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Abstract Scholarship is growing on societal transitions, describing radical societal change involving multiple sectors and scales, and transformative governance, describing how public, private, and civil society actors use tools of policy to pursue this fundamental change, aiming to build resiliency and sustainability. Much of this literature has a systems‐level focus and does not closely examine how governance participants, working individually or collectively, can steer a jurisdiction toward or away from transformativeness. This paper offers a corrective, integrating policy entrepreneurship scholarship with transformative governance research to advance understanding of how human agency underpins societal change. Drawing on accounts from 50 interviewees across eight case studies of US cities grappling with flooding hazards, we show how policy entrepreneurship can boost the political and economic resources that city officials rely upon to help propel radical shifts towards greater social, economic, and environmental equity. 

Abstract Recent large-scale societal disruptions, from the COVID-19 pandemic to intensifying wildfires and weather events, reveal the importance of transforming governance systems so they can address complex, transboundary, and rapidly evolving crises. Yet current knowledge of the decision-making dynamics that yield transformative governance remains scant. Studies typically focus on the aggregate outputs of government decisions, while overlooking their micro-level underpinnings. This is a key oversight because drivers of policy change, such as learning or competition, are prosecuted by people rather than organizations. We respond to this knowledge gap by introducing a new analytical lens for understanding policymaking, aimed at uncovering how characteristics of decision-makers and the structure of their relationships affect their likelihood of effectuating transformative policy responses. This perspective emphasizes the need for a more dynamic and relational view on urban governance in the context of transformation. 

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. 

Surveys are an important vehicle for advancing research on urban policy and governance. The introduction of online tools eased survey-based data collection, making it cheaper and easier to obtain data from key informants like local elected officials or public administrators. However, the utility of web-based survey administration may be diminishing. To investigate this dynamic and search for strategies to support survey research in urban studies, we perform a systematic review of survey research in urban policy and administration scholarship and conduct an original survey follow-up experiment. Our findings identify a clear downward trend in survey response rates that was accentuated during the COVID-19 pandemic. Results from our survey experiment show distinctly different costs per solicitation and per completed survey, depending on administration mode. These findings stimulate discussion on how scholars may continue to use surveys to generate high-quality, empirically rigorous research on urban affairs in light of recent trends.