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1. Becoming Killable: White-tailed deer management and the production of overabundance in the Blue Hills

   https://doi.org/10.1080/02723638.2021.1902685  

   Connors, John Patrick; Short Gianotti, Anne (May 2021, Urban Geography)

   null (Ed.)

   This paper examines the implementation of a white-tailed deer management program in the Blue Hills Reservation outside of Boston, Massachusetts. Drawing on the concepts of biopolitics, we explore how white-tailed deer became an object of concern and ultimately targets of lethal management in this suburban park. Through interviews, document analysis, and observation of public meetings, we examine the changes in and controversy over the presence, perception, and management of deer in the park. We argue that the implementation of the deer management program is only partially explained by the growing numbers of white-tailed deer, and must also be understood in the context of concerns about human health and shifting imaginaries of urban green spaces and global biodiversity. The case illustrates the entanglements of harm and care in the management sub/urban ecosystems and highlights how differences in the ethical and ontological understandings of deer create tensions in efforts to advance multispecies urban planning. 

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2. Does Outsourcing Reduce Public Scrutiny Toward Elected Officials?: Insights From US Municipal Water Management

   https://doi.org/10.1111/padm.13058  

   Barnes, Jesse L; Koebele, Elizabeth A; Deslatte, Aaron (March 2025, Public Administration)

   ABSTRACT Amidst 21st‐century climate‐related threats, municipal elected officials (EOs) may outsource public services to third parties to avoid the political costs of adopting “unpopular” sustainability policies—a strategy known as political decoupling. However, decoupling raises accountability concerns and may not improve sustainability, leading some municipalities to “recouple” services. To help understand the political impacts of these decisions, we assess how public scrutiny toward EOs in US municipalities changes after varying degrees of coupling in the water provision sector (i.e., how much service delivery shifts away from or toward municipal oversight). Analysis of local media coverage shows public attention toward EOs decreases after higher degrees of decoupling and recoupling, public opinion becomes polarized toward EOs after decouplings, and the public links sustainability‐related issues to EOs after high degrees of decoupling. The results highlight how reforming public services relates to political accountability‐related factors and raise critical questions about the political decoupling strategy. 

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3. Policing the California Outercity: Drivers of Police Spending in a Changing Metropolis

   https://doi.org/10.1093/socpro/spad050  

   Ross, Ángel Mendiola (October 2023, Social Problems)

   Abstract This paper explores the intersection of two major trends in the United States over the last forty years: a substantial investment in local law enforcement and the diversification of suburbia. While previous research on police spending has focused almost exclusively on large central cities, this study broadens this perspective to assess how these dynamics play out in outer-ring suburbs. I construct a unique panel dataset of over 200 California municipalities and find that the drivers of police spending vary across the metropolis in significant ways. Fixed-effects models that control for unobserved heterogeneity across place suggest that suburbs with growing shares of renters spend more on police. Elaborating on the concept of renter threat, I show how increases in renter households are associated with increases in police expenditures across a range of model specifications in suburbia. I point to suburban homeowner concerns about crime and property values as well as the history of racial exclusion in suburbia that is often couched in economic terms as potential explanations for these findings. Results point to the enduring role of police as a contemporary mechanism of both social control and inequality in California suburbs. 

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4. Causes and Consequences of Local Government Efforts to Reduce Risk and Adapt to Extreme Weather Events: Municipal Organizational Robustness

   https://doi.org/10.3390/su13147980  

   Valdivieso, Patricio; Neudorfer, Pablo; Andersson, Krister P. (July 2021, Sustainability)

   This research article investigates the causes and consequences of municipal institutional arrangements for the provision of resilient critical infrastructure in municipalities. The study explains how the municipal organizational robustness and external institutional dynamics moderate the relation between capacities, leadership, and local government investment decisions. We examine hypotheses on moderating effects with regression methods, using data from 345 Chilean municipalities over a nine-year period, and analyzing the evidence with support of qualitative data. Our results reveal that municipal organizational robustness—operational rules, planning, managerial flexibility and integration, and accountability—is the most quantitatively outstanding moderating factor. The evidence leads us to deduce that efforts to support local governments in the emerging policy domain of resilient critical infrastructure require special attention to the robustness of municipal institutional arrangements. The results are valid for countries where the local governments have responsibilities to fulfill and their decisions have consequences for the adaptation. Since one of the objectives of the Special Issue “Bringing Governance Back Home—Lessons for Local Government Regarding Rapid Climate Action” is to explore how action is enabled or constrained by institutional relations in which the actors are embedded, this study contributes to achieving the goal. 

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5. Synchronous effects produce cycles in deer populations and deer‐vehicle collisions

   https://doi.org/10.1111/ele.13650  

   Anderson, Thomas_L; Sheppard, Lawrence_W; Walter, Jonathan_A; Rolley, Robert_E; Reuman, Daniel_C; Blasius, ed., Bernd (December 2020, Ecology Letters)

   Abstract Population cycles are fundamentally linked with spatial synchrony, the prevailing paradigm being that populations with cyclic dynamics are easily synchronised. That is, population cycles help give rise to spatial synchrony. Here we demonstrate this process can work in reverse, with synchrony causing population cycles. We show that timescale‐specific environmental effects, by synchronising local population dynamics on certain timescales only, cause major population cycles over large areas in white‐tailed deer. An important aspect of the new mechanism is specificity of synchronising effects to certain timescales, which causes local dynamics to sum across space to a substantial cycle on those timescales. We also demonstrate, to our knowledge for the first time, that synchrony can be transmitted not only from environmental drivers to populations (deer), but also from there to human systems (deer‐vehicle collisions). Because synchrony of drivers may be altered by climate change, changes to population cycles may arise via our mechanism. 

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