Interlocal collaboration and local climate protection

ABSTRACT

The influences of state government have been curiously absent from most studies of collaboration among cities. Extant research on city collaboration which promotes on climate and environmental sustainability issues focuses primarily on local-level institutions, politics, and processes. Thus, the role of states to constrain or facilitate collaboration among local governments needs to be more fully accounted for. Building on transaction cost and institutional collective action theory and drawing on data from a national survey of US cities, we investigate the influences of city-level factors together with the hierarchical effects of state rules and policies on the extent to which mechanisms for interlocal collaboration are employed in pursuing climate protection and renewable energy development goals. The results confirm predictions that multilevel intergovernmental forces influence the extent to which cities collaborate. These results have both theoretical and practical implications for understanding interlocal collaborations.

KEYWORDS:

• Federalism
• interlocal collaboration
• climate protection
• renewable energy
• institutional collective action

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the the National Research Foundation of Korea Award [NRF-2017S1A3A2067636];the US National Science Foundation Award [1444745].

Notes on contributors

Jisun Youm

Jisun Youm is a research fellow at the Research Institute for Coexistence and Collaboration, Korea National Open University. Her research areas are local government administration, intergovernmental relationship, climate change protection and sustainable development policy. Her most recent publications cover local political institutions, interlocal collaboration, local financial management, and urban sustainable development policy.

Richard C. Feiock

Richard C. Feiock holds the Jerry Collins Eminent Scholar Endowed Chair and is the Augustus B. Turnbull Professor of Public Administration and Policy in the Askew School at Florida State University where he directs of the FSU Local Governance Research Laboratory. He is Editor of Public Administration Review, and has published widely on local institutions, institutional collective action and political markets.