Where should water come from?

Publication Type

Book Chapter

Publication Date

10-2022

Abstract

This chapter looks at the provision of water by two different Southern California water agencies. One jurisdiction seeks to meet its water needs by financing and buying water from an expensive, energy-intensive desalination plant; the other jurisdiction successfully persuades its residents to reduce and change their consumption patterns of water and saves a huge amount of money as compared to the agency that bought into the desalination plant. What’s interesting from our book’s critical point of view is that the water agencies had different ideas about how people behave as water consumers. The jurisdiction that bought the expensive and wasteful desalination plant spent far more money and ended up wasting a huge amount of water because they didn’t even entertain the idea that people’s water consumption habits could change. Like good neoliberals they assumed that people were selfish, that they are attempting to maximize their individual utility, and that they had relatively stable preferences, which it would be foolish to attempt to change substantially. They paid dearly for those assumptions. In addition, the case demonstrates, how even in relation to complex problems such as handling water supplies, conscious human prediction and problem-solving can outperform market-based mechanisms. The case shows, in opposition to neoliberal orthodoxy, that it is possible to plan.

Keywords

water provision, Southern California, desalination plant, consumption patterns, water conservation, neoliberalism, wasteful spending, human prediction, problem-solving, planning

Discipline

Environmental Policy | Environmental Sciences

Research Areas

Integrative Research Areas

Publication

People before markets: An alternative casebook

Editor

Daniel Souleles, Johan Gersel, and Morton Thaning

First Page

79

Last Page

94

ISBN

9781009165846

Identifier

10.1017/9781009165846.005

Publisher

Cambridge University Press

City or Country

Cambridge

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009165846.005

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