Dissertation

Political ecology of safe drinking water in the United States with a case study focus on Puerto Rico

Opitz-Stapleton, Sarah

2009

Overview

Most research focusing on safe drinking water seeks to investigate the reasons that inhibit nearly 1 billion people in developing countries from having safe drinking water. Yet, there are still numerous communities in the United States without safe drinking water that often fail to enter into global water discourses. This study employed a political ecology framework to investigate and document the perspectives on drinking water of four very small (<100 households) community owned and operated water systems in Puerto Rico. Political ecology examines power-knowledge relationships between human groups across spatial and temporal scales, how these relationships influence and determine human interaction with the environment and, conversely, how environmental change shapes power-knowledge relationships. Through a series of 87 semi-structured interviews and community walk-throughs, I constructed profiles of each community’s unique system of water governance and management, customary practices of water rights, conceptions on the roles of various community members in participating in various aspects of the water system, community-developed knowledge systems on water quality and health, and dynamic community composition. I then contrasted and situated the communities’ profiles within the historical processes leading to the creation of the Safe Drinking Water Act and the current discourses on safe drinking water promulgated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and various state primacy agencies, such as the Puerto Rican Department of Health (PRDOH). These large-scale administrative and jurisdictional actors describe the failure of very small and small water systems to comply with the Act as being due to financial, technical and managerial limitations. The four communities I visited have very different perspectives on drinking water than the EPA or PRDOH. My research on safe drinking water in the United States points to deeper, underlying questions: Whose water governance? and Whose water knowledge systems? Those who determine the “causes” of certain communities’ non-compliance with the Safe Drinking Water Act are able to set the policies and courses of action for solving the “problem”. However, when communities themselves have different conceptions of their drinking water “problems”, the solutions proposed by more powerful and “knowledgeable” actors frequently fail to move the communities into compliance. Through this study, I seek to expand the drinking water discourses in the U.S. to begin reconciling various water governance and water knowledge systems across scales and among actors.

• Publisher: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
• Subject: Civil engineering / Environmental science / Political science
• ISBN: 1109117108, 9781109117103