Carrot or stick: what motivates urban water consumption? Evidence from Southern California

Maitreyee Mukherjee

International Journal of Water Resources Development, 2023, vol. 39, issue 1, 1-25

Abstract: California has experienced one of the most intense and prolonged droughts in its history in the last decade, prompting the state government to undertake a series of policy responses. This paper compares the impact of the 2015 urban water-use reduction mandate with respect to pre-policy voluntary conservation efforts and post-policy water consumption trends by examining utility-level water demand dynamics of the Metropolitan Water District in Southern California. The findings overall indicate that despite voluntary measures resulting in a gradual decline in urban water-use, the introduction of the regulatory stick achieved swift reduction targets that remained even after removal of the mandatory policy.

Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/07900627.2021.1969222 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:cijwxx:v:39:y:2023:i:1:p:1-25

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/cijw20

DOI: 10.1080/07900627.2021.1969222

Access Statistics for this article

International Journal of Water Resources Development is currently edited by Cecilia Tortajada

More articles in International Journal of Water Resources Development from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().