Jungah Bae

Forms of Government and Climate Change Policies in US Cities

It has long been believed that council-manager governments with professionally trained public managers are more efficiency oriented and insulated from political pressure than mayor-council governments. Despite the general acceptance of this conventional wisdom, empirical evidence to support the predicted differences in policy has been extremely hard to come by. Most studies have found no direct effect of form of government on expenditures or policy; the effect of local institutions has been indirect, working to amplify or reduce supplier or demander preferences. In contrast, this paper examines a unique dataset of sustainability efforts in governmental operations and the community, and reports evidence that forms of government are an important direct influence on the approach that communities take to sustainability. Council-manager government systems have a significant positive effect on efforts directed to governmental operations, but a negative effect on community efforts.

Politics, institutions and entrepreneurship: city decisions leading to inventoried GHG emissions

Local governments in the USA and around the globe are increasingly active in promoting energy efficiency and sustainability both in their governmental operations and in the wider community. Although in many countries, it is cities rather than the national government that have taken the lead role in reducing GHG emissions, we know little about what factors account for local adoption of climate protection at city level. In response, this article investigates how political and institutional factors, as well as various public entrepreneurs affect the adoption of GHG inventories in cities and differences in policies directed at emissions from the larger community versus governmental operations. The results confirm that elected mayors and civic entrepreneurs promote carbon reduction in the larger community, but managers and bureaucratic entrepreneurs focus their efforts on carbon emissions of governmental organizations.

The Roles of Regional Organizations for Interlocal Resource Exchange: Complement or Substitute?

This article investigates competing visions of how regional organizations influence cooperation among individual local governments within a metropolitan area. As network brokers among local governments, regional organizations can reduce the transaction costs of self-governing solutions to regional problems through bargaining and contracting among local units, but their centralized activities might also crowd out interlocal exchanges. Florida Regional Planning Councils are examined to test competing hypotheses based on these two visions, identifying the influence of regional organizations’ governance and activities on interlocal revenue transfers among municipal governments. Evidence that regional organizations can complement as well as substitute for interlocal cooperation is reported. In conclusion we discuss these findings in the context of vertical and horizontal federalism and theories of institutional collective action.

Managing Multiplexity Coordinating Multiple Services at a Regional Level

Metropolitan areas are characterized by policy and service fragmentation, not just jurisdictional fragmentation. Studies of vertical and horizontal coordination in metropolitan regions tend to focus on individual services, making them somewhat unrealistic and limiting their ability to capture overall regional governance in a metropolitan world, where individual jurisdictions engage in multiple policy relationships simultaneously. Scholars must address multiplex relationships between governments exchanging and impacted by multiple services in order to provide realistic advice and insights for managers and policy makers. This essay explores the challenges of regional collaboration by examining trends and identifying problems and opportunities that arise from service mutiplexity.

Governing Local Sustainability Agency Venues and Business Group Access

To what extent do local administrators include business interests in their informal bargaining and negotiation on issues involving economic development and environmental and sustainability policies? In the absence of previous studies, we extend political market theory to decisions involving administrative officials by investigating differences across city agencies in the extent they provide business organizations access to the policy development processes. A multilevel analysis is applied to a unique set of survey responses from 413 local government administrators in 50 of the 54 largest U.S. cities. These design and data innovations provide new insights into local administrators’ willingness to grant access to economic development interests. Within individual cities, we account for differences in agency mission and administrators’ personal positions and experiences. Across cities, we account comparatively for variations in government size, demographic characteristics, ideology, and growth patterns.