was higher in communities where the electorate was closely divided between Democrats and Republicans.

We measured partisan competition as one minus the local difference between registered Democrats and Republicans, divided by total registered voters.** Are hardcore partisans tattling on their opposition party neighbors? Maybe, but we suspect that heightened party competition simply indicates a more civically engaged public.

Does water waste reporting lead to greater conservation?

We also analyzed the correlation between water waste complaints and conservation outcomes, using the SWRCB’s official measure of conservation (current water use compared with the same month in pre-drought 2013). Yes, waste complaints positively correlated with subsequent water conservation. Substantively, one more complaint per thousand persons predicts a 0.56% increase in monthly water conservation. This effect is small in percentage terms, but represents a great deal of water in a state as big as California: one more complaint per thousand persons per month for each utility would have resulted in 32 billion gallons more water saved during the emergency—enough supply San Francisco for 16 months.

So is participatory surveillance a good idea for water utilities?

With the data on hand we can’t say for sure that participatory surveillance caused the conservation we see. But the results are consistent with the idea that public engagement expands monitoring capacity and suggests that participatory surveillance can enhance the effectiveness of urban water restrictions. More generally, inviting the public to report maintenance or water quality problems could be a useful way to put more “eyes on the street” and help water utilities perform better.