Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Panel: The Influence of Competition and Cooperation on Local Environmental Policy and Governance

(Natural Resource Security, Energy and Environmental Policy)

Complex environmental problems frequently transcend the boundaries of independent governmental jurisdictions as well as the functional administrative units that have been traditionally established to address them. This is perhaps both most evident and significant for city-led environmental and sustainability initiatives. Although cities around the world have emerged as environmental leaders and innovators – particularly in countries where higher levels of government lack political will or ability – their smaller sizes and the institutionally fragmented contexts in which they often operate can make collective action particularly difficult to achieve. In addition to being shaped by their own internal priorities, competitive and cooperative pressures can have a particularly large influence on environmental governance at the local level. The four papers in this panel are theoretically linked to the Institutional Collective Action (ICA) literature and empirically examine the influence that institutional fragmentation, and the competitive and cooperative pressures that result from it, has on the design and implementation of local environmental and sustainability initiatives. The first two papers focus on the functional fragmentation that exists within individual city governments and the second two consider the external pressures that arise horizontally between cities, particularly within fragmented metropolitan regions. Kim and Feiock look at sustainability efforts occurring within cities and examine how competition among functional agencies impacts the collaborative relationships they develop with other local governments and nonprofit organizations for the implementation of those initiatives. Yi likewise examines the effects of inter-departmental competition and functional fragmentation within cities, but does so using a very different context: water governance in China. Within Chinese cities, water pollution, quality, supply and sewage issues are each governed by different administrative units. Yi examines the factors that have influenced some local governments to redesign their water governance structure for better institutional integration. Moving from a focus on intra-city to inter-city fragmentation, Krause and Park examine how regional competition influences cities’ choice of policy tool in their design of five distinct environmental policies. Whereas, Curley’s paper takes regional competition as a contextual starting point and empirically examines the relationship between collaborative arrangements and the aim of local environmental policies providing initial insight to the question: “which came first the policy or the collaborative partner?” Institutional fragmentation poses significant challenges to environmental and sustainability governance at the local level. Together these four papers contribute to policy discussions by providing insight to the impact it has on environmental governance and increasing understanding of ways in which local governments are able to harness the benefits of competition and cooperation to achieve effective policy outcomes.