Flipping the Script on What Causes City Green Initiatives

On August 5, 2013, the Chicago suburb Orland Park approved a long-term plan for sweeping green stability improvements. Called “The Comprehensive Plan,” Orland Park’s proposal, which took four years to compose, covers almost all building and development jurisdictions in the community and is currently projected to be completed by 2030. Orland Park is not alone. Other villages and cities nationwide are exploring community-wide green stability plans, which are multi-dimensional in their application and require the cooperation of multiple levels of government, as compared to single-issue projects, which are smaller programs that focus on a single problem or area. Not all cities, however, have favored community-wide sustainability programs. Orland Park’s neighbor Tinley Park, for instance, has instead invested more in single-issue green initiatives.

In order to understand why certain cities – but not all – push for community-wide sustainability green programs, researchers Dorothy M. Daley, Elaine B. Sharp, and Jungah Bae merge survey information with existing secondary census-related data with the aim of measuring different factors’ effect on a municipality’s willingness to push for community-wide green programs. The researchers’ results, published in their 2013 paper for Cityscape titled “Understanding City Engagement in Community-Focused Sustainability Initiatives,” find that a number of factors, such as the presence of a mayor-council government, influence a city’s willingness to pursue community-wide green programs.

By adding survey data to the already existing census data, Daley, Sharp, and Bae find that businesses and environmental special interest groups have a significantly lessened effect on a city’s willingness to push for these community-wide initiatives. In fact, their research shows that the effect of special interests – both those for and against green sustainability – on community-wide green policy measures is not statistically significant. This finding was antithetical to the authors’ previous work, which concluded that cities facing financial strain might pursue climate mitigation programs with hopes of co-benefits or cost savings. They suggest that this departure may stem from the difficulty of accurately measuring special interests’ effect on public policy.

Special interests’ lack of influence on green policy choices was not the only factor contradicting previous work. The researchers also find that cooperative relationships with neighboring communities aided community-wide green sustainability initiatives for mayor-council government structures. This was not, in itself, that surprising to the researchers, but the study also finds that the same effect did not hold true for city manager-council government structures. Daley, Sharp, and Bae theorize that the difference between the governmental structures comes from ambitious mayors looking to expand their influence, whereas city managers, who are non-elected officials that are not directly beholden to elections, theoretically would not be interested in the same political goals.

The differences between these two government structures, according to the paper, do not end at neighbor cooperation. The authors find that mayor-council governments in industrial cities tend to push more for community-wide programs. The opposite was true for city manager-council governments, where city officials favored community-wide green sustainability initiatives only when their economies relied more heavily on a “creative class”, i.e., a diversified economy favoring more technology-focused firms. The researchers theorize that mayors in manufacturing cities push for more community-wide green programs because of a desire to innovate their economy, whereas the different role of city managers may lead them to have a different vision for their cities’ development. For instance, mayoral governments may be focused on pushing their cities’ vertically based industrial economy toward a more diversified economy for development purposes. In contrast, a city manager may only be interested in maximizing their city’s finances. The differences between these two economic goals suggest a push for further green efficiency in a diversified economy but not necessarily in an industrially based economy.

Returning to the case of Orland Park, Illinois – this city appears to fall within the parameters of Daley, Sharpe, and Bae’s research. Orland Park has a type of mayor-council structure and historically has worked with neighboring cities through Cook County government on a variety of issues. Nonetheless, Daley, Sharpe, and Bae caution against drawing overly strong conclusions from their new results. Instead the researchers conclude that their new study shows how our understanding of what effects green policy is changing and has not been fully deconstructed. While the case of Orland Park might lend credence to Daley, Sharpe, and Bae’s most recent findings, the lack of community-wide initiatives from neighboring Tinley Park points to the authors’ conclusion that future research is necessary for understanding more about the motivations for urban green initiatives.

Article Source: Dorothy M. Daley, Elaine B. Sharp, and Jungah Bae, “Understanding City Engagement in Community-Focused Sustainability Initiatives,” Cityscape 15, No. 1 (2013): 143-62.

Feature photo: cc/(phototouring)