Is the Price Right? Gauging the Marketplace for Local Sustainable Policy Tools

Abstract

Local government sustainability has become a cause célèbre in urban policy. Extant research has attempted to construct narratives of sustainable environmental, economic, and social equity motivations by grouping together multifaceted types of policies adopted to deal with multidimensional problems of land use, transportation, energy, solid waste, carbon emissions, and other functional areas of local government. Yet, decades of policy adoption and implementation research suggest some policies or policy tools require a far greater commitment of resources and administrative and political buy‐in than others. We explore whether the degree of such commitment reflects different motivations at play and test for distinct political economies for specific categories of energy efficiency and greenhouse gas reduction policy tools. We find evidence that the determinants for the two types of policies are distinct, and subsequent research requires refocusing theoretical and empirical efforts at differentiating “win‐win” tools from more “altruistic” commitments to sustainable action by governments.

Urban Pressures and Innovations: Sustainability Commitment in the Face of Fragmentation and Inequality

“…Theoretically, the higher a city scored on a range of 0–100, the more “sustainable” it would be considered. Additive indices constructed from dichotomous items can be problematic because they assume that the adoption of any one tool is just as valuable a commitment to sustainability as any other (Deslatte & Swann, ). Intuitively, equally weighted items may not be a reliable measure of a latent commitment of a city to conduct its activities sustainably, as one city may inflate its ranking based on the adoption of low cost but highly visible policy choices.…”

Context matters: A Bayesian analysis of how organizational environments shape the strategic management of sustainable development

“…Empirical work consistently finds that local governments' administrative, community, and political capacities enhance sustainability commitment (Krause ; Deslatte and Swann ). However, previous research has tended to combine dimensions of capacity and suggest an additive, linear relationship with sustainability commitment (Wang et al ).…”

Drivers of Policy Instrument Selection for Environmental Management by Local Governments

“…Both financial and human resources matter, as evidenced by cities with greater per capita revenue and with larger and specialized staff being more likely to have such policies in place, compared with otherwise similar cities (Homsy and Warner ; Terman and Feiock ; Wang et al ). Local institutions have also proven influential, with the council‐manager form of government consistently linked to fewer community‐targeted sustainability efforts but increased efforts targeted at sustainability of internal government operations (Bae and Feiock ; Deslatte and Swann ).…”

“…Finally, micro‐level decisions involve the calibration of those instruments to achieve particular targets. Deslatte and Swann () use a macro perspective to examine cities' selection of green policy tools in the context of organizational goals, such as greenhouse gas reduction and energy efficiency. Instead, we emphasize a meso‐level program operationalization in which specific types of policy instruments are selected to advance identified environmental objectives, but they are not calibrated to reach particular targets.…”