Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Sparked by their surprising emergence as innovative climate policy leaders, cities’ decisions to engage in greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation planning – including doing such things as adopting emission reduction commitments, conducting GHG inventories, and developing climate action plans – have been the subject of extensive examination over the last decade. The impact that these planning and subsequent local policy actions have had on actual emissions, however, remains under-explored and even less is known about the conditions under which cities’ climate planning efforts yield meaningful and substantive impact.

Data limitations, namely the sporadic and unstandardized accounting of GHG emissions at the city level, underlie the minimal empirical attention given to understanding local climate policy outcomes and the factors that contribute to their achievement. Reflecting this, we employ expert opinion as an alternative approach to quantify the impact of local climate efforts. We use this to examine the question: How does administrative form and stability impact the extent to which cities’ climate planning efforts serve as the basis for local GHG emissions reductions?

Administrative form and stability shape organizational ability to implement policy, but have largely been excluded from studies of local climate protection initiatives. The extant literature has instead tended to focus on community and interest group support, governmental resources, and climate vulnerabilities as explanations for cities’ decisions to engage. Although important, the current focus on policy outcome, and particularly cities’ abilities to make-good on their planning efforts, call administrative dynamics to the forefront.

We utilize data from two nation-wide surveys sent to pre-identified sustainability officials in US cities in 2010 and 2015, respectively. Our primary intent is to estimate the factors that influence whether, according to local experts, a city’s GHG emissions inventory has served as the basis for significant, minor, or no emission reductions. However, because the errors that determine whether a city has an inventory are correlated with the errors that determine its outcome, selection bias is a concern. As such, we utilize a Heckman Ordered Probit, which estimates the selection component (whether a city has an inventory) and the outcome component (the impact of that inventory on emissions) of the model simultaneously to account for potential selection on the unobservables. Independent variables of interest include characteristics of the administrative arrangements cities use to implement sustainability efforts (i.e. headquarter location and decentralization), whether these arrangements have changed over the last five years, and the use of performance measurement techniques. Separate models are run to assess the factors that influence emissions reductions from city government operations and the larger community.