Urban Infrastructure Policy to Adapt to Technological and Social Change

Abstract

Examples from urban infrastructure in the United States show that high-level policy reports focused on investment neglect performance improvement, as well as changes in society and technology. A study methodology using systems approaches, institutional analysis, and examples from US situations was used to probe causes and remedies of this policy shortcoming. A conceptual systems model of services and the Maslow hierarchy of needs identified essential services spanning water, energy, transit, and streets management. Drinking water services have greater clarity and were selected to assess actor roles, responsibilities, and actions. The institutional analysis and development framework was used to organize the actors, settings, norms, incentives, rules, and action arenas. Data from the drinking water sector indicated that infrastructure policy reports mix issues and obscure significant impacts on specific sectors. They assume a static view and do not consider transformations in social contracts, alternative technologies, and service delivery methods. Without policy reform, public trust in government services will diminish, but political and administrative realities constrain rational and comprehensive approaches. The drinking water social contract is unlikely to change, but partnerships can incentivize reforms like performance assessment and agency accreditation. Development of a road map for urban infrastructure policy reform will require research by task forces of leading-edge practitioners within categorical arenas like drinking water, electric power, transit, and public works.

1. Introduction

With global urbanization, cities need more effective infrastructure-based services to support quality of life and social functioning [1]. However, the effectiveness of these urban services varies widely. Examples of services required for basic needs are drinking water, energy, transit, and streets to provide living space and transportation corridors. In lower-income settings with urbanization and informal settlements, poor conditions can leave people with little support from urban services other than self-help [2]. Even in higher-income settings, disparities in infrastructure capacity can cause inequitable service delivery and cause pockets of hardships [3].

Such disparities based on infrastructure are affected by asset conditions and management capacity to sustain effective operational performance. However, policy studies focus mainly on investment, leaving performance improvement as a stepchild. The central hypothesis here is that this occurs mainly because of the multi-faceted nature of infrastructure policies, where higher governmental levels have the power of the purse but cannot do much about operations at lower levels. Performance improvement is evident among leading organizations at such lower levels, but it is not universal, especially among smaller ones. Performance improvements discussed here include operational optimization, asset management, and regulatory reform. Each approach shows best practice exemplars, as well as many instances where they are not applied, despite their proven effectiveness.

Infrastructure policy is multi-faceted and multi-level and can be developed by diverse governmental and non-governmental organizations. The focus here spans these across public problems and lines of action that should be taken. Examples of studies are by national commissions, congressional committees, federal government departments, and national interest groups, such as the American Society of Civil Engineers, the National League of Cities, and similar groups.

The polycentric nature of infrastructure policy development can be addressed using the principle of subsidiarity to identify productive levels to exercise powers and responsibilities [4]. Other theories that explain the dilemmas include principal-agent theory about the principal-to-actor transfer of responsibility and power and alignment of government activities across functions and levels [5,6].

Framing of infrastructure issues is a major issue in promoting understanding by policy makers and public trust. The public may say they support investment in infrastructure but may not understand how it affects areas like taxes and fees. The ambiguity of the term infrastructure was evident, for example, in the constantly changing USD 1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act during the Biden Administration [7]. Part of the discussion was about hard infrastructure, and another part was about soft social infrastructures.

The aggregation of infrastructure categories in policy discussions that obscures performance issues dates back more than four decades [8]. Studies in the intervening years used mixed categories in confusing ways, with the result that infrastructure policy is not well understood. Such studies of infrastructure policy [9] often focus on themes and do not point to action items. For example, a study analyzed 995 publications to identify themes with names like stormwater, cities, investments, urban infrastructure, and vulnerability. This led to further identification of a research agenda with themes like disaster mitigation, maintenance, smart cities, and communication networks [10]. These may be useful for discussion, but they fail to point to specific action steps [11]. For example, a workshop by the US National Science Foundation attended by the writer concluded that “infrastructure is 95% political” [12], but participants could not identify meaningful actions and interest among industry stakeholders waned.

The recurring recommendations for investment have greater political appeal than operational performance. Stakeholders making reports may have stakes in funding new systems more than operating old ones. Many disparate situations are involved in tracking operational performance at levels where it supports basic needs, and these are difficult to generalize. Promoting public trust is important, but it is difficult to consider in infrastructure reports.

Meanwhile, vague and recurring recommendations for more investments fall on deaf ears while real issues of improving services go unaddressed. Evidence shows that users continue to take the services for granted and resist paying full cost [13]. Absent a crisis, little happens, critical maintenance and renewal fall behind, and infrastructure systems deteriorate, as they have in the US and Germany, for example [8,14].

2. Methodology

The first goal of the study is to test the hypothesis that urban infrastructure policy studies focus on investment and do not consider the potential of performance improvement adequately. This is followed by an examination of core public works services to assess the influence of this unbalanced focus on investment while not considering the impacts of technological and social changes on the performance of urban infrastructure systems.

The basic study method comprises a mixture of problem-solving approaches. It is not the same as what social scientists call “mixed methods,” which are a mixture of qualitative and quantitative approaches. Often, such studies require the participant to consult secondary sources and analyze data that may or may not be quality-assured. This study is qualitative and involves long and extensive personal involvement of the writer with many of the situations, actors, and actions involved. Such personal involvement carries the risk of bias, but it can be present in cases involving less experience. Ultimately, the reader must assess the possibility of bias in findings and recommendations.

The study involves a review of policy documents, a conceptual model, systems thinking about a mental map of elements for an institutional analysis, and study of the alignment of stakeholder roles, responsibilities, and agencies with infrastructure policy gaps. Data include examples mined from industry media and refereed journals, as well as the writer’s records from the American Public Works Association and other professional groups, along with a long-standing graduate course about infrastructure and public administration at Colorado State University.

The review of policy documents aims to assess their sources, purposes, and impacts. The writer has been involved directly in some of these, and they have been a core topic of the graduate course for some 40 years. Initially, the federal government level dominated, but over the decades the work at this level stabilized and it became clear that roles and responsibilities have shifted to lower government levels and to non-governmental groups. This follows the principle of subsidiarity, which will be explained. A full explanation of this devolution process is beyond the scope of the discussion, but its basic attributes are described.

The conceptual model is a visual representation to illustrate how infrastructure-based services support the social and economic elements of urban systems. It is presented only at a general level to avoid excessive detail that would make it difficult to form the mental map needed. This work could be expanded by using systems methods such as model-based systems engineering, but such details are not needed here.

The mental map prepares the analyst to identify the main elements for institutional analysis. Several methods for this analysis procedure are identified, and the one used primarily is the institutional analysis and development method, which will be explained later. The main feature of the analysis is use of the concept of action arenas to assess how roles and responsibilities align with the actions needed to reduce gaps in applying infrastructure policy tools such that performance improvement can be included.

The examples are organized by reducing the large and disparate lists of categories in diverse policy documents to a few basic services that serve the lower levels of the hierarchy of needs outlined by Maslow, which will be explained along with the mental model. Ultimately, the list is reduced to four urban services, transit, streets, drinking water, and electric energy. The detail required for the analysis meant that only one could be explained in detail, and drinking water was selected due to the greater focus on data that it provided.

Recommendations are made for improvement of broad infrastructure policy approaches, and the roles of education and research are analyzed to search for new ways to address performance improvement in urban infrastructure services. The recommendations lead to a road map comprising a few main points that suggest roles for principal stakeholder groups in the realm of urban infrastructure policy and improvement.

To summarize, the study methodology comprises:

• Review of policy documents and other literature;
• Conceptual systems modeling using the Maslow hierarchy;
• Examples of basic services and a focus on the drinking water sector;
• Institutional analysis drawing from the IAD method;
• Analysis of stakeholder alignment and agencies to address policy gaps;
• Recommendations for a road map with roles for policy improvement.

3. Urban Infrastructure Policy in the US

This section presents an overview of policy reports in the US and their effectiveness in addressing relevant infrastructure issues that determine urban economic, social, and physical conditions. It provides a systemic mental map for situational awareness of how subsystems relate to each other and affect other urban systems [15]. Conceptual modeling is used to show how infrastructure supports the elements that affect quality of life in cities. The conceptual level avoids the problem that too much dimensionality would make the discussion difficult to follow.

The multi-faceted concept of quality of life in cities depends on goals, perspectives, and antecedent conditions, as well as cultural aspects. In a high-income country with effective governance, a good city may provide support for health, amenities, and other resources to satisfy residents. In poorer settings, it could mean a reduced quality of life with residents having lower expectations, but conditions may be improving, and residents may be optimistic about the future [16,17].

Speculation leads to various descriptors, such as smart, healthy, livable, sustainable, affordable, just, and future-oriented cities [18,19,20,21,22,23,24], but there are no consensus criteria about these [25]. Lacking consensus, the SDGs provide a starting point, at least for cities in lower-income countries. SDG 11 outlines targets to “Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable.” Its focal points are shown by targets for housing and basic services, transport systems, human settlements, cultural and natural heritages, disaster mitigation, environmental impacts, green and public spaces, and regional links [26]. The generality and non-heterogeneity of these descriptors illustrate the complexity of the interactions involved and make them difficult to assess.

For example, Target 11.1 is “By 2030, ensure access for all to adequate, safe and affordable housing and basic services and upgrade slums,” and its indicator is “Proportion of urban population living in slums, informal settlements or inadequate housing.” Basic services, like access to water and sanitation, are not identified in this indicator, and the implicit assumption is that if residents have adequate housing, they will have basic services. Other SDGs address basic services, such as SDGs 6 and 9, which include water and transport.

Many studies address the SDGs in cities around the world. For example, statistics about the US involve issues for dashboards [27] while other reports are survey-based or anecdotal. The US National League of Cities reported that mayors rated infrastructure as the second priority in 2023, just behind economic development and workforce issues and ahead of housing, public safety, and health. Citizens rated issues differently, and they reported the issue of infrastructure as their priority [28]. Urban infrastructure was identified as a Grand Challenge by the US National Academy of Engineering (NAE) [29], although drinking water was listed separately. The crossovers among these statistics and ratings indicate the difficulty in measuring progress.

Although infrastructure is universally recognized and related elements such as housing, energy, water, transport, and public safety are mentioned frequently, responsibilities can be hard to pin down. To address this issue, infrastructure must be classified to identify the performance of the actors in managing its subsystems.

Policy reports by governments, non-governmental organizations and interest groups, or private businesses with conflicts of interest usually disaggregate infrastructure into categories and adopt estimates by study groups of the gaps between needed and available levels. The gaps will normally show static views of estimated differences between needed and available stocks. This approach ignores reduced demands due to management strategies and/or productivity improvements through new technologies.

There is evidence of fatigue in these infrastructure policy reports. The last time that a US Commission covering all categories was authorized was during the 1980s with the National Council on Public Works Improvement [30]. This followed closely after the America in Ruins report, which was sponsored by the Council of State Planning Agencies, a non-governmental organization representing state planning agencies [8]. It reported generally that America’s infrastructure was “wearing out faster than replaced,” that “half to two-thirds of the nation’s cities and other communities would be unable to support modernized development without large investments in streets, roads, bridges, water and sewer systems, waste disposal sites, treatment plants, and other facilities.” Some of the estimates had quality controls [31], while others, such as in [8], lacked them.

Government agency reports include targeted studies by Congress such as by the Senate Transportation and Public Works Committee, the Congressional Research Service, and the Congressional Budget Office. Such policy studies for legislative actions may be grist for the mill of political tradeoffs. As an example, the US “Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill” signed in 2021 as the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) was debated for “hard” infrastructure like roads, bridges, and tunnels and “soft” infrastructures such as medical and childcare, low-income housing, and immigration reform [32,33]. In its eventual form, it included 452 funding pots ranging across hard and soft categories. While it provided large sums of federal investments, some were soon poised for cancellation [34].

The best known reports by non-governmental organizations are the Infrastructure Report Cards published by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE). These are descendants of the NCPWI report, which initiated the “report card” concept [30]. The NAE report is also issued by an NGO representing a professional group [29]. Other interest groups focus on specific categories like the quest for more equitable provision of stormwater systems in low-income communities. Other reports take an expanded view, such as the Global Infrastructure Outlook report [35].

Regardless of the source of these reports, the neglect of systems performance and social and technological changes is evident across them. Lack of attention to performance seems to be caused by the complexity of operations [36], incentives of the organizations, and absence of performance regulation of utilities owned by local governments. The lack of connection with quality of life indicators is caused by the complexity of interacting systems and the diversity of cultural conditions among cities. Lack of consideration of social and technological change is caused by uncertainties and the rapidity of trends.

4. Conceptualizing Urban Systems and Infrastructure Services

Conceptual modeling can illustrate the first-order dynamics of subsystems by viewing a city as a system of systems (SoS). The SoS is a framework that evolved to study organizational behaviors [37] with applications in urban geography [38]. The systems comprising the SoS range across social, economic, physical, and natural categories, and each of these will involve interacting subsystems. Attempts to model detailed functioning are too complex to point to specific actions and the mindsets of citizens, but artificial intelligence offers promising potential pathways [39].

A basic model to show how basic services support social and economic elements can be illustrated by a few major elements with the most important subsystems. This illustrates the networked and interdependent systems and exposes linkages and emergent behaviors [40]. These are important because, if subsystems are assessed in a detailed and quantitative model, many assumptions are needed, and emergent behavior of networked systems might be overlooked.

The SoS begins with conceptualization [41] and development of an architecture with system boundaries and interacting subsystems. Early systems dynamics [42] models like in Jay Forrester’s 1970s book Urban Dynamics used population, housing, and jobs as three basic aggregated subsystems [43]. This was convenient for simple problems which can now be modeled on spreadsheets [44]. While fifty years have passed, the dimensionality of the problem still prevents comprehensive analysis, but data analytics and machine learning show promise [45] to replace models based on systems dynamics.

Past urban models focused on themes like mobility, flows in cities, spatial analysis, demography, economics, land use, and energy and water consumption [46]. However, the inherent complexities force the modelers to make simplifying assumptions and ignore network and emergent behaviors. The result is a divergence in conceptualization and no real convergence in understanding.

As an example, one study [47] identified 13 urban subsystems, which can be grouped as infrastructure, economic elements, health and social, communications, and governance. Infrastructure elements included were energy, transport, infrastructure, waste management, water systems, and buildings. Another model [48] aggregated them differently with land use, public facilities, urban fabric (residential, commercial, and industrial structures), demography (population and social dimensions), economics (jobs and businesses), and legal framework. As evident, elements in SoS urban models can be arranged in different ways, and researchers have no standard approach to build upon.

The conceptual framework (Figure 1) at a high level can represent any of the model frameworks, and it avoids the divergence that comes with more detail. It includes the generic economic, social, and physical systems required for any model, and it shows the core infrastructure needed for the business and residential subsystems comprising the built environment.

The general elements shown are the same as in [48] and they avoid diverse subsystems while showing the built environment, the flows of communication and transportation creating connectivity, and basic services to support the economic and social systems. The linked external systems are shown on the outer ring. Many additional subsystems, inputs, outputs, and linkages could of course be added to the diagram.

How infrastructure supports basic needs in cities is often mentioned but not specified. They can be explained at the lower end of the Maslow hierarchy [49] with its focus on physiological and safety needs. This is shown [50] by aligning public works services with physiological, safety, and some social needs near the bottom. The needs are met for people living in the built environment, so the urban system of Figure 1 can be expanded to show in Figure 2 how the services support the needs in the hierarchy. The mapping can show the economy, housing, food, health, and security, and the required infrastructure systems can be shown to provide basic inputs of drinking water, energy, wastewater, stormwater, transit, streets/traffic, and the collection of trash. In turn, these categories can be divided into utilities and general services.

The mapping will be messy if the categories of goods provided by the services are broken out. For example, water supply meets needs at several levels of the Maslow hierarchy, but its main function of sustaining health and life is fixed near the bottom. The different types of goods provided by utilities for drinking water and energy can be split out according to whether they are toll goods to be supported by fees or whether they are public goods to be supported by taxes. These assignments must be viewed in terms of their context, as many cities use innovations in finance to address specific issues with policies for bundling, subsidies, cross-financing, and selective regulation. General trends in US public finance for cities are to charge fees wherever possible, so the only general services that remain tax-supported are street maintenance and traffic control.

The basic services to be discussed further are water and energy for inputs, streets and transit for mobility and interactions, and wastewater and trash collection for waste emissions. More detail could illustrate how mobility and waste emissions are needed for physiological purposes and how some outcomes also apply at higher levels, especially safety and social needs.

5. Infrastructure Examples: Focus on Drinking Water

In US cities, the basic services shown on the right side of Figure 2 are organized mainly by local governments, although with varying service delivery methods [51]. Of these six core systems, four were selected for further analysis to highlight the main points. Even with four systems, the detail required is still high, and drinking water was selected as the focus with the other three for discussion and comparison.

The services include two utility categories (drinking water and electric energy) and two transportation-related categories (transit and streets). Drinking water and electric energy are focused on as utility services and transit is delivered in multiple ways, but it is more of a blended category, which can include a mass transit utility like a bus system. Streets were included to show how infrastructures can serve more than one purpose. They are normally not managed as a utility but as general-purpose facilities with multiple functions.

Examples of leading-edge practices are presented next to show how quality of life in cities depends on infrastructure. They sample from some 20,000 cities, towns, and incorporated places in the US, ranging from small towns to the mega-city of New York [52]. The discussions range across governance, management, and investment issues. Data are found mainly in trade publications, which often lack citations and peer review but identify trends and innovative practices better than academic publications, where authors may draw from secondary case data that can be outdated and unverified. Some trade publications cover general sectors, such as utilities or public works [53,54,55], and others focus on subsectors, like drinking water or transit. As trade publications lack peer review, the validity of their claims requires checking to avoid conflict of interest in presentations. As they are presented to audiences in similar situations, there is to some extent a set of checks and balances on the claims.

Drinking water offers the best data because this sector has been studied extensively. Examples of situations are in the flagship publication of the sector, the Journal of the American Water Works Association (AWWA), along with its companion operator-focused publication, Opflow [56]. These report on services delivered in the US by a set of almost 50,000 mostly small community water systems [57]. Analysis of drinking water issues has also been reported in studies by the National Research Council [58] and the Water Research Foundation (WRF) [59].

From a governance and management standpoint, drinking water utilities confront many issues relating to finance, workforce, and customer interaction, which are reported in various surveys like in [60]. Most of their infrastructure is in their capital-intensive distribution networks, where old pipelines can fail at increasing rates. Utilities also need better operational strategies, and leading-edge utilities are undergoing digital transformation to respond to this need [61,62].

After about two decades of analysis, although workforce and improved performance are critical, policy studies still focus on the static case of system renewal [63,64]. This occurs despite efforts to advance asset management and new knowledge about topics like failure mechanisms, risk analysis, and condition assessment, among others [65,66]. Federal responses are mainly through replenishment of the Drinking Water State Revolving Fund (DWSRF), a block grant program to transfer responsibilities to states. The IIJA also authorized funding for lead service line replacement, a move focused on public health and job creation.

Meanwhile, utilities are mainly on their own for self-finance and the likely future is one where they continue to face workforce, investment, and management challenges. Examples of leading-edge utility work show impressive work to improve operations. An example is the adoption by the Des Moines Water Works of an extensive program of cathodic protection [67], which is part of an asset management program. The same utility has just completed a governance reform effort with innovative regional consolidation [68]. Another example is use of self-assessment among several Southern California utilities [69]. These innovative approaches illustrate performance strategies for the subsystems included in the conceptual model. Despite these leading-edge efforts, available methods for performance improvement are not being implemented on a broad basis. As will be discussed, this occurs despite the availability of excellent advances and many tools.

The situation varies among the other three core services. Demand for electric energy is showing rapid growth, much of it due to electric vehicles and new data centers. Emphasis on renewable generation sources will add to the requirement for new transmission investments and grid hardening [70]. The focus going forward will be on generation, while the main issues within cities are access and reliability. The reliability issue is affected by weather-related outages, which cause major problems with transmission lines and urban distribution infrastructure. Much of the new investment needed will be to bury overhead distribution lines in cities [71]. It is apparent that electric power utilities will need new investment, while working continually on performance improvement.

Transit issues are dominated by service challenges, rather than capital-intensive fixed systems. Most urban transit in the US is by demand–response systems, which are provided by non-profits and private providers, as well as public authorities. Bus transit has a high dependence on operations rather than capital-intensive structures. Only about 3% of ridership is by rail in cities [72]. While studies will stress investment needs [73], the focus going forward will be mainly on addressing demand issues like an aging population, young adults requiring transit, workforce changes, and shifting locations of job hubs. Serving many diverse needs amidst a large volume of travel demands and a politically charged environment is difficult for transit managers.

About 1.3 million miles of urban streets serve multiple purposes in the US. Policy studies and trade journals usually lump them under the roads and highways category, which obscures their specific needs [73,74]. The framework to manage streets is in public works asset management systems [75]. The notion of performance improvement for them is diverse and different than for water and electricity and the multi-pronged transit category.

The examples illustrate clear but diverse impacts of the four services on quality of life in cities, although each category has unique structural and operational attributes as well as different business models. Some rely more on local government and others on public–private partnerships. Drinking water is considered as a health issue and not as an infrastructure issue, but this ignores the capital-intensive distribution systems. Most electric power is delivered by for-profit businesses and is user-financed. Streets require massive investments, but they are not identified separately as an urban infrastructure category, while being financed mainly by local taxes. Transit is mainly an issue in larger cities and does not focus as much on infrastructure as the other categories. Given these diversities, it is not surprising that a national policy report announcing that more infrastructure investment is needed cannot represent the issues very clearly.

There is ample room among these issues for economic studies to classify infrastructure systems in terms of access, equity, and financing. Access to electric power and drinking water can be controlled and financed by user charges, so user finance is appropriate, but affordability looms as a major issue. Ideally, transit would be user-financed, but social needs outweigh the capabilities of fare-supported services, and it ends up being a hybrid between user financing and subsidization as a public good. With multiple objectives and purposes, streets are mainly public goods, although cities can make them excludable and they can be rivalrous due to overcrowding.

6. Roles and Responsibilities for Infrastructure Policy Development

This section presents an analysis of policy reform that considers roles and responsibilities to promote tradeoffs between investment and performance improvement. It uses questions developed from several sources about institutional analysis, including:

• What goes on here;
• What processes need adjustment;
• What problem-solving know-how is available;
• What ought to go on here;
• What are the impacts of change on other activities;
• What are the impacts of change on other institutions?

The questions fit into the broad framework of institutional analysis [76], which is a way to apply system analysis/thinking [77] through a generalized problem-solving process [78] to perform policy analysis [79]. The methods have similar aims in searching for pathways to solve problems, and they include identifying actions needed by actors and stakeholders to improve the outcomes of policy processes.

While there is no consensus framework to perform institutional analysis, the institutional analysis and development (IAD) method offers a promising way to organize the major elements of policy situations. It includes actors, institutional settings, norms, incentive structures, rules, action arenas, and other features [80]. By drawing on it and the other methods mentioned, a hybrid method of inquiry results. It is not the same as the “mixed methods” approach in social science research [81], which combines qualitative and quantitative approaches, but it is mixed in the sense that it blends conceptual frameworks for problem solving.

The discussion continues to use the case of drinking water systems and their capital-intensive distribution networks, which experience many failures. Policy recommendations focus on investment, despite the availability of performance improvement tools, which are not widely used by many community water systems in the US, especially the small ones [82]. This leads to a policy gap where water utilities are aware of available performance improvement tools through research outlets, associations, workshops, and more, but they are not implemented. For example, research has shown how digital transformation can help with data analysis to target the areas needing most attention and sustain adequate service levels, despite infrastructure challenges. Two of the digital tools, asset management [82] and distribution system optimization [83,84,85], are not being implemented by most utilities. The third performance tool, regulation, is not used much due to the public sector ownership of local drinking water utilities.

As an example of a drinking water policy report that focuses on investment, the US Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) needs studies are used. They began after the 1996 Amendments to the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) and the latest one is seventh in the series. They are based on state government inputs about investment needs to meet standards [86]. Typically, in 2023 the needs for distribution and transmission systems were the greatest among the drinking water infrastructure categories, some USD 422.9 billion for pipeline systems, or about 70% of the total. The other infrastructure categories required lower investments, USD 107 billion for treatment, USD 56.1 billion for storage, and USD 25.2 billion for source improvement. Another policy report, the ASCE Report Card [63], uses the same data to promote investment needs.

On the operations side, the need for performance improvement for drinking water quality increased after the 1974 SDWA, and multiple issues were approached, beginning with the regulatory tool of health-based standard setting for water treatment systems. After two decades, it became clear that distribution systems management needed more attention, and the USEPA asked the National Research Council (NRC) to study the problems and suggest solutions. The resulting report remains the most comprehensive analysis of distribution system problems that is available [58].

While the NRC report did not claim to focus on operational needs, its recommendations advocate measures for performance improvement, including a new AWWA standard for management of distribution systems and utility accreditation programs for quality management. The current utility accreditation program is based on optimization of distribution system management, which takes an overall approach to balancing all objectives and not violating constraints [84]. The method is offered through the Partnership for Safe Water (PSW) program, a voluntary program of AWWA to help utilities address the piecemeal requirements of regulations (Partnership for Safe Water) [85].

The NRC report explained how incentives to adopt AWWA G-200 were needed but it did not discuss the PSW program because it was only extended to distribution systems later. Research shows that, without such incentives, not many utilities have adopted G200 or the PSW program [82]. The reasons for lack of adoption center on workforce capacity, conservative utility management, lack of incentives, and absence of regulatory requirements. This issue is being addressed for electric power utilities through the introduction of performance-based rate making [87], a relatively new concept, but fewer water utilities are subject to such requirements because they are mostly government-owned.

Most policy actors that influence distribution system issues are at local levels where specific actions are taken. A list of them was drawn from the writer’s graduate course on infrastructure and utility management at Colorado State University. The actors with the most agency for utility management are at policy, executive, and staff levels in local governments, local offices of state regulatory agencies, engineering services, and contractors and suppliers. Actors with some but lesser involvement include the development industry, non-governmental organizations, and financiers.

Their roles that include policy, management, control, and technical support are shown in

Table 1. Stakeholders and agency levels for influencing tradeoffs and decisions.

Actors	Policy	Management	Control	Technical
City policy level	High	Medium	Medium	Low
City executive and staff level	High	High	Medium	Medium
State/federal regulators	Low	Low	High	Low
Engineering services	Low	High	Low	High
Contractors and suppliers	Low	High	Low	High

as aligned with the categories of actors. Levels of agency for the roles and actors were assigned as high, medium, and low. The basis for the assignment of roles and agency is the writer’s experience in working with many local infrastructure agencies and stakeholders. Governance authorities have the most agency for policy, city staff have more influence over management decisions, and hired engineers and contractors have high agencies for technical decisions. Regulators have power in the realm of control, which can affect management and technical outcomes. While these observations seem obvious, they show that, if tradeoffs are to be considered, the stakeholders with agency in policy and management must be informed. This is especially important among the smaller utilities that lack their own expertise. The roles can be blurred in practice, particularly in small municipalities with overlapping responsibilities and capacity constraints.

Policy actors in local governance comprising mayors, board members, and other officials face many situations, and their agency levels depend on public opinion. They arrive at their posts through diverse routes that may or may not include adequate preparation to understand utility matters. City executives and staff members are selected and trained through more definite routes and should have a greater understanding of utilities. Engineering and construction firms and their suppliers comprise a diverse group with varied incentives and capacities, and regulators also come from diverse backgrounds with uncertain knowledge bases. From this analysis, it is apparent that the actionable responsibilities of actors begin at lower technical levels and move upwards to more general policy and management issues.

7. Discussion

The paper began by identifying the problem that infrastructure policy studies focus on investment and neglect the potential of performance improvement. This is due to the focus of higher governmental levels on finance and not on system performance improvement. To address the issue, the methods of policy analysis should be adjusted to include performance improvement and consider technological and social change.

A major challenge is that, while the SDGs and policy studies indicate the importance of urban infrastructure, the diversity of the services it supports makes the goals difficult to assess and management programs less effective. This presents a barrier to meeting the basic needs of people in cities, especially in lower-income settings undergoing urbanization. It also saps responses to human rights, citizen trust in government, and the community vitality needed for healthy cities.

A comprehensive analysis probed the policy processes with a series of questions derived from methods of institutional analysis and problem solving. The core issue was how the vague dialogues and lack of standard classification frameworks for urban infrastructure systems lead to inadequate policy recommendations. This was evident in policy reports in the US, which focus only on investment. Some of these policy reports have political overtones, lack comprehensive analysis, and are assembled to respond to special interests.

The roles of governments must be aligned with private sector activity to address needs for basic services, but such relationships are difficult to arrange. This issue of alignment has illustrated the complexity of the policy environment that is difficult for the public to understand. Only by analysis and new ways to present the issues can better policies be made and infrastructure systems improved.

Models are useful to facilitate understanding of complex systems activity among urban infrastructure categories, but they must be skeletonized. Some 15 to 20 system elements were reduced to seven basic services that are organized in the US by local governments with varying service delivery methods. Systems for drinking water, energy, wastewater, stormwater, transit, streets/traffic control, and trash collection were reduced further to four core categories (transit, streets, drinking water, and energy), with drinking water services for detailed analysis.

Drinking water systems experience many failures and require significant investments for infrastructure, but the prospects for improved performance through asset management, operational strategies, or regulatory tools are not incorporated into policy studies. The methods are available but not widely used by US utilities due to workforce capacity, conservative utility management, lack of incentives, and absence of regulatory requirements.

Roles were assigned to actors in the policy, management, control, and technical support arenas, with levels of agency assigned as high, medium, and low. This shows how cities could promote performance improvement, but governance authorities may not understand the possibilities. However, they may implicitly consider performance improvement in budget processes where full needs are not funded and make guesses of needs if managers improve performance.

For the most part, the regulatory system does not authorize or incentivize performance improvement. Engineering companies could promote them, but they earn more income through infrastructure investments and may lack utility management expertise. The situations vary among scenarios. In new systems for core cities and peri-urban areas, engineers work with the development industry and make incentive-based choices about new systems. In older systems, the focus is on operating systems and public acceptance of financial decisions like rates and taxes.

The other three basic systems showed similar situations. Street infrastructures use asset management, which is adopted more widely than for water utilities. However, they also require planning and integration with related services, such as mobility, economic development, and neighborhood vitality, making it difficult to assess overall performance. Transit is not infrastructure intensive, but it has different challenges among mixtures of providers. The most visible infrastructure and service issues are in the largest cities, but most of the needs are in the larger number of smaller cities, which do not use much infrastructure. In electric energy distribution, failures attract more attention than in water systems, and risk of weather-induced failures is growing. Many services are provided by private companies, who face challenges from new sources, innovation, and competition.

Organization of these variables enables comparison of the four services across common attributes.

Table 2. Comparison of four services.

	Financial Model	Prevailing Governance	Infrastructure Intensity	Operations Intensity	Regulatory Controls
Drinking water	Utility	City	High	Medium	Medium
Electric power	Utility	Business	High	High	Medium
Transit	Mixed	Mixed	Medium	High	Low
Streets	Tax support	City	High	Low to medium	Mixed

illustrates this with a selection of five attributes as variables. The ratings can be summarized by explaining the attributes. Financial models are based on utility organization (which can be government or business), governance refers to the control of the service’s business model, infrastructure intensity is measured by dependence on the physical systems, as opposed to management, operations intensity refers to the extent that the system requires constant attention rather than being on autopilot, and regulatory controls refer to those that affect performance.

To identify common system behaviors amidst the diversity shown in Table 2, the outcomes of the drinking water analysis can be used. It showed the following system behaviors:

• Static view of investment needs blocks comprehensive policy analysis;
• Repetitive funding emphasis diminishes public awareness and interest;
• Major reforms only occur from crises or disruptive new ideas;
• People consider infrastructure issues implicitly through utility rates and taxes;
• Government social contracts for drinking water provision seem frozen;
• Possibilities for privatization are not explored fully;
• Performance-based rate management underutilized;
• Alternative technologies require more attention.

These findings can be grouped into policy categories for further study and to identify additional issues that affect policy choices (

Table 3. Emergent drivers of infrastructure policy.

Drivers of change	The focus on investment serves some purposes, but it assumes a static view that fails to consider change.
Technological change	New technologies make current assumptions about future systems obsolete and argue for adaptive approaches.
Social contracts	Changing social institutions require adaptive methods for service delivery to respond to justice and equity needs.
Public support	Attention to public trust can be included in performance assessments for infrastructure services.
Action levers	Decision scenarios should move from contentious arenas to those where deliberate actions can be based on evidence that instills public confidence.
Institutional arrangements	New institutional arrangements like performance-based rate regulation (OBR) are needed to accompany new organizational arrangements and management institutions.

).

Addressing these complex drivers will require new approaches and widespread participation. To assess what this might require, the roles of education for actors providing policy, management, control, and technical support were analyzed. Among the disciplines taking these roles, the only one with a focused educational program is engineering, which provides technical support. It is unlikely that new curricula can be added there to focus on infrastructure issues as undergraduate education is straining to keep up with rapidly changing technologies and methods. New degrees to address infrastructure performance are not feasible due to narrow employment opportunities and constraints on higher education. Even graduate engineering degrees focused on infrastructure cannot address the issues comprehensively.

The actors for policy, management, and regulatory control come from a diverse range of disciplines and backgrounds and no core discipline can be identified. Management education is a possibility, but infrastructure and utility management are niche subjects and have not become concentrations in many places. Infrastructure management education suffers the same dilemma as engineering and special degrees are not feasible. Evidence is the demise of the public works master’s degree program at the University of Pittsburgh [88] and the fact that such graduate education is only considered as a niche area of public administration, which is itself a niche field within political science with little technical management included [89]. As a result of the situations described, training for actors involved with infrastructure policy and management must come in special courses and other delivery channels.

Although a new approach to comprehensive infrastructure policy is not on the near horizon, research about what it might look like can be. It should seek a framework for policy analysis for complex problems with many parts, multiple government levels and public–private participation, social and political dimensions, and the need to identify the roles of actors with agency to advance the concept. This agenda faces the same barriers as education due to broad issues that can only be addressed at specific levels. This explains why data from focused trade publications is more useful than academic examples in academic journals, as well as why thematic studies across infrastructure categories are of limited usefulness.

Ultimately, the theory of “muddling through” as a process seems likely to continue in infrastructure decisions. It was advanced in a 1959 article by Charles Lindblom entitled “The Science of Muddling Through” [90]. The concept was that the federal bureaucracy uses only limited analysis, rationality with bounds, and limited theory to make policy. It is related to current thinking that people make quick decisions and snap judgments based on abbreviated information. This is opposed to a rational and comprehensive approach as the best way to develop public policy. This approach includes useful but underutilized methods like ranking values and objectives for relevant factors, analyzing alternative solutions, and choosing alternatives that deliver the highest value in terms of objectives.

Why bureaucrats do not operate this way is discussed in [90], which focuses on the federal government, but the explanations also apply to lower levels of government. Defining values and objectives is difficult and there are tradeoffs. Policy recommendations are linked to the objectives, and this constrains the solution spaces. Values and objectives of constituencies of the bureaucracy determine the importance of preferences, and solutions based on abstract criteria may not attract broad support. It is not efficient to analyze every policy option and busy administrators cannot devote time to it. Given these problems, Lindblom asserted that policies are developed through “successive limited comparison,” which views policies that make only small changes to narrow the scope of analysis. This leads to incrementalism in policy development, which may frustrate people who think government is unresponsive. This view is widely held in the US currently, and the continuing decline of trust in government suggests that Lindblom was on the right track, at least concerning infrastructure policy [91].

While levels of trust in government provide a pessimistic view of the future of infrastructure policy, the need to assemble partnerships involving governmental levels, agencies, and the private sector offers a brighter pathway. A coordinating structure will be required such that diverse needs and views can be assembled and negotiated in ways to facilitate greater public involvement and trust. The most promising place for this to occur is at the local levels, where the rights of citizens to decide their futures align with the need to make common decisions about shared resources like urban infrastructure.

The key question resulting from the analysis is how a road map toward a coordinated approach to infrastructure policy can evolve without central direction from the national government. In the case of the US democratic and federal system, a comprehensive approach to infrastructure policy can only result from the sum of the parts assembled via partnerships among levels of government, professional networks, and other stakeholder groups. In the case of the drinking water services, the main non-governmental organization representing the sector is the American Water Works Association, but policy advocacy is not a major thrust of it. Others, such as the Association of State Drinking Water Administrators [92], advocate policy along special interest lines, such as state government concerns about regulatory approaches. The ASCE’s Infrastructure Report Card receives much attention, but its impact on reforms is unknown.

While the analysis in this paper could postulate a road map, it would not seem promising without greater understanding of the institutional factors that were discussed. Research is needed to study the potential changes in institutional arrangements that might lead to significant change. The first step in such a study could be to understand the issues well. The first-order question could be to identify the most important gaps in the capacity of urban infrastructure to meet the array of human needs discussed here. As there are many gaps, a focus on a few critical ones would be required, as in the case of drinking water, and maybe access and affordability of service would be near the top of the list. Once such gaps are identified, the institutional arrangements involved can be explained. Following that, an analysis of the actors and their roles can be conducted, and it should indicate how incentives and controls can be implemented to see the roles fulfilled effectively. These questions illustrate how methods of institutional analysis can be useful for the study.

Whether this analysis would be considered important within the broad array of issues facing governments is, of course, an open question. Regardless of the answer, advancing policy to solve problems like those discussed will be healthy for related issues of governance and democracy. Such policy improvements will address issues like involvement of professional groups in national life, how to address problems like small utility adoption of reforms when distribution of government revenues is involved, and how to reform education to address the issues.

8. Conclusions

The study showed that high-level infrastructure policy studies do not address basic services well at local levels where most actions that determine the quality of the services occur. These policy studies focus on aggregated investment needs and not on the performance of individual types of systems. This creates a problem because urban infrastructures support the basic services that sustain life and foster community vitality, but policy studies do not address their real needs.

The policy space for urban infrastructure is complex because the systems and services involved differ in multiple ways. The four public works services that were studied had unique attributes and different business models, but they are often lumped into the infrastructure category in thematic studies and policy analysis. The study did, however, show common emergent themes about the problem of combining them in policy studies. Primarily, it showed that the recurring emphasis on investment needs ignores the dynamic nature of technological and social changes that affect policy choices. Another issue is that repetitive reports that focus only on funding needs do not speak well to people who are more concerned with their service levels and costs. This leads to diminished public awareness and interest in addressing shared problems.

Whether the policy studies matter much is an open question. Ultimately, major transformations may only occur from a crisis or disruptive new technologies like artificial intelligence. Regardless of this reality, it is in the best interest of society at all levels to develop the best analysis methods to determine ways to improve its core services. In the case of urban infrastructure, without more focus on operational performance, policy goals have little meaning and researchers are unable to work effectively with practitioners in joint research. This points to the need for an improved approach to policy analysis.

The policy process for urban infrastructure is a shared enterprise that involves intergovernmental coordination and public–private cooperation. While highly visible national reports get attention, much of the work occurs more in the trenches of local governments and professional associations. In the era of big data with ways to use data analysis more creatively than in the past, it seems promising to pursue new ways to develop and disseminate policy in ways to improve urban infrastructure as well as other basic services.

Such a promising prospect must be weighed against the possibility that rational, comprehensive analysis will not work well at the general level of infrastructure policy. The many actors, levels of government, and diverse interest groups may not be amenable to such an orderly process. Rather than the disorder involved in “muddling through” as a viable approach, partnerships among government entities and the private sector with an appropriate coordinating structure could lead to more public involvement and trust, especially at local levels where most decisions about urban infrastructure occur. Studying how organized professional associations and their partners could work alongside the government to advance policy could provide a road map for the future.

Solutions to infrastructure policy problems may point to the need for education and research strategies, but the complex societal issues raised indicate that the core involved disciplines of engineering and management could only address them in niche graduate programs or in continuing education for the main actors, such as public administrators. In a similar way, the research agenda for urban infrastructure improvement can only be addressed at specific levels with only marginal gains as possible outcomes.

A road map to improve the policy process for urban infrastructure will require research to identify promising changes in institutional arrangements. The issues, pathways, and roadblocks must be identified to address the gaps in capacity of urban infrastructure to meet the most important needs. The institutional arrangements noted should address the roles of main actors, their roles, and the incentives and controls needed to facilitate their work. Social contracts should be examined to identify alternative business models, system configurations, and delivery mechanisms, and new methods of performance-based regulation should be incorporated. The research required for such a road map would likely not occur in academia, but it could be conducted with task forces of leading-edge infrastructure practitioners. Without a focus on individual infrastructure categories, such an approach might confuse participants with too many generalities. Therefore, the starting point should be within categorical arenas like drinking water, electric power, transit, and streets as public works. While this conclusion is based on US experience, it should apply to many other situations as well.

As a summary of key takeaways and actionable measures, the following can be derived from the study:

• Inconsistent framing of infrastructure as a category for policy studies blocks effective analysis and limits usefulness of thematic studies.
• The focus on investment in policy studies neglects the transformational effects of new technologies, social changes, and impacts of performance management.
• Repetitive reports focused on funding do not address core concerns of people about service levels and costs.
• Inconsistent framing limits contributions of formal education to infrastructure capacity building and the effectiveness of joint work of researchers and practitioners.
• A road map to improve the policy process for urban infrastructure will require research to identify a process toward changes in institutional arrangements.
• A road map will require work in categorical areas by professional associations in partnership with local governments and key interest groups.