Social Drivers of Water Utility Privatization in the United States: An Examination of the Presence of Variegated Neoliberal Strategies in the Water Utility Sector* Patrick Trent Greiner Department of Sociology University of Oregon Abstract This study uses a logistic regression analysis to investigate the social drivers of water utility privatization in the United States at the local level. In order to do so I combine data gathered from the Environmental Protection Agency’s 2012 Safe Drinking Water Information System database and use it in conjunction with the U.S. census’s 2008–12 county-level demographic estimates. I use a logistic regression analysis in order to examine the relationship between theoretically relevant social factors and the probability of a privately owned or operated water system being located within a community. Key findings suggest that water utility privatization in the United States follows the logic of a variegated neoliberalism and constitutes a form of environmental injustice. Introduction Though private water utility systems have existed since the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century made urbanization a primary con- cern for many governments around the world, their apparent inability to adequately supply a resource that was necessary to the success of industrial cities rendered them a relatively marginal source of water provision when compared to municipal alternatives (Hall and Lobina 2012). Private water utility companies continued to play a rather small role in the provision of public water until the 1990s, when the readop- tion of liberal economic ideologies by much of the global community led supranational institutions, such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, to impose structural adjustment policies that man- dated the privatization of many public water systems in the Global South and eastern Europe (Bakker 2013; Barlow 2009; Conca 2008; Hall and Lobina 2012; Hall, Lobina, and Corral 2011; Harvey 2005; Jaffee and Newman 2013). The presence of privately owned or operated water utility firms continued to grow in the Global South and eastern Europe until the mid-2000s, when high-profile failures of private water * No work is completed in isolation. Special thanks to Jennifer Steimer, Cindy Wood- ruff, and my University of Oregon colleagues: Richard York, Gregory McLauchlan, Julius McGee, and Matthew T. Clement. Rural Sociology 00(00), 2016, pp. 00–00 DOI: 10.1111/ruso.12099 Copyright © 2016, by the Rural Sociological Society