What Does Governance Have to Do With It? Institutional Diversity and Safe Drinking Water Access in California

This seminar will be presented in person only; there will be no live remote viewing available. Please join us in Bren Hall 1414. 

ABSTRACT

Long histories of racialized development underlay drinking water provision in the United States. Scholars regularly associate the resulting fragmentation with drinking water disparities, pointing to issues of economies of scale. But while undeniably important, such considerations cannot fully explain the origins or persistence of drinking water disparities which belie multilevel factors of not just the built and natural environments but also the socio-political environment. Focusing on California, this talk will explore how governance influences access to safe, affordable and sustainable drinking water and what it means for implementing California’s Human Right to Water Law (AB 685) passed in 2012.  

BIO

Kristin is an assistant professor of cooperative extension in water justice policy and planning in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management at UC Berkeley. Her approach to research and extension employs mixed quantitative and qualitative methods and community-based research to tackle pressing questions related to the socio-political drivers of drinking water disparities. Prior to coming to Berkeley, Kristin was a NSF postdoctoral fellow at the Luskin Center for Innovation at UCLA. She received her PhD in the Graduate Group in Ecology at the University of California Davis in 2021 before which she worked for Community Water Center in Visalia, California.