Picking up speed: public participation and local sustainability plan implementation

Abstract

Although planning scholars often argue that public participation improves implementation outcomes, this relationship is rarely empirically tested. This study investigates how public engagement, during planning and after plan adoption, impacts on the speed of local government sustainability plan implementation. It includes a correlation analysis of quantized in-depth interviews with sustainability planners in 36 American cities. The study finds that individual characteristics of public engagement, both during planning and after plan adoption, had statistically significant relationships to implementation speed, but in some cases this relationship was negative. The correlations imply that sustainability planners can make strategic choices to improve implementation speed through public participation in plan creation and after plan adoption. Alternatively, planners also make choices during participatory planning that slow implementation, a problematic outcome when the ultimate goal of a planning process is on-the-ground change.

Keywords:

• sustainability
• sustainability planning
• implementation
• public participation
• citizen advisory committee

Acknowledgements

The author is indebted to the sustainability planners who agreed to be interviewed for this study and the 30 UNC Wilmington MPA students who participated in the coding reliability experiment. She thanks Nisha Botchwey and two anonymous reviewers for their comments on the article. She also thanks Eugenie Birch, Thomas Daniels, David Hsu, and John Landis for their feedback on the larger study from which this article is drawn. Finally, she acknowledges the support of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy which provided funding for the larger study through the C. Lowell Harriss Dissertation Fellowship.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed at: https://doi.org/10.1080/09640568.2017.1358154.

Notes

1. In this article, the term ‘sustainability plan’ is used in reference to any plan that aims to address the long-term health of human and ecological systems by spanning multiple, traditionally distinct disciplines, including both plans officially titled sustainability plan as well as climate action plans, greenhouse gas reduction plans, and community energy plans.

2. “Quantizing occurs when qualitative codes are transformed into quantitative variables. Quantizing opens up the possibility of applying statistical techniques to data that was once qualitative.” (Nagy Hesse-Biber 2010, 79)

3. These local organizations are often referred to as stakeholders, but the concept of a support network goes beyond individuals and organizations that will be impacted by the policies included in the plan (i.e. have a stake in the plan's outcomes). The organizations that form the support network have the potential to take an active role in implementation, rather than the purely passive role of experiencing an impact.

4. Early implementation of a sustainability plan includes including aligning codes and regulations with the plan goals, building staff capacity and interest in implementation, starting new programs (e.g. bike sharing), updating existing programs (e.g. municipal recycling), fundraising, and partnering with outside organizations such as NGOs, foundations and businesses.

5. In the American system of local government, a plan, such as a sustainability plan, is not always treated in the same way by elected officials (typically City Councilors and a mayor). The strongest commitment to implementing a plan is made through an official vote to ‘adopt’ a plan. In this process, the plan is discussed publically at a City Council meeting and a vote by elected officials to adopt the plan formally incorporates it into city policy. Alternatively, these officials can simply ‘accept’ a sustainability plan as a report, which is the colloquial equivalent of taking the recommendations of the plan under advisement rather than officially incorporating them into city policy. The weakest form of sustainability policy is seen when a mayor acts on his or her own to draft a sustainability plan as a special initiative. This requires no action from elected officials and for this reason provides less long-term political support for implementation. Mayors' initiatives typically end when a new mayor is elected and, unless the sustainability plan gains strong support from voters, it is also likely to suffer this fate.