Greg Pierce is the Associate Director of the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation and directs the Center’s Water and Environmental Equity programs. He is also an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Urban Planning and affiliated faculty with the UCLA Water Resources Group, Lewis Center for Regional Studies and School of Public Health’s Center for Healthy Climate Solutions.
Dr. Pierce’s research on basic resource/service provision and access for disadvantaged or marginalized populations takes place at three connected scales, with sectoral foci on water. At the sub-national scale, Dr. Pierce employs formal policy design techniques to evaluate and inform service provision strategies formulated by national sub-national agencies. At the metropolitan scale, political economy analysis is employed to assess programs and plans which allocate services to specific neighborhoods and households. Finally, in response to sub-national and metropolitan scale failures, Dr. Pierce’s research utilizes rational choice and behavior models to analyze low-income urban and household strategies to secure access to and utilize these basic services and programs.
Notable contributions to scholarship include a) reasserting the role of environmental infrastructure neglect in causing mistrust and service insecurity in disadvantaged urban communities, particularly under-reliance on tap water; b) designing and testing the efficacy of policies to redress gaps in water service provision and adaptive capacity to climate change for spatially- marginalized disadvantaged communities, particularly mobile home tenants.
He is the sole or co-author of thirty-seven peer-reviewed articles, including well-cited, first-authored articles in numerous prominent environmental health planning and policy journals. Dr. Pierce serves as the principal investigator of two major research projects with the California State Water Resources Board, focused on a) designing a statewide drinking water affordability program, b) informing funding and long-term solutions for small water systems across the state of California. In the past 3 years, he has secured 15 extramural research funding awards as a principal investigator (PI).
He tweets @gregspierce
Selected publications (Full Google Scholar Profile)
Meehan, Katie, Jepson, Wendy, Harris, Leila, Wutich, Amber, Beresford, Melissa, Fencl, Amanda, London, Jonathan, Pierce, Gregory, Radonic, Lucero, Wells, Christian and Wilson, Nicole (2020). Exposing the myths of household water insecurity in the global North: a critical review. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Water.
Gregory Pierce, Nicholas Chow and JR DeShazo (2020). “The Motivation for Sub-National Drinking Water Affordability Programs: Conceptual and Empirical Evidence from California.” Utilities Policy.
Gregory Pierce, Silvia Gonzalez, Peter Roquemore* and Rebecca Ferdman.* 2019. Sources of and solutions to mistrust of tap water originating between treatment and the tap: Lessons from Los Angeles County. Science of the Total Environment.
Pierce, Gregory. 2019. “How Collectively-organized Residents in Marginalized Urban Settlements Secure Multiple Basic Service Enhancements: Evidence from Hyderabad, India.” Urban Studies.
Gregory Pierce, Larry Lai and J.R. DeShazo (2019) “Identifying and Addressing Drinking Water System Sprawl, Its Consequences, and the Opportunity for Planners’ Intervention: Evidence from Los Angeles County.” Journal of Environmental Planning and Management.
Ariana Javidi and Gregory Pierce (2018) “Negative Drinking Water Perception’s Severe Consequences: Examining Constrained Alternative Choices to the Tap.” Water Resources Research.
Pierce, Gregory and Silvia Gonzalez* (2015). “Unreliable Water Access in U.S. Mobile Homes: Evidence from the American Housing Survey.” Housing Policy Debate 25(4): 739-753
Radonic, Lucero. 2018. “When catching the rain: A cultural model approach to urban water governance” Human Organization,77(2): 172-184.
Radonic, Lucero. 2017. “Through the aqueduct and the courts: An analysis of the universal right to water and Indigenous water rights in Northwestern Mexico”. Geoforum 84(1): 151-157.
Radonic, Lucero and Thomas E. Sheridan. 2017. “Co-producing waterscapes: Urban growth and indigenous water rights in the Sonoran Desert”. In The U.S.-Mexico Transborder Region: Cultural Dynamics and Historical Interaction. Carlos Velez-Ibañez and Josiah M. Heyman, eds. Pp. 287-304. Tucson: University of Arizona Press