Equity and Infrastructure Asset Management: Promoting Community Outcomes in the Water Sector

Abstract

Water utilities across the United States are being tasked with paying increased attention to inequities experienced in the communities they serve. This paper examines whether a widely used decision process within the sector, i.e., infrastructure asset management, is compatible with this desire to advance equity. Using three dimensions of equity, i.e., distributional, procedural, and recognitional, to interrogate asset management as currently practiced in the United States, we question some of its deeply held principles. The Environmental Protection Agency has five core asset management questions, which focus on asset systems, sustainability, and long-term costs to the utility. Here, we propose that different core questions are needed to reconcile the asset management system with equity and realize larger community outcomes. A case study is presented showing one utility’s attempt to do that by basing its asset management system in the needs of its oppressed communities. In the end, the authors of this paper remain skeptical about using asset management to drive community equity. Asset management was invented and evolved in a larger system that produces racial inequities, and we are not confident that it can be transformed enough to drive equity. Asset management’s focus on assets, sustainability, and costs does not promote social justice. To achieve equity, the water sector needs to reorient its focus to larger community outcomes. Racial equity requires radical and transformative changes in society, including to infrastructure systems. Water managers have a responsibility to push for changes to infrastructure planning and decision-making in their organizations.