Building Local Government Capacity for Community Climate Engagement

Abstract

While climate change is a global problem, its impacts are experienced locally. Local governments therefore play a key role in climate adaptation, adjusting natural and human systems to moderate the harm from climate impacts. Addressing climate change requires collective action by everyday people, who must determine what solutions fit their priorities and real-world constraints. Community engagement is therefore crucial for developing solutions, where people articulate their priorities and contribute local knowledge. Local governments across the country have developed processes for this climate engagement. Yet, these processes are often short-term and ad-hoc, critiqued for failing to incorporate public input and reinforcing systemic inequalities. Considering these challenges, local governments are exploring ways to embed engagement into their decision-making processes as a long-term organizational practice, akin to other regular processes like hiring and contracting. This shift requires building organizational capacities that make engagement more feasible and effective over time, including new systems and skills for its implementation. Building sustained engagement capacity is especially important in the context of climate adaptation, where solutions must be continually revisited and readjusted for changing conditions. This dissertation collected original data from local government officials across the U.S. to examine how they build sustained capacity for community engagement around extreme heat and broader climate adaptation. Extreme heat is the now deadliest weather-related disaster in the U.S., receiving growing attention from the public and local governments. Like other impacts, extreme heat often requires policy solutions that span various policy areas and decision-makers, thereby warranting a collaborative approach. Lessons from this dissertation are therefore relevant for broader climate engagement. Data comes primarily from 30 in-depth interviews and 259 surveys with local government officials in departments of public health, emergency management, and planning. Interviews were conducted with officials who have demonstrated experience implementing engagement efforts in their jurisdictions, related to extreme heat. These interviews employed phenomenological techniques, helpful for understanding each person’s engagement experience, and how they make implementation decisions for their specific context. Interview findings then informed survey construction, used to examine research questions on a larger scale. The survey was designed in a way where it could be used to examine individual-level responses in chapter 2 and collapsed into county-level responses for chapter 3. Relative to all U.S. counties, surveyed counties are highly populous and experience more severe heat. However, the dissertation also includes a supplemental sample of Pacific Northwest (PNW) counties in the United States that are more rural and less heat-affected. These counties were primarily sampled for additional research beyond this dissertation but are also included in chapter 2 which focuses on individual characteristics more than counties’ context. Chapter 1 draws on theories of organizational change to examine how governments build internal capacity for engagement over time, such as new systems for communication and shared understandings of government’s role. It first introduces a theoretical framework to describe the capacity-building process, then empirically illustrates it through content analysis of interviews with local government officials. Findings describe the main challenges that officials navigate, the strategies they develop in response, and engagement outcomes that suggest their organizations are strengthening their foundation for continued engagement. These findings highlight how local governments are adapting their systems to build long-term capacity, such as establishing relationships with community intermediaries (i.e., trusted messengers) and prioritizing early conversations about engagement’s bounds, at which point community partners may opt-out without damaging the relationship. These strategies are intended to address common challenges, such as community distrust and resource constraints that hinder government’s use of engagement. In addition to strengthening governments’ systems, these shifts may create positive feedback effects beyond engagement’s immediate outcomes, fostering public trust and political buy-in, among other benefits. This chapter contributes a theoretical framework for examining how government organizations strengthen their capacity for engagement and highlights practical strategies that practitioners can use in their own jurisdictions. Chapter 2 complements chapter 1 by shifting focus from organizational structures to the individuals who implement engagement. Scholarship has found that public officials invite more community involvement into their work when they feel positively towards community engagement, viewing it as more valuable. This chapter therefore uses a mixed-methods approach to explore how local government officials develop these positive attitudes. Contrary to theory, survey results indicate that professional credentials like graduate degrees, managerial positions, and association membership have little to no influence on officials’ valuation of community engagement. Instead, officials who feel more positively tend to engage in more peer-learning on the topic and report stronger engagement skills. The second part of this chapter thus uses interviews to explore how officials develop these attributes. Interview evidence suggests that these attributes tend to arise from practical experience more than credentialing processes (e.g., graduate training, association membership), particularly face-to-face public interaction that teaches them how to navigate sensitive conversations and translate technical information. These experiences often come from prior occupations outside of government, such as teaching, journalism, and community-organizing. These chapter 2 findings challenge traditional assumptions in professionalization theory that credentialing shapes individuals’ attitudes, highlighting a need to modernize the theory for a contemporary workforce where career-switching may be more common. Chapter 2 also offers practical suggestions for hiring and training. With regard to hiring, practitioners should value candidates with cross-sectoral experience or backgrounds requiring complex face-to-face public interaction. This may mean broadening civil service requirements or advertising positions in new outlets. In a similar vein, training should involve peer-learning that convenes cross-boundary actors (e.g., different departments, sectors) to problem-solve around realistic scenarios, such as table-top exercises, where actors talk through their response to a simulated emergency. Chapter 3 shifts to examining how broader collaboration shapes local governments' heat policies, drawing on county-aggregated surveys regarding each county’s heat policies and partners. Heat and demographic data from public datasets are also integrated to control for other drivers of their heat policy. Broader collaboration is relevant to engagement since governments often involve additional partner types alongside the public (e.g., healthcare providers). This chapter effectively identifies collaboration’s impact on how many heat policies counties adopt, and the diversity of their policy approaches. Chapter 3 finds that more collaborative partners help jurisdictions scale their policy approach by enabling them to adopt more policies overall. To a lesser extent, collaboration also helps them diversify their policy approaches, meaning that policies use different mechanisms to address heat risk, such as adapting infrastructure and providing direct services. Diversification may occur primarily in early stages of heat-related work, as partners introduce new perspectives and promote expansion into unfamiliar policy areas. Meanwhile, partners who join later may primarily help scale and deepen existing approaches. Chapter 3 offers empirical evidence to reinforce frequent calls for increasing collaboration in heat-related work. It also contributes to theory on collaborative governance and polycentricity by suggesting collaboration serves different purposes across the life cycle of a jurisdiction’s policy development, diversifying their approach in early phases and scaling it in later ones. On a practical level, officials managing collaboration may prioritize efforts that promote knowledge exchange in early stages of their heat-related work, shifting towards coordination efforts in later stages, such as systems for accountability and monitoring. Each empirical chapter focuses on a question important for building local governments’ capacity for climate engagement, contributing theoretical and practical insights for future work in this area. Limitations include a data skew towards jurisdictions in the western U.S. and those with likely longer engagement experience. Because of this experience skew, findings may not reflect the experience of jurisdictions just beginning their engagement work or unable to initiate it. Future research should examine these jurisdictions, where challenges are likely most acute and where foundational strategies and skills are still being established. Doing so will help identify lessons for helping jurisdictions get engagement work off the ground. In addition, future research could take a closer look at PNW counties to examine how these trends differ in rural settings and in a region, which is historically cool but is getting hotter. This focus would contribute to an underdeveloped area of heat-related research, which has mainly focused on heat policy in urban settings.