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Municipalities face increasingly complex challenges from climate change-driven natural hazards that threaten health, infrastructure, and livelihoods. Addressing these risks requires ambitious climate policies that drive the societal transformations advocated in climate policy literature. This study examines factors enabling local governments to adopt ambitious flood risk management. Ambitious climate adaptation policies go beyond minimum regulatory requirements to reduce climate vulnerability and enhance resilience. They facilitate their community’s ability to bounce forward after confronting system disruptions and shocks. Given the dynamic nature of climate challenges, scholars emphasize the importance of having a capacity for transformation over achieving fixed outcomes. Accordingly, this study hypothesizes that city governments with higher Transformative Governance Capacity (TGC) are more likely to implement ambitious flood management strategies. TGC is characterized by behavioural qualities such as being learning-focused, proactive, and risk-accepting. Using survey data from 386 U.S. cities, we operationalize and quantify local governments’ TGC and analyze its association with ambitious flood management practices, as proxied by participation in the Community Rating System (CRS) – a voluntary programme that incentivizes communities to exceed national flood mitigation standards. The findings support the hypothesis that greater TGC is associated with higher levels of involvement in the CRS and higher CRS scores, underscoring the importance of this distinct type of behavioural capacity in addressing escalating climate threats.
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Inscriptions of resilience: Bond ratings and the government of climate risk in Greater Miami, Florida
In recent years, credit rating agencies have begun to incorporate a municipality's resilience and vulnerability to climate change into their US municipal bond rating methods. Drawing on the case of Greater Miami resilience planning and Science and Technology Studies-inspired work on inscriptive devices, I investigate how this incorporation practically happens, and how it shapes the ways that Greater Miami governments attempt to govern climate risk through resilience investments. What “counts” as resilience there, I suggest, is increasingly an effect of the observational practices of rating agencies. However, the still-emergent status of resilience as an object of knowledge among rating agencies and Greater Miami governments means that resilience retains a degree of plasticity, allowing government officials and residents alike to mobilize the term for different purposes and toward different ends. In tracing the emergent relations between rating agency practice on climate risk and local government resilience investments, the paper makes two contributions to scholarship in economic and urban geography. First, it illuminates the ways that extra-local practices of expert valuation shape the local construction of environmental fixes. Second, it offers insights into how one of the key actors of the 2007–2008 financial crisis is beginning to lay the epistemic groundwork for future economic crises and inequalities in and between cities, this time as they relate to climate change impacts and a city's supposed resilience and vulnerability to them.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2025990
- PAR ID:
- 10361590
- Publisher / Repository:
- SAGE Publications
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space
- Volume:
- 54
- Issue:
- 2
- ISSN:
- 0308-518X
- Format(s):
- Medium: X Size: p. 295-310
- Size(s):
- p. 295-310
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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