CEENRG Researcher Cale Reeves publishes new article on water policy

Cale Reeves, a post-doctoral researcher at the Department's Centre for Environment, Energy and Natural Resource Governance (CEENRG), has published a new article in the journal Resources, Conservation & Recycling.

The article, entitled 'Internal determinants or external drivers? The case of U.S. water reuse policy adoption', demonstrates that important drivers of water re-use policy adoption among US states are internal factors (including drought, population growth, and strong economic reliance on water), rather than external factors which are known to be relevant to energy policy.

The abstract reads as follows:

Many U.S. states have policies for water reuse; some do not. This study analyses what drives the adoption of water reuse policy. We consider internal drivers including drought, precipitation, population growth, and economic reliance on water. We consider learning, emulation, and competition as potential external drivers. We use binomial logistic regression and event history analysis to evaluate the relation of policy adoption to these drivers. We do not find evidence for learning, emulation, or competition as drivers of water reuse policy; that is, the policies of other states are not found to drive water reuse policy adoption. We find that internal drivers - drought, population growth, and strong economic reliance on water are statistically significant and positively associated with policy adoption. These results contrast with drivers of energy policy adoption, for which external factors such as regional proximity are more important.