Kayleigh Ward and colleagues publish article in Environmental Sociology
Kayleigh Ward, research faculty and lecturer at the University of Colorado Boulder, recently published a paper with her colleagues in Environmental Sociology titled “Values at the tap: how organizational culture shapes water unaffordability and environmental justice in U.S. cities.” The article uses Schlosberg’s three justice dimensions with Schwartz’s human values theory to examine how organizational values inside municipal water utilities shape pricing and customer assistance. The authors conducted a series of interviews and found that policies that name affordability as an objective, institutionalize participation, and pair ecological mandates with affordability funding are imperative to environmental justice in terms of the water supply.