Ecological, Engineering and Community Resilience Policy Adoption in Large US Cities

Abstract

This paper seeks to identify which resilience-oriented policies are being enacted and factors that influence policy adoption. We develop clusters of policies related to three types of resilience: ecological, engineering, and community. Among large U.S. cities, we find wide variation in the number and type of policies enacted. Through multivariate analysis, we identify factors that are associated with the adoption of these policies. Similar to earlier work on sustainability and climate change policy, our results show that larger cities are more likely to adopt all three types of resilience policies. Wealthier and liberal cities adopt more ecological resilience policies. Cities that are members of city networks also adopt more policies, but not all networks significantly influence policy adoption suggesting that network goals and connections are important. We also find that among these large cities, it is the smaller of them that appear to benefit most from membership in networks.