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1. 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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2. Accountability and effort among street-level bureaucrats: Evidence from a lab-in-the-field experiment

   https://doi.org/10.1080/10967494.2021.1951408  

   Zarychta, Alan; Grillos, Tara; Andersson, Krister P. (August 2021, International Public Management Journal)

   Governance reforms like decentralization and performance-based management aim to improve public services by increasing accountability among street-level bureaucrats: bureaucrats may be held to account by communities, supervisors, intermediary organizations, or all of these. To assess the relationship between accountability and bureaucratic effort, we utilize data from a lab-in-the-field behavioral experiment conducted with Honduran health workers across decentralized and centrally administered municipalities. We presented health workers with an incentivized effort task that included instructions that were neutral, had a bottom-up political accountability prompt, or a top-down bureaucratic accountability prompt. Our results show that administrative context moderates the accountability-to-effort relationship. With neutral instructions, civil servants in decentralized systems exert greater quality effort than their counterparts under centralized administration. Importantly, both accountability prompts increase quality effort in centrally administered settings to levels comparable with those in decentralized settings. These findings support multiple accountability as a potentially important mechanism linking decentralization reform to improved service delivery. 

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3. Advancing food democracy: The potential and limits of food policy positions in local government

   https://doi.org/10.5304/jafscd.2021.111.002  

   Berglund, Erika; Hassanein, Neva; Lachapelle, Paul; Stephens, Caroline (January 2021, Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development)

   For several decades, food policy councils (FPCs) have led the effort to place food on local govern­ment policy agendas. While FPCs are making pro­gress in supporting local food systems, they also face institutional and organizational challenges. In recent years, a handful of cities and counties have endeavored to further food system reform with the establishment of full-time government staff posi­tions focused on food policy. As of spring 2020, there were 19 confirmed food policy positions housed in local governments across the United States. While there is considerable literature on FPCs, little research has been published regarding food policy staffing in local governments. Accordingly, this study uses original in-depth inter­views with 11 individuals in municipal or county food policy positions to understand the purpose and function of governmental food policy staff positions and their impact on local food systems. Our findings suggest that these positions help to coordinate and nurture local food programs and policies and have the potential to facilitate mean­ingful participation of individuals and groups in the community in food system reform. We discuss the potential benefits and challenges for governmental food policy positions to support food democracy, and provide the following recom­mendations for communities interested in estab­lishing or strengthening similar positions: (1) iden­tify and coordinate existing opportunities and assets, (2) foster and maintain leadership support, (3) root the work in community, (4) connect with other food policy professionals, and (5) develop a food system vision. 

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4. 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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5. Decentralization Can Increase Cooperation among Public Officials

   https://doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12606  

   Molina‐Garzón, Adriana; Grillos, Tara; Zarychta, Alan; Andersson, Krister_P (May 2021, American Journal of Political Science)

   Abstract Collective action among public officials is necessary for the effective delivery of many social services, but relatively little is known about how it can be fostered through policy reforms. In this article, we compare cooperation among public officials within decentralized versus centrally‐administered municipalities in Honduras. Leveraging a quasi‐experiment in health sector reform, coupled with behavioral games and social network surveys, we find that decentralization is associated with greater cooperation. When they are able to communicate, health sector workers in decentralized municipalities contribute more to a public good than their centrally‐administered counterparts. This increase in cooperative behavior results in part from the decentralization reform engendering greater numbers of interactions and stronger ties across different levels of government. These findings indicate that institutional reforms like decentralization can favorably reconfigure patterns of social interactions across public organizations, which is an important component of administrative capacity in developing countries. 

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