Implementing City Sustainability

Overcoming Administrative Silos to Achieve Functional Collective Action

Rachel M. Krause, Christopher Hawkins, Richard C. Felock

• Publisher: Temple University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781439919217, 9781439919200
• eBook ISBN: 9781439919224
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Sustainable Development
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Implementing City Sustainability examines the structures and processes that city governments employ to pursue environmental, social, and economic well-being within their communities. As American cities adopt sustainability objectives, they are faced with the need to overcome fuzzy-boundary, coordination, and collective action challenges to achieve successful implementation.

Sustainability goals often do not fit neatly into traditional city government structures, which tend to be organized around specific functional responsibilities, such as planning, public works, parks and recreation, and community development. The authors advance a theory of Functional Collective Action and apply it to local sustainability to explain how cities can—and in some cases do—organize to successfully administer changes to achieve complex objectives that transcend these organizational separations. Implementing City Sustainability uses a mixed-method research design and original data to provide a national overview of cities' sustainability arrangements, as well as eight city case studies highlighting different means of organizing to achieve functional collective action.

By focusing not just on what cities are doing to further sustainability, but also on how they are doing it, the authors show how administrative structure enables—or inhibits—cities to overcome functional divides and achieve successful outcomes.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction to Local Sustainability and Functional Collective Action
• 2. Setting the Stage: A Quantitative Overview of Cities and Sustainability
• 3. Functional Collective Action Framework
• 4. Lead Agency Consolidation: Fort Collins, Colorado
• 5. Lead Agency Coordination: Kansas City, Missouri, and Orlando, Florida
• 6. Relationships and Bargaining: Providence, Rhode Island; Ann Arbor, Michigan; and Oakland, California
• 7. Decentralized Networks: El Paso, Texas, and Gainesville, Florida
• 8. A Closer Look at Interdepartmental Relationships and Network Structures around Sustainability in Select Cities
• 9. Key Themes and Findings at the Intersection of Cities, Sustainability, and Functional Collective Action
• Appendix A: Survey Instrument
• Appendix B: Survey Invitation
• Appendix C: Template for Semistructured Interviews Conducted in Case Study Cities
• Appendix D: Fort Collins, Colorado, City Profile
• Appendix E: Kansas City, Missouri, City Profile
• Appendix F: Orlando, Florida, City Profile
• Appendix G: Providence, Rhode Island, City Profile
• Appendix H: Ann Arbor, Michigan, City Profile
• Appendix I: Oakland, California, City Profile
• Appendix J: El Paso, Texas, City Profile
• Appendix K: Gainesville, Florida, City Profile
• Appendix L: Betweenness and Degree Centrality Scores for All Functional Units in Orlando, Kansas City, and Fort Collins City Governments
• References
• Index