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Although they play a key role in shaping local efforts, there is limited research on how city officials define sustainability as it is practiced in their communities. To address this limitation and contribute to planning research, we leveraged a unique nationwide data set of sustainability definitions provided by the sustainability lead in more than 400 U.S city governments. Our study’s qualitative analysis of these statements complements existing research by exploring emerging themes on how sustainability is perceived and practiced at the local level. Results indicated that practitioners’ conceptualizations reflected five general orientation categories: action, aspiration, emotion, process and organization, and progress. We evaluated the association of these general orientation categories with cities’ administrative arrangements, political environments, resources, and capacities. Findings suggested that supportive contexts were associated with city sustainability staff defining sustainability in aspirational terms, as opposed to emphasizing progress or discrete actions.
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The Road to Routinization: A Functional Collective Action Approach for Local Sustainability Planning and Performance Management
When confronting complex challenges, governments use basic bureaucratic design heuristics -- centralization and specialization. The complexity of environmental and climate issues has drawn recent attention to the ways in which fragmented authority influences, and often challenges, the policy choices and institutional effectiveness of local governments. Sustainability planning and improved performance are potential benefits stemming from the integration of responsibilities across silos. Our central proposition is that institutionalized collective-action mechanisms, which break down siloed decision-making, foster more successful implementation of sustainability policies. We empirically examine this using two surveys of U.S. cities and find evidence that formal collective-action mechanisms positively mediate the relationship between broader agency involvement and more comprehensive performance information collection and use. However, we identify limits to the role of planning in fostering a performance culture. Specifically, cities that have engaged in broader planning conduct less-comprehensive performance management, likely due to measurement difficulty and goal ambiguity.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1941561
- PAR ID:
- 10368416
- Publisher / Repository:
- SAGE Publications
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- State and Local Government Review
- Volume:
- 54
- Issue:
- 4
- ISSN:
- 0160-323X
- Format(s):
- Medium: X Size: p. 310-327
- Size(s):
- p. 310-327
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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