Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Sustainability is, by definition, a multi-dimensional objective and comprehensive efforts to advance it must include environmental, economic and social functions. Cities often hold the legal authority and operational expertise to rectify unsustainable practices and, over the last two decades, they have increasingly taken ownership of this responsibility. However, local governments’ traditional administrative arrangements tend to be silo-ed and are often ill-suited to address complex and functionally transboundary objectives like sustainability. As a result coordination, cooperation, and collective action challenges are common, even within single government organizations.

Combing insights from the extant literature on human services integration, functional collective action, behavioral public administration, and social network, this paper develops a model of intra-organizational integration around sustainability. It focuses on generating a useful operationalization of integration and offers propositions about its institutional and issue-based drivers as well as its impact on individual thought and behavior. We apply it to the City of Fort Collins, Colorado, USA and its innovative Sustainability Services Area (SSA). SSA was explicitly created to facilitate the integration of the City’s efforts around sustainability’s “triple bottom line.” It is headed by an executive-level director and consists of three departments: Environmental Services, Social Sustainability, and Economic Health. The model’s application yields an empirical description of the type and pattern of professional interdisciplinary interactions across SSA. The patterns change based on the time-frame considered and suggest that those that occur at a frequency of "a few times a month" are key to shaping individual integrative thought and behavior of individual staff.