I address these research gaps in three essays that explore the research question of (1) how design features of sustainability programs vary across US local governments, (2) which factors influence variations in program design, (3) how these factors are related to environmental quality outcomes in communities. By assessing US local governments’ sustainability programs, I found that even for local governments that adopt a same number of sustainability programs, they design their programs differently, especially across the breadth of environmental issues that local governments address in their sustainability programs and the breadth of policy instrument that are used in their programs. Findings suggest that pressures from external stakeholders and variations in local governments’ organizational capacities are related to local governments’ decisions to purse different types of sustainability strategies. Finally, I find that local governments that design their programs more comprehensively are likely to have greater environmental performance outcomes in their community. My dissertation expands existing research in a significant way by focusing on the importance of program design and its link with improved environmental performance, thereby providing important implications for distinguishing among local governments’ sustainability strategies.
To address this question, this study employs the interpretive approach as the logic of inquiry and the public value mapping framework as the analytic tool to contemplate the overall social impacts of U.S. food banking. Data sources include organizational documents of 203 U.S. food banks, as well as other public documents and literature pertaining to U.S. food banks.
Using public value mapping analysis, this study constructs a public value logic, which manifests the dynamics of prime and instrumental values in the U.S. food banking context. Food security, sustainability, and progressive opportunity are identified as three core prime public values. Instrumental values in this context consist of two major value categories: (1) intra-organizational values and (2) inter-and ultra-organizational values. Furthermore, this study applies public value failure criteria to examine success or failure of public values in this context. U.S. Food banks do contribute to the success of public sphere, progressive opportunity, sustainability and food security. However, the practice of U.S. food banks also lead to the failure of food security in some conditions. This study develops a new public value failure criterion based on the inherent limitations of charitable service providers. Main findings, contributions, and future directions are discussed.
Many coastal cities around the world are becoming increasingly vulnerable to natural disasters, particularly flooding driven by tropical storm and hurricane storm surge – typically the most destructive feature of these storms, generating significant economic damage and loss of life. This increase in vulnerability is driven by the interactions between a wide number of complex social and climatic factors, including population growth, irresponsible urban development, a decrease in essential service provision, sea level rise, and changing storm regimes. These issues are exacerbated by the short-term strategic planning that dominates political action and economic decision-making, resulting in many vulnerable coastal communities being particularly unprepared for large, infrequent storm surge events. This lack of preparedness manifests in several ways, but one of the most visible is the lack of comprehensive evacuation and rescue operation plans for use after major storm surge flooding occurs. Typical evacuation or rescue plans are built using a model of a region’s intact road network. While useful for pre-disaster purposes, the immediate aftermath of large floods sees enormous swaths of a given region’s road system flooded, rendering most of these plans largely useless. Post-storm evacuation and rescue requires large amounts of atypical travel through a region (i.e., across non-road surfaces). Traditional road network models (such as those that are used to generate evacuation routes) are unable to conceptualize this type of transportation, and so are of limited utility during post-disaster scenarios. To solve these problems, this dissertation introduces an alternative network conceptualization that preserves important on-network information but also accounts for the possibility of off-network travel during a disaster. Providing this in situ context is necessary to adequately model transportation through a post-storm landscape, one in which evacuees and rescuers are regularly departing from roads and one in which many roads are completely interdicted by flooding. This modeling approach is used to automatically generate routes through a flooded coastal urban area, as well as to identify potentially critical road segments in advance of an actual storm. These tools may help both emergency managers better prepare for large storms, and urban planners in their efforts to mitigate flood damage.
In an effort to understand the factors involved in the decisions to adopt a local drone use policy, this dissertation leverages qualitative methods to analyze the policy process leading to local decisions. The study capitalizes on rich contextual data gathered from a variety of sources for select cities in Orange and Los Angeles Counties. Specifically, this study builds a conceptual framework from policy innovation literature and applies it in the form of content analysis. This initial effort is used to identify the catalysts for policy discussion and the specific innovation mechanisms that support or detract from the decision to adopt a local drone use ordinance. Then, qualitative comparative analysis is used to determine which configuration of factors, identified during the content analysis, contribute to the causal path of policy adoption. Among other things, the results highlight the role that uncertainty plays in the policy process. Cities that adopt a drone use ordinance have low levels of uncertainty, high numbers of registered drone users, and at least two neighboring cities that also have drone use policies. This dissertation makes a modest contribution to policy innovation research, highlights how a configurational analysis technique can be applied to policy adoption decisions, and contains several recommendations for regulating drone use at the local level.
Based on a randomized online vignette experiment with 1,569 respondents residing in the United States collected in Amazon’s Mechanical Turk platform, the dissertation confirms that public authorities face different levels of public tolerance relative to business managers. More specifically, the unethical behaviors of a public manager are less likely to be tolerated than the same misconduct of a business manager, while ethical offenses of elected officials are least likely to be tolerated by the public. However, the public is relatively much less tolerant of public managers’ and elected officials’ petty violations relative to business managers than they do for more egregious violations of public authorities.
The dissertation further finds that public evaluations are contingent upon the respondents’ work experience in different sectors. Individuals working in government are more likely to be tolerant of petty unethical behaviors, regardless of whom they evaluate, but they become much less tolerant of public managers’ and elected officials’ grand ethical violations. The longer individuals work in for-profit organizations, the less likely they are to tolerate public authorities’ petty violations of organizational rules while consistently being more accepting of the unethical behaviors of business managers.
Using an experimental design, the dissertation finds the importance of a fair and legitimate use of tax money in the public’s moral evaluations of public leadership and further discusses the potential sources of public skepticism of the public sector. Furthermore, the public and private sector comparison provides theoretical and practical implications for ethics reform in the era of collaborative governance.
Background: With Pennsylvania currently considering a move away from an Alcohol Beverage Control state to a privatized alcohol distribution system, this study uses a spatial analytical approach to examine potential impacts of privatization on the number and spatial distribution of alcohol outlets in the city of Philadelphia over a long time horizon.
Methods: A suite of geospatial data were acquired for Philadelphia, including 1,964 alcohol outlet locations, 569,928 land parcels, and school, church, hospital, park and playground locations. These data were used as inputs for exploratory spatial analysis to estimate the expected number of outlets that would eventually operate in Philadelphia. Constraints included proximity restrictions (based on current ordinances regulating outlet distribution) of at least 200 feet between alcohol outlets and at least 300 feet between outlets and schools, churches, hospitals, parks and playgrounds.
Results: Findings suggest that current state policies on alcohol outlet distributions in Philadelphia are loosely enforced, with many areas exhibiting extremely high spatial densities of outlets that violate existing proximity restrictions. The spatial model indicates that an additional 1,115 outlets could open in Philadelphia if privatization was to occur and current proximity ordinances were maintained.
Conclusions: The study reveals that spatial analytical approaches can function as an excellent tool for contingency-based “what-if” analysis, providing an objective snapshot of potential policy outcomes prior to implementation. In this case, the likely outcome is a tremendous increase in alcohol outlets in Philadelphia, with concomitant negative health, crime and quality of life outcomes that accompany such an increase.