The Institutional Collective Action (ICA) framework has contributed to understanding collective action problems in fragmented governance and identified mechanisms for overcoming them. Participation in collaboration is risky--even if it has the potential to make all parties better off. This framework has uniquely shown how collaboration risk and other transaction costs can be overcome to create effective collaborations for addressing complex policy issues. However, after over a decade of use, the framework is due for critical evaluation and articulation of its state of the art and science to better inform future scholarship. For this purpose, this article defines key concepts and formulates assumptions, as well as reviews the empirical contributions and longstanding limitations of the ICA framework. A robust agenda for future research is also outlined. To move forward, we believe ICA research should focus on the foundational core of the ICA framework, maintain flexibility in explanatory models, and expand the scope beyond the collective action problems at the local level.

Public acceptance and support for renewable energy are important determinants of the low-carbon energy transition. This paper examines public sentiment toward solar energy in the United States using data from Twitter, a micro-blogging platform on which people post messages, known as tweets. We filtered tweets specific to solar energy and performed a classification task using Robustly optimized Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (RoBERTa). Our RoBERTa-based sentiment classification model, fine-tuned with 6300 manually annotated tweets specific to solar energy, attains 80.2% accuracy for ternary (positive, neutral, or negative) classification. Analyzing 266,686 tweets during the period of January to December 2020, we find public sentiment varies widely across states (Coefficient of Variation =164.66%). Within the study period, the Northeast U.S. region shows more positive sentiment toward solar energy than did the South U.S. region. Public opinion on solar energy is more positive in states with a larger share of Democratic voters in the 2020 presidential election. Public sentiment toward solar energy is more positive in states with consumer-friendly net metering policies and a more mature solar market. States that wish to gain public support for solar energy might want to consider implementing consumer-friendly net metering policies and support the growth of solar businesses.

for their insights, as well as Alex Osei-Kojo and Megan Lamiotte for their assistance with data acquisition.

Context: Despite attention to federal and state governments' response to the US opioid crisis, few studies have systematically examined local governments' role in tackling this problem. Objectives:To determine what opioid policy and programmatic activities local governments are implementing, which activities are more challenging and require a greater latent ability to implement, and what community, environmental, and institutional factors shape such ability. Design: A cross-sectional survey and multistage sampling procedure. Setting/Participants: Of all 358 county governments in 5 purposively selected states (Colorado, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Washington) surveyed, 171 counties (response rate = 47.8%) with complete data on self-reported policy and programmatic activities and predictor variables were eligible for analysis. Main Outcome Measures: Nineteen opioid policy and programmatic activities were analyzed individually and combined into a latent implementation ability index using empirical Bayes means estimates. Results: Item response theory and bivariate analysis were applied. Item response theory estimates suggested that having police officers carry naloxone and establishing a task force of community leaders were easier to implement than more challenging activities such as establishing needle exchanges and allowing arrest alternatives for opioid offenses. Covering individuals' treatment costs was predicted to involve the highest ability. County population size (r = 0.34; 95% confidence interval [CI], 0.20-0.47), population density (r = 0.35; 95% CI, 0.21-0.47), and being a Pennsylvania county (r = 0.45; 95% CI, 0.32-0.56) showed the strongest associations with latent implementation ability. Conclusions: Counties appear engaged in opioid policy and programmatic activity, although some activities are likely more difficult and may require greater ability to implement than others. More sparsely populated counties appear more disadvantaged in implementing activities for tackling the opioid crisis and may need additional assistance to leverage their ability to build a comprehensive policy and programmatic infrastructure.