Individual responsibility towards providing water and wastewater public goods for displaced persons: How much and how long is the public willing to pay?

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scs.2021.102785Get rights and content

Highlights

  • There is a perceived individual financial responsibility to support those displaced.

  • Collective and individual responsibility misaligned when providing public goods.

  • Individual responsibility is less than collective expectation of providing service.

  • Males, and wealthier, more educated, and urban individuals are more willing to pay.

  • This can inform utilities on rate increases to fund a portion of services.

Abstract

In 2019, the number of displaced persons worldwide reached a historic peak. When those displaced arrive in hosting cities, local utilities, often with no additional money, are tasked with meeting unexpected demands. One way to recoup these costs is to raise rates. However, publics are not always willing to share their own financial resources and utilities. In this empirical study, we quantitatively assess the residents’ perceived individual responsibility—or willingness to pay—for these expanded services. Here we seek to not only identify if an individual is willing to financially support the provision of services for those displaced via an increase in their own rates, but also, to quantify how long they are willing to support these services. Further, we explore factors that influence this perceived individual responsibility. Enabling this study is survey data from the German public in 2016, a time when the asylum seekers, who were displaced by instability in the Middle East, encountered increased public opposition. We find respondents who are male, wealthier, more highly educated, and more urban are more willing to pay for services for displaced populations. These results can inform awareness campaigns or changes in rates and rate structures.

Introduction

In 2019, the number of displaced people in the world reached a historic peak, challenging the capacity of humanitarian agencies to respond (UNHCR, 2020). Displaced by disasters, war, famine, and instability, more and more people are forced to search for new places to live. In the absence of refugee camps (Sikder, Mirindi, String, & Lantagne, 2020), displaced populations settle in urban hosting communities (Dabaieh & Alwall, 2018). This paper is interested in the case of displaced populations arriving in communities with established infrastructure systems. This rapid shift in population is a socially-driven challenge to urban resilience. If the challenges introduced by these sudden population dynamics are not met, there is real potential for a failed water and wastewater infrastructure, with related public health and environmental impacts.

To avoid these problems, local water and wastewater utilities are tasked with meeting these unexpected demands, often without corresponding increases in revenues. However, the displaced are often unable to pay for such services on arrival. Further, these large-scale population displacements are often unexpected, leaving little to no time for front-end planning for either the host or displaced community. As displaced persons resettle in host communities, it becomes a serious short-term challenge to provide them with infrastructure services such as water and wastewater (Faust & Kaminsky, 2017; Kaminsky & Faust, 2017). In response to the revenue gap that arises from the new demands of the displaced population and their inability to pay for such services immediately upon arrival, utilities have indicated that rates would likely need to be increased across the existing customer base (Faust & Kaminsky, 2017). As can be expected, utilities are concerned with public opposition to increases that may be seen as primarily beneficial to displaced persons, as well as how passing such costs on to customers could be justified (Faust & Kaminsky, 2017).

Utilities in hosting communities are faced with these unique and often contrasting expectations that has not been explored yet in literature or practice. The public collectively does expect that water and wastewater services should be provided to vulnerable residents for a set time period (Kaminsky & Faust, 2017). However, what we do not know is whether residents feel that financially supporting these services for displaced persons is their individual responsibility. Otherwise stated, the public believes these services should be provided, but how they perceive the provision of such services should be financed is not clear. When attempting to fulfill the needs of the expanded community, the state, policymakers, engineers, and utility managers can face publics who are not always willing to share their own financial resources and utilities with vulnerable residents. Therefore, we ask the following questions: Do residents perceive a significant individual responsibility to provide water and wastewater services to those displaced compared to their collective expectation of the provision of services? What type of a person is more or less willing to financially contribute to the provision of water and wastewater services to those displaced?

Practically speaking this study quantifies individual responsibility to support those displaced in hosting communities post disaster, which is becoming increasingly important as the world reaches historic records of displaced persons (UNHCR, 2020). As policy makers, engineers, and utility staff, grapple with the question of how to ensure that funds are available and allocated to support the related increased demands, results from this analysis can inform awareness campaigns or changes in rates and rate structures that can ensure the funding availability. The paper contributes to the theory of willingness to pay for newcomers by demonstrating that those socially and geographically positioned closer to urban development are more likely to support displaced people. Positioned closer to the levers of diverse types of capital in urban environments, people are likely to be more educated, obtain higher social statuses, and receive higher incomes that allow them to support newcomers without it being a financial burden or seeing the action as infringing upon their status and future.

Section snippets

Population dynamics and civil infrastructure

In the context we analyze here—Germany during the peak of the “refugee crisis” in 2015/2016 (Statista, 2021)— serving displaced populations entailed reasonably long-term service provision for over one million displaced persons, regardless of their ability to pay. With over one million newly registered asylum seekers in 2015, the number of displaced persons in Germany reached a peak (Statista, 2021). When a community receives a large influx of migrants, it must spend on infrastructure, such as

Methods

A collective expectation exists that water and wastewater services are a human right (Kaminsky & Faust, 2017). We posit that this collective expectation differs from a person’s sense of individual responsibility—that is, the general public may expect this right to be protected but individuals do not feel a personal responsibility to contribute to safeguarding it. We first determine whether this difference is real using inferential statistics. Once established, we explore individual

Results & discussion

Many respondents did in fact have a positive attitude towards the collective provision of water and wastewater services, yet many perceived no individual responsibility to financially contribute for any period of time. In Fig. 1, we see that only ∼75 respondents felt these services need not be provided to the displaced; however, ∼200 respondents stated that they would not directly contribute towards providing these services. Of the 270 and 267 respondents that perceived a collective expectation

Conclusion

Findings from this analysis confirmed that there does exist a misalignment between collective expectations and individual responsibility, where individual responsibility toward financially supporting services for those displaced is statistically less than the collective expectation that another entity should be financially supporting such services. Looking at who perceived this individual responsibility, we find that respondents who are male, wealthier, more highly educated, and more urban are

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgements

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 1624409 and 1624417. We would like to thank the survey respondents for their thoughtful feedback, and Felipe Araya for help with data processing.

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