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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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Motivated Localism: Polarization and Public Support for Intergovernmental Carbon Reduction Efforts
Climate challenges in the 21st century have given rise to re-thinking the role of local governments in confronting larger-than-local challenges. However, anthropogenic climate change has become a weaponized partisan issue, and surveys show a growing partisan tribalization over climate science. Empowering local governments to take broader climate and sustainability actions is one avenue for addressing this. This study tests a localism hypothesis, which holds that citizens will be more supportive of local climate efforts when the benefits are internalized by the community. This deference to locally directed actions springs from the predisposition for decentralization of political authority widely attributed to localism, a directional goal of motivated reasoners which may feed into social identity, cohesion and shared community values. Through three survey experiments, the study finds citizens are more likely to favor continuation of local climate-related programs in the face of high performance and politicization at the federal level.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1941561
- PAR ID:
- 10368570
- Publisher / Repository:
- SAGE Publications
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Urban Affairs Review
- ISSN:
- 1078-0874
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- Article No. 107808742211094
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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