Aaron Deslatte

A narrative method for analyzing transitions in urban water management: The case of the Miami‐Dade Water and Sewer Department

Although the water management sector is often characterized as resistant to risk and change, urban areas across the United States are increasingly interested in creating opportunities to transition toward more sustainable water management practices. These transitions are complex and difficult to predict – the product of water managers acting in response to numerous biophysical, regulatory, and political factors within institutional constraints. Gaining a better understanding of how these transitions occur is crucial for continuing to improve water management. This paper presents a replicable methodology for analyzing how urban water utilities transition toward sustainability. The method combines standardized quantitative measures of variables that influence transitions with contextual qualitative information about a utilitys unique decision making context to produce structured, data-driven narratives. Data-narratives document the broader context, the utilitys pre-transition history, key events during an accelerated period of change, and the consequences of transition. Eventually, these narratives should be compared across cases to develop empirically-testable hypotheses about the drivers of and barriers to utility-level urban water management transition. The methodology is illustrated through the case of the Miami-Dade Water and Sewer Department (WASD) in Miami-Dade County, Florida and its transition towards more sustainable water management in the 2000s, during which per capita water use declined, conservation measures were enacted, water rates increased, and climate adaptive planning became the new norm. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

Capturing Structural and Functional Diversity Through Institutional Analysis The Mayor Position in City Charters

City charters affect the governance of municipal systems in complex ways. Current descriptions and typologies developed to study city charter structures simplify the diverse types and configurations of institutional rules underlying charter designs. This research note demonstrates a more detailed approach for studying the design of city charters using analytical methods based on the Institutional Analysis and Development Framework. This approach is illustrated with a pilot study of institutional rules in municipal charters that define the roles and duties of mayors. The findings reveal that city charters exhibit great institutional diversity, particularly within strong mayor cities. We conclude with a research agenda that could generate a more precise and rigorous understanding of the relationship between the different configurations of institutions of city charters and the politics, governance, and performance of municipalities.

Boundaries and Speed Bumps The Role of Modernized Counties Managing Growth in the Fragmented Metropolis

Many counties in the U.S. federalist system have morphed from a limited role in service delivery to a workhorse for municipal-style local government. They also facilitate development and sprawl, helping to shape development patterns of the modern fragmented metropolis. Why do counties accommodate development demand that deviates from long-term land-use plans intended to prevent sprawl? Utilizing panel data of county land-use changes in Florida, this study finds evidence that the decisions are shaped by both external competition for growth and internal institutional incentives. Fragmentation fuels more leapfrog development patterns on the urban fringe. Horizontal fragmentation encourages counties to compete for development, whereas vertical fragmentation via special districts facilitates such development through provision of services and reducing pressure for public officeholders to raise taxes. However, these fragmentation effects are also influenced by modernized institutions in counties such as home-rule charters and form of government.

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.

Hierarchies of Need in Sustainable Development: A Resource Dependence Approach for Local Governance

Urban sustainability is a burgeoning focus for urban scholarship but rarely examined within the larger context of local government economic activities. Why should cities focusing on cutback management and competition for tax revenues be expected to devote all but the fleetest of attention to carbon footprints or metropolitan-wide environmental or social problems? To address this question, we utilize a resource dependence (RD) theoretical framework to conceptualize sustainable development as a pattern of contractual arrangements between governments and firms shaped by resource constraints. Utilizing survey data of U.S. cities and a Bayesian methodological approach, we present evidence that municipal job-recruitment efforts reduce the probability of observing an overall sustainability policy commitment. Cities which placed greater emphasis on retaining and developing existing businesses are also more committed to sustainability.

Handing over the Keys: Nonprofit Economic Development Corporations and Their Implications for Accountability and Inclusion

ABSTRACT Public organizations have explored service-delivery with nonprofit organizations to help alleviate the strain on their long-term fiscal sustainability. This interdependence has ramifications for fairness and responsiveness in service-delivery that are poorly understood. One area where government-nonprofit collaborative activity has not been explored is within the context of sustainable development. This study utilizes surveys of U.S. cities at multiple time periods to examine the comparative use of nonprofit economic development corporations and their performance on smart-growth and social equity policy activities. This study first explores the roles played by the two most common types of local nonprofit organizations—nonprofit Local Development Corporations (LDCs) and Community-Based Development Organizations (CBDOs)—in use of performance information and accountability mechanisms in local economic development activities. In turning to policy outcomes, the use of LDCs is negatively associated with land use policies intended to advance social inclusion.

What do we know about urban sustainability? A research synthesis and nonparametric assessment:

Urban sustainability has become a burgeoning practical and scholarly enterprise over the last two decades. Yet, there have been few attempts to systematically assess what cumulative knowledge this research is generating. We advance our understanding of urban sustainability by synthesising extant empirical findings to gauge progress made towards developing theoretical insight, and then testing a nonparametric predictive model that helps overcome methodological challenges in this literature. Drawing data from two national surveys of US local governments, we find that although organisational capacity appears to be the most important predictor, the broad range of activities grouped under the banner of ‘urban sustainability’ rely on distinct causal mechanisms, and use of composite models and measures of sustainability may hinder theoretical advancement. Implications for future research are discussed.

Florida’s Growth Management Experience: From Top-Down Direction to Laissez Faire Land Use

Land use and development pose fundamental long-term governance challenges for city regions across the world. This chapter traces the recent history of reforms in Florida’s growth management regime, advancing understanding of the containment tools employed by cities and the strategies that underlie these configurations. Utilizing surveys of local government planners from three time periods (2002, 2007, and 2015), the chapter examines land-use choices before and after the Great Recession and a state-level deregulatory reform of Florida’s once-heralded growth management system in 2011 to examine variation in land-use regulations at the local level. The patterns have implications for future research and practice and suggest that the durability of land-management tools intended to stave off development and preserve open space may need to be carefully examined apart from smart-growth approaches which assume development is inevitable.