The Road to Routinization: A Functional Collective Action Approach for Local Sustainability Planning and Performance Management

Abstract

When confronting complex challenges, governments use basic bureaucratic design heuristics -- centralization and specialization. The complexity of environmental and climate issues has drawn recent attention to the ways in which fragmented authority influences, and often challenges, the policy choices and institutional effectiveness of local governments. Sustainability planning and improved performance are potential benefits stemming from the integration of responsibilities across silos. Our central proposition is that institutionalized collective-action mechanisms, which break down siloed decision-making, foster more successful implementation of sustainability policies. We empirically examine this using two surveys of U.S. cities and find evidence that formal collective-action mechanisms positively mediate the relationship between broader agency involvement and more comprehensive performance information collection and use. However, we identify limits to the role of planning in fostering a performance culture. Specifically, cities that have engaged in broader planning conduct less-comprehensive performance management, likely due to measurement difficulty and goal ambiguity.