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Local governments worldwide are increasingly experiencing the impacts of extreme climate events such as flooding, drought and wildfires. This has created a growing impetus on the part of public administrators to better assess and address the sustainability of the infrastructures which support public goods or services. This study investigates efforts to integrate local government sustainability-related planning, capabilities and performance information use as a means of regulatory feedback control. Our primary research objective is to better understand how and why constrained, smaller governments enhance the types of feedback they process in the Anthropocene. Drawing from a unique dataset of text, environmental and survey data from municipalities in the U.S. state of Indiana, we find greater exploratory information-gathering in comprehensive land-use and capital planning, and greater financial investment in sustainability efforts, are positively associated with sustainability-related performance information use. We find no linkage between sustainability-focused economic development planning, dedicated administrative capacity and performance use, indicative of the resource-constraints and challenges in adapting existing processes and capacities for ambiguous threats. 

Local, state and federal governmental agencies are navigating a period best characterized as dysfunctional federalism, in which intergovernmental support for sustainability- and resilience-related efforts cannot be relied upon. This field research article explores sustainability and resilience-related planning, implementation and performance management efforts in constrained municipalities in the U.S. state of Indiana, responding to public administration scholars who have called for advancing theories of managing risks. Drawing from cognitive and collective action theory, we examine these local government sustainability efforts as collective acts of inference in response to the federal climate policy whiplash from 2021-2025 under the Biden and Trump administrations. Evidence suggests that local governments made some progress over the study period in responding to observed climate-related impacts and increasing issue-specific collaborative efforts. However, they made less progress toward preparing for future environmental changes. Given federal funding reversals under presidential administrations, future progress for constrained local governments is uncertain. 

Compared to larger cities, smaller local governments with economic and social disadvantages are less understood in their progress toward sustainable development. Since economic growth is often central to constrained local governments, their constrained capabilities exacerbate the challenge for public managers to shift gears from traditional economic development to sustainable development. When capabilities are limited within existing functions, the municipality may need to look outside its organization to meet its goals. Public administration scholars have argued that collaboration can help overcome such challenges. However, a significant gap remains in understanding that the choice of different capability-based collaborative mechanisms affects organizational outcomes. This paper examines how the choice between alternative capability-based collaborative mechanisms influences the sustainable development efforts of resource-constrained local governments. Using Institutional Collective Action (ICA) as a theoretical lens, we contend that public managers choose mechanisms that minimize the risk of collaboration. Drawing on novel Bayesian machine-learning methods and data from smaller, resource-constrained local governments in Indiana, we find evidence that collaborative mechanisms that reduce information-related collaboration risks drive greater engagement in local sustainable development. Additionally, this effect becomes larger when the municipality uses more than one collaborative mechanism. These results suggest that, considering the extreme resource constraints of smaller and rural local governments, collaborative mechanisms can generate positive-sum effects for sustainable development efforts. 

Abstract This article examines the relationship between social vulnerabilities and the attention paid to them by local governments. Drawing from collective action and cognitive theories, we conceptualize planning as an organization-level inference process of selecting strategies to minimize gaps between expected and desired futures. Responding to public administration scholars who have called for advancing theories of managing risks, we examine whether local planning processes are responsive to community disadvantages and how the administrative arrangements and coordination efforts of local governments influence this sensitivity. In doing so, we highlight a phenomenon labeled organizational divergence, in which a collective’s perceived community disadvantages differ from reality. Examining climate action, economic development and sustainability plans, combined with survey and spatial data on environmental burdens for 462 municipal governments, we find evidence, using a multiphase Bayesian analytic strategy, that institutional designs which empower professional city managers increase the probability cities will engage in broader types of planning but decrease the odds they will prioritize social vulnerabilities. However, these cities are more likely to minimize divergence relative to mobility and water-related vulnerabilities. Conversely, greater functional coordination across governmental units increases the probability of prioritizing vulnerabilities in planning but also increases organizational divergence. 

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. 

Local governments tend to produce disjointed planning and implementation responses to ambiguous problems. This study adapts a cognitive science framework known as active inference to investigate local government resilience planning and management processes. We contend that disconnects between planning and management reflect the inadequacy of the “knowledge infrastructure” systems which could enable more adaptive responses. Using a mixed-methods approach to study stormwater resilience in the U.S. state of Indiana, we find evidence that municipalities integrate planning and management efforts relative to experienced flooding impacts. However, they are less likely to proactively develop information on longer-term or more distant climate impacts. 

Abstract Climate change is a management and governance challenge requiring diverse potential responses. This article highlights the critical role public managers play in navigating the response diversity of such governance systems. Response diversity is the rule‐based set of options available for responding to unexpected service disruptions and is distinguished from ambiguity, which holds a negative valence within public administration. We first develop theoretical propositions about how institutions influence response diversity, drawing on public administration, resilience, and cognitive science research. Then, we use the Institutional Grammar and Institutional Network Analysis tools to empirically trace the rate‐making processes in two U.S. urban water utilities. We conclude that institutional designs do distinctively influence response diversity and are therefore key for evaluating the climate adaptability of heavily engineered infrastructure systems. Specifically, we identify important differences in the diversity of information, participation, and heuristics used for selecting investment strategies. 

This article examines the relationship between the political fragmentation of cities in metropolitan regions, the distribution of social vulnerability, and the city-level economic and social sustainability strategies they adopt. Strategies emerge from prevailing community norms, and polycentric governance arrangements can support conditions in which both economic and social sustainability strategies emerge as compliments, contrary to the concern that fragmentation spurs zero-sum competition. Combining surveys of U.S. cities with social vulnerability data and text analysis of planning documents, we find that greater fragmentation has a negative impact on the sustainable development strategies cities adopt. However, growth and sustainable development strategies tend to develop alongside social sustainability efforts to address human needs. We conclude that development strategies emerge in polycentric systems in relation to the degree of fragmentation which exists, and that subsequent work should continue to focus on identifying these entropic thresholds in order to effectively address lingering inequities. 

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.