The organisational structure of urban environmental stewardship

Abstract

How is the organisational structure of urban environmental stewardship groups related to the diverse ways that civic stewardship is taking place in urban settings? The findings of the limited number of studies that have explored the organisational structure of civic environmentalism are combined with the research on civic stewardship to answer this question. By bridging these relatively disconnected strands of research and testing their expectations on a structured sample of civic groups that were surveyed in New York City, a statistically significant relationship is found between the organisational structure of groups and both the organisational characteristics, as well as the types of environmental work they are doing. How these findings advance the research on urban environmental stewardship is discussed, as well as what these results tell us about the ways civil society engages in urban stewardship more broadly.

Keywords:

• urban stewardship
• local environmentalism
• civil society organisations

Notes

 1. For more details on this definition of stewardship and how it was conceptually developed, see Fisher et al. (2007).

 2. This list is not meant to be exhaustive.

 3. Only groups that had complete mailing addresses were included in the sample (as the primary method of data collection was a mail-in survey). However, if group also had a working email address, the survey was sent to them by email first.

 4. Data were collected in accordance with Columbia University's IRB protocol # IRB-AAAC3985.

 5. Other studies of local environmentalism have used other methods of data collection and have achieved higher response rates (e.g. Salazar 1996, Kempton et al. 2001, Andrews and Edwards 2005). However, these methodologies are not possible for a census of all of the stewardship groups in a major metropolitan area like New York City.

 6. Response rates per borough were: 22% in Manhattan and Staten Island, 21% in Queens, 16% in Brooklyn, and 14% in the Bronx.

 7. For more information, see http://www.irs.gov/charities/charitable/article/0,,id = 96099,00.html [Accessed 16 November 2010].

 8. See www.osiny.org/site/PageServer?pagename = Issues_citizen_action [Accessed 20 January 2011].