Chapter 1: Introduction: The future of drinking water in America -- Chapter 2: Regulating for Health: Prioritizing and maintaining the most meaningful opportunities for risk reduction opportunities for risk reduction -- Chapter 3: Human Capital: Operator quality and water utility performance -- Chapter 4: Funding the Future of Safe Drinking Water Fiscal sustainability amidst growing service provision challenges -- Chapter 5: The State of Safe Water The future of SDWA implementation for primacy agencies -- Chapter 6: Right-sized How much consolidation is enough -- Chapter 7: Good Governance Good Water A framework for evaluating drinking water institutions -- Chapter 8: Thirsty for Deliberation Exploring possibilities for enhanced public engagement in protecting the nation’s drinking water -- Chapter 9: Risk and Efficacy in Communication of Contaminants in Drinking Water -- Chapter 10: Commercial Drinking Water and the Safe Drinking Water Act -- Chapter 11: Beneath the Blanket Contaminant-specific analysis for drinking water justice -- Chapter 12: The Madison Declaration: Building on the last fifty years for successes over the next fifty years.

Open Access

In this open access book, contributors explore current challenges and opportunities to improve drinking water regulation, governance, management, environmental justice, and more. In 2024, the United States marked the 50th anniversary of the Safe Water Drinking Act, its principal law regulating drinking water. Rather than looking back, this book looks forward to the decades ahead: each chapter is rooted in rigorous research and ends with concrete recommendations for the future of American drinking water. The book’s authors include leading policy scholars and water sector professionals. The book culminates in the Madison Declaration, a vision statement and bold call to action for the next fifty years. Manny Teodoro is Robert & Sylvia Wagner Professor at the La Follette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of The Profits of Distrust: Citizen-Consumers, Drinking Water, and the Crisis of Confidence in American Government (2022, with Samantha Zuhlke and David Switer) and Bureaucratic Ambition: Careers, Motives, and the Innovative Administrator (2011).

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