Values at the tap: how organizational culture shapes water unaffordability and environmental justice in U.S. cities

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Rising household water rates have made unaffordability a public-health and environmental-justice concern, yet the cultural drivers of water utility affordability policies remain unclear. Integrating Schlosberg’s three justice dimensions with Schwartz’s human values theory, we examine how organizational values inside municipal water utilities shape pricing and customer assistance. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 37 managers, staff, and officials at 11 publicly owned utilities in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania. Three dynamics emerged. First, environmentality is subordinate to fiscal security: conservation pricing and treatment upgrades are framed as costs to recover through uniform rates, reproducing distributive inequities. Second, conformity and tradition operate through consultant-led rate studies that benchmark against peers, buffering utilities from procedural and recognition justice claims. Third, tension between universalism (equal treatment) and benevolence (targeted relief) sorts utilities into three value camps – Traditionalists, Balancers, and Benevolence-Led; only the latter embeds EJ as an explicit value, pairing equity measures with robust outreach. We advance water affordability research by showing EJ can function as an organizational value that competes with or complements sustainability, security, conformity, and tradition. Policies that name affordability as an objective, institutionalize participation, and pair ecological mandates with affordability funding can shift Balancers toward benevolence-led practice.