Standardization versus Situatedness: A Gray Literature Metasynthesis of How Guidance for Alaska’s Water Infrastructure Management Varies by Government Level

The success of water system operation, maintenance, and management (OMM) critically depends on the local workforce. Extreme environmental conditions, limited financial resources, challenging supply chains, and increased technological requirements especially challenge the workforce to equitably and reliably deliver such OMM services in Alaska. To better understand these challenges, this paper presents a metasynthesis of the gray literature regarding water system management in Alaska, with a particular focus on workforce development and OMM regulation. This synthesis was conducted based on qualitatively coding 49 documents that were representative of the full corpus of 183 documents identified on this topic. While prior work tends to focus on a single regulatory level (national or state), this metasynthesis reveals important differences that occur between regulatory levels of government. More specifically, we find federal and state governments focus more on standardization (one size fits all), while regional and local governments focus more on situatedness (tailoring for every circumstance). This may have equity implications for water utilities in Alaska and other Arctic regions where national and state standards drastically differ and overlook local needs. We find that this theme of standardization versus situatedness may generalize to other state water systems, especially those with similar conditions as Alaska (such as Wyoming and Montana), as well as in other sectors in Alaska beyond water (such as environmental management, nursing, and aviation). Given the multilevel governance of water system OMM, these findings suggest that training materials and programs, certification processes, financial support, and policy decisions could be more effective if they consider the local context in which these water systems are situated more, especially when local conditions markedly differ from national norms. Such an approach may help better ensure more reliable and equitable access to safe drinking water in extreme settings such as those in Alaska and in the Arctic, more generally.