Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The Motivations Behind Municipal Climate Engagement: An Empirical Assessment Of How Local Objectives Shape The Production Of A Public Good, Rachel Krause

Rachel M. Krause

Cities engage in greenhouse gas mitigation efforts because of some combination of desires to achieve local co-benefits, respond to the preferences and pressures of influential political actors, and contribute to the public good by minimizing climate change. The relative importance of each motivation is hypothesized to affect the composition and comprehensiveness of subsequent climate initiatives. In some cities, initiatives appear to be ad hoc collections of tangentially related actions, whereas in others they are the result of a strategic planning process. This article uses survey-based data collected from U.S. cities that are explicitly involved in climate-change mitigation efforts and empirically …