Public Versus Private: Does It Matter for Water Conservation? Insights from California

This article asks three connected questions: First, does the public view private and public utilities differently, and if so, does this affect attitudes to conservation? Second, do public and private utilities differ in their approaches to conservation? Finally, do differences in the approaches of the utilities, if any, relate to differences in public attitudes? We survey public attitudes in California toward (hypothetical but plausible) voluntary and mandated water conservation, as well as to price increases, during a recent period of shortage. We do this by interviewing households in three pairs of adjacent public and private utilities. We also survey managers of public and private urban water utilities to see if they differ in their approaches to conservation and to their customers. On the user side we do not find pronounced differences, though a minority of customers in all private companies would be more willing to conserve or pay higher prices under a public operator. No respondent in public utility said the reverse. Negative attitudes toward private operators were most pronounced in the pair marked by a controversial recent privatization and a price hike. Nonetheless, we find that California’s history of recurrent droughts and the visible role of the state in water supply and drought management undermine the distinction between public and private. Private utilities themselves work to underplay the distinction by stressing the collective ownership of the water source and the collective value of conservation. Overall, California’s public utilities appear more proactive and target-oriented in asking their customers to conserve than their private counterparts and the state continues to be important in legitimating and guiding conservation behavior, whether the utility is in public hands or private

Ecosystem Services in the Service-Dominant Logic Framework.

Peer reviewe

Sustainability

IPE and sustainability have co-evolved over the past 40 years under the twin pressures of ever-deepening neoliberal globalisation and environmental degradation. Globalisation has seen themassive expansion in international trade, investment and finance and an associated rise ininternational organizations, multinational corporations (MNCs) and civil society organisations.In conjunction with the development and spread of information and communicationstechnologies, the global political economy has transnationalised giving rise to new forms ofpublic, private and hybrid governance. Globalisation has been associated, however, with highlevels of tropical deforestation, fisheries depletion, biodiversity loss and global warming. Froma social justice perspective, deep-seated inequalities remain within and between countries inthe Anthropocene (Biermann et al 2012), with coefficients of inequality now greater than theywere at the outset of the globalisation push (Picketty 2014)

Protection Motivation Theory and Contingent Valuation: Perceived Realism, Threat and WTP Estimates for Biodiversity Protection

We report on a discrete-choice CV study conducted in Germany to value the WTP for biodiversity protection in less developed countries. To systematically investigate survey realism and subjective threat assessment from the loss of biodiversity described in the scenario the study includes questions to uncover the constructs of Protection Motivation Theory, which is introduced to the CV literature. The patterns of responses to such questions are analysed using an Expectation-Maximization algorithm to derive class membership probabilities. These are found to match the predictions of Protection Motivation Theory and systematically improve the logistic analysis of the WTP responses