Local Planning Response for Enhancing Resilience in Drought-prone Small Cities and Towns

Intensifying droughts due to climate change are increasing competition for water among different uses in communities. This growing competition will have implications for local development and sustainability. Among all actions related to water-sensitive growth, water conservation is most indicative of local response to drought risk, and its consideration in comprehensive plans suggests the community’s commitment towards building resilience to future water shortages. This research focuses on planning response for building resilience to droughts in the context of small cities and towns. It includes a study of water conservation consideration in comprehensive plans from a representative sample of 114 drought-prone small cities and towns in the contiguous US. It uses content analysis comprising of alternate approaches to resource-intensive manual-based coding for identifying water conservation discussion in local plans and includes a descriptive analysis of the nature of this discussion. It also applies inferential analysis to determine potential factors that can inform the level of water conservation consideration in the plans. Analyses in this research demonstrate the utility of Efficiency and Convergence measures to compare alternate coding methods and to determine the most suitable approach for identifying references related to a concept in plans. These findings will facilitate the use of less resource-intensive coding approaches in plan analysis, allowing larger sample sizes to improve the generalizability of results. Examination of the nature of water conservation discussion reveals a much higher proportion of references related to policies and implementation mechanisms than supporting information, with a potential disconnect between policies/implementation discussion and supporting information for some water conservation concepts indicating implications for plan quality. The analysis also reveals patterns in the utilization of implementation mechanisms and provision of implementation details for water conservation strategies that can affect their application in smaller jurisdictions. Finally, findings from regression analysis suggest economic vulnerability, local capacity, and the state’s focus on drought mitigation as potential factors that affect the level of water conservation consideration in the plans. These findings have implications for how long-term planning for water conservation should be approached and enabled in smaller jurisdictions to improve resilience in the face of growing water scarcity.