Adam Wiechman | Searcharxiv

arXiv2026

Design for Dynamic Fitness: Archetypes of urban water systems

In an era of accelerating change, urban water infrastructure systems increasingly operate outside of their design conditions, putting new pressure on systems' institutional designs to weather emerging challenges. Water management institutions must therefore be designed to exhibit dynamic fitness, defined by anticipatory capacity and responsiveness. However, we do not yet understand the specific features of institutional design that enable dynamic fitness, especially in relation to the diverse biophysical characteristics of systems that such fitness is contingent upon. We advance research on dynamic fitness in the context of urban water supply systems by drawing on 35-year data sets of stressors and responses for 16 U.S. urban water utilities using archetype analysis. Here we find that institutional archetypes capable of coping with higher biophysical complexity invest in both information processing capacity and response diversity. While dynamic fitness comes at a cost, balance between information processing capacity and response diversity promotes efficiency, which can be expanded through polycentric regional institutional structures that facilitate information sharing. Lastly, careful consideration should be given to tradeoffs across levels of governance, as institutional structures that facilitate dynamic fitness at the utility level may reduce the control and flexibility of higher levels of governance.

econ.TH↗

arXiv2025

Politics, Inequality, and the Robustness of Shared Infrastructure Systems

Our infrastructure systems enable our well-being by allowing us to move, store, and transform materials and information given considerable social and environmental variation. Critically, this ability is shaped by the degree to which society invests in infrastructure, a fundamentally political question in large public systems. There, infrastructure providers are distinguished from users through political processes, such as elections, and there is considerable heterogeneity among users. Previous political economic models have not taken into account (i) dynamic infrastructures, (ii) dynamic user preferences, and (iii) alternatives to rational actor theory. Meanwhile, engineering often neglects politics. We address these gaps with a general dynamic model of shared infrastructure systems that incorporates theories from political economy, social-ecological systems, and political psychology. We use the model to develop propositions on how multiple characteristics of the political process impact the robustness of shared infrastructure systems to capacity shocks and unequal opportunity for private infrastructure investment. Under user fees, inequality decreases robustness, but taxing private infrastructure use can increase robustness if non-elites have equal political influence. Election cycle periods have a nonlinear effect where increasing them increases robustness up to a point but decreases robustness beyond that point. Further, there is a negative relationship between the ideological sensitivity of candidates and robustness. Overall, the biases of voters and candidates (whether they favor tax increases or decreases) mediate these political-economic effects on robustness because biases may or may not match the reality of system needs (whether system recovery requires tax increases).

econ.TH↗