Water Infrastructure Crisis in the U.S. and a Roadmap for Reform

Manny Teodoro
Tuesday, June 4

America’s water infrastructure challenges emerge in large part from the crazy patchwork quilt of institutions that own, manage, finance, and regulate the supply. Teodoro offers a roadmap for water governance reforms to align institutional incentives with sustainable, affordable and effective infrastructure.

Manny Teodoro works at the intersection of politics, public policy, and public management. His research focuses mainly on U.S. environmental policy, including empirical analyses of environmental justice. In addition to academic studies, Professor Teodoro pursues a line of applied research on utility management, regulation, and finance. He’s developed novel methods for analyzing utility rate equity and affordability, and works on these issues directly with governments and water sector leaders across the United States.

Professor Teodoro also studies public management and bureaucratic politics, emphasizing labor markets as political phenomena and predictors of organizational performance. His award-winning book, Bureaucratic Ambition (2011, Johns Hopkins), argues that ambition shapes administrators’ decisions to innovate and to engage in politics, with important consequences for innovation and democratic governance.

Professor Teodoro’s research has been funded by the National Science Foundation and Water Research Foundation, and has been published in the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, Public Administration Review, Policy Studies Journal, Social Science Quarterly, Journal of Public Policy, American Review of Public Administration, Water Security, the Journal of the American Water Works Association, PS: Political Science & Politics, and State & Local Government Review.