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As cities worldwide increasingly adopt commitments towards climate justice, questions remain about the ways that city governments will be able to fund more just climate efforts. While the use of novel debt financing schemes has been examined in the literature for its justice implications, scholars have rarely interrogated how the more mundane tools and practices of municipal finance can be applied to enable more just urban transitions. Here, we use the USA as a case study to analyse the impacts of climate change and climate action on municipal budgets and to examine how cities are adapting their financial tools and practices to advance climate action and climate justice efforts. We employ a mixed-methods research design that combines 34 expert interviews with a systematic content analysis of municipal budgets from 15 US cities of different sizes. We find that both climate change and climate action can contribute to cities’ fiscal vulnerability by imposing additional expenditures and/or reducing municipal revenues. While most cities lack transparency about their investments in climate action and climate justice, some city governments are implementingordinary innovationsthat embed climate and justice criteria into budgetary practices and funding tools. These ordinary innovations reveal that cities are beginning to reimagine municipal finance in the service of more just climate futures.
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Mayoral partisanship and municipal fiscal health
Whether cities can provide critical public services and infrastructure depends on their fiscal health or the ability to pay for different service responsibilities and meet other financial obligations. In this study, we explore a long-simmering controversy in the study of local politics and public finance: does mayoral partisanship matter for city fiscal health? To answer this question, we use audited financial data from 2004 to 2016 for U.S. municipalities with a population of 50,000 or more to measure a critical dimension of fiscal health, which is budgetary solvency. Employing difference-in-differences regression with staggered treatment adoption, our findings reveal that cities switching from a Democratic to a Republican mayor experience improvements in budgetary solvency. However, the effect does not last and dissipates as the next election approaches, indicating the existence of a city fiscal health cycle. The effects of mayoral partisanship are more evident when elections are not competitive. We also find that Republican mayors in mayor-council cities exhibit better budget outcomes than Republican mayors in council-manager cities.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2114770
- PAR ID:
- 10526154
- Publisher / Repository:
- Springer
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Public Choice
- ISSN:
- 0048-5829
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- mayoral partisanship, fiscal health, municipal election, government form
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-024-01190-0
