The Flint Water Crisis and the Politics of Safe Drinking Water in the United States
Professor Hughes shows how cities will be at the forefront of addressing challenges like providing drinking water and adapting to climate change. She is a leading voice in finding more equitable solutions to the pressing environmental challenges of our time.
—Mark Buntaine, Associate Professor, Bren School
Watch a recording of this talk here
ABSTRACT
Flint’s drinking water crisis has helped to bring renewed—and needed—attention to the importance of safe drinking water in the United States. How can we prevent such a failure from happening again and support systems struggling to provide safe and affordable drinking water? The Flint water crisis was the result of a confluence of factors operating at multiple scales in time and space. This talk aims to draw out more explicitly the role of policy, and specifically rationalized policy, in incentivizing and allowing the decisions that most proximately led to the Flint water crisis. Semi-structured interviews and publicly available reports, testimony, newspaper articles, and secondary data highlight the vulnerability of poor and minority communities in the United States to the effects of rationalized policies, and the stickiness and entrenchment of these policies today. I discuss important alternatives that are emerging and priority areas for future research on the politics of safe drinking water.
BIO
Sara Hughes is an Associate Professor of Environmental Policy and Planning at the School for Environmental and Sustainability at the University of Michigan. She also serves as the Associate Director of the Cooperative Institute for Great Lakes Research and directs the Water and Climate Policy Lab. She is a Visiting Scholar at the Luskin Center for Innovation at UCLA for the 2022-2023 academic year.
Hughes is a scholar of policy agendas, policy analysis, and governance processes, focusing on decisions about water resources and climate change mitigation and adaptation. She is currently the Principal Investigator for the National Science Foundation-funded project “Feeling the Squeeze: How Financial Stress Shapes Decision Making and Risk for Drinking Water Systems in U.S. Cities.” Hughes received her PhD in Environmental Science and Management from the University of California, Santa Barbara. More information about her research and students can be found at www.waterclimatepolicylab.org.