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Size, Sustainability, And Urban Climate Planning In A Multilevel Governance Framework, George C. Homsy

Public Administration Faculty Scholarship

In the United States, the absence of federal leadership on climate change and a strong tradition of localism has created a system in which many greenhouse gas reduction efforts fall to the discretion of municipalities. This often leads to uncoordinated action across jurisdictional boundaries. Despite the widespread notion that cities can lead on climate policy from the bottom up, I find, using a logistic regression analysis of data from 1,837 municipalities, that local governments are more likely to enact climate change policies in an environment where higher levels of government have acted rather than in a decentralized one. Smaller municipalities, …