No Local Penalty: Proximity to a Planned Water-Reuse Scheme and Public Acceptance. Evidence from Barbados

Public acceptance is a potential constraint on water-reuse infrastructure, but much survey evidence elicits attitudes toward hypothetical or broadly framed reuse. Facility-siting research suggests that general support can fall when a project becomes local, while water-reuse research emphasizes trust, perceived risk, benefits, and context. We examine whether a local penalty appears in a knowledge–attitudes–practices survey of 1,069 households across 30 enumeration districts in Barbados. Some communities were purposively selected because they were proximate to a planned reclaimed-water scheme; comparison communities were drawn island-wide. We estimate conditional differences and assess sensitivity to covariate imbalance, geographic composition, and selection into a project-specific question. We find no evidence of a local penalty. The personal-use willingness gap is positive in every specification (0.11–0.20 standard deviations), although imprecisely estimated; the preferred estimate rules out a negative gap larger than about 0.08 standard deviations. The clearest difference is support for the local treatment-plant upgrade: among respondents aware of the upgrade, the standardized gap is 0.53 standard deviations, with Lee bounds of 0.37–0.68 under monotonic selection into the awareness-conditioned item. Abstract reuse beliefs and generic environmental and institutional attitudes are flat. Proximity raises subjective knowledge by 0.21 standard deviations but leaves objective knowledge unchanged, suggesting greater salience or familiarity. The evidence points to a local acceptance pattern specific to the concrete facility.