‘How will this affect our credit rating?’: municipal debt and governing the environment

Abstract

ABSTRACT By analyzing the multiple forms of debt used by municipal water supply organizations, I present evidence to argue that the financial structures of contemporary public governance give financial interests undue influence over the management of natural resources. This study uses financial statistics and qualitative data pertaining to the largest provider of drinking water in the US, Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (MWD), an empirically significant case study. Municipal water agencies collect revenues through traditional sources including water sales and tax collections, but they also raise significant funding with a variety of debt instruments. In this study, I first observe a strong increase in revenue-backed debt, supplanting tax-backed debt, as the primary source of funding. Next, I examine how revenues have shifted since mid-century with water sales growing primary and taxation becoming peripheral. Lastly, I analyze the influence of financial gatekeepers – credit rating agencies – considering the growing reliance on private financial capital. I find that rating agencies push finance-oriented objectives on water managers that include commodifying water to maximize revenue, avoiding expenditures, and flouting climatological realities of scarcity, among others. I propose the notions of financial feedbacks and the financial pathology of institutions as conceptual tools for characterizing these processes.