Where Is What Called Sustainability? A Survey of Policies Ostensibly and Explicitly Linked to Sustainability in the United States

Abstract

This paper discusses the outcome of a survey of US planners working in local governments with a population of over 25,000. The survey asked in which of 72 action areas ostensibly linked to sustainability had their government enacted policy, of these which did they explicitly link to sustainability and if they associated implementation with political conflict. We also considered the geographical variation of policies. We wished to find out if policy-makers more frequently associate sustainability with some policies over others. We hypothesized that between regions there would be significant variation in the number of policies pursued and in which were linked to sustainability, and that political conflict may explain this geographical variation. However, our findings were more limited: we found that planners are more likely to explicitly link policies pertaining to environmental goals with sustainability, and that there is geographical variation in what policies local governments pursue, although in only a few cases we found variations of statistical significance.

Keywords::

• sustainability
• urban politics
• city planning

Notes

^1. Current address: Department of City and Regional Planning, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, New East Building CB #3140, Chapel Hill, NC 27599, USA. Email: [email protected]