Networks as Knowledge Infrastructure
This study uses longitudinal survey methods, text analysis and interviews to investigate the formation and evolution of sustainability-focused collaborations - which we label green ties - across metropolitan regions of the United States. Green ties are forms of knowledge-based “social infrastructure” within and between organizations which can help minimize uncertainty and risks associated with adapting physical or natural infrastructures. While sustainability-focused networks of governments have existed for years, green tie formation and evolution has accelerated due to increasing extreme weather events and through investments such as the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) and the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). These laws created dozens of new programs intended to spur regional planning and collaboration. For example, through fall 2024 the federal government had appropriated $43 billion to state and local governments for the strategic deployment of electric vehicle (EV) charging infrastructure through collaborations in metropolitan areas and along transportation corridors. However, our prior research has identified significant challenges local governments face in building partnerships to optimize such investments, highlighting the need for stronger theoretical and empirical linkages between organizational information-processing and decision-support systems and the ‘larger than local’ challenges requiring collective action.
National Study on Resilience, Sustainability Planning, and Partnerships
This report summarizes survey data provided by government officials from 415 US cities with populations of 20,000 or more who completed the survey between April 29 and July 19, 2022.
Dr. Aaron Deslatte of Indiana University, Dr. Michael Siciliano of the University of Illinois at Chicago, and Dr. Rachel Krause of the University of Kansas led the study with support from the Indiana University Center for Survey Research.
View the report for cities at least 50,000 residents and fewer than 50,000 residents; and the survey results!
Recent Research:
Deslatte, Aaron, Laura Helmke-Long, Eric Stokan, and Juwon Chung. "Economies of Inequality? Polycentric Metropolitan Governance and Strategic Sustainability Choices." Urban Affairs Review (2025): 61(2), 315-347.
This article examines the relationship between the political fragmentation of cities in metropolitan regions, the distribution of social vulnerability, and the city-level economic and social sustainability strategies they adopt. Strategies emerge from prevailing community norms, and polycentric governance arrangements can support conditions in which both economic and social sustainability strategies emerge as compliments, contrary to the concern that fragmentation spurs zero-sum competition. Combining surveys of U.S. cities with social vulnerability data and text analysis of planning documents, we find that greater fragmentation has a negative impact on the sustainable development strategies cities adopt. However, growth and sustainable development strategies tend to develop alongside social sustainability efforts to address human needs. We conclude that development strategies emerge in polycentric systems in relation to the degree of fragmentation which exists, and that subsequent work should continue to focus on identifying these entropic thresholds in order to effectively address lingering inequities.
Deslatte, Aaron, Michael D. Siciliano, and Rachel M. Krause. "Applying collective action frameworks to analyse local-level collaboration for electric vehicle-related policies."Politics & Policy (2024): 1-21.
Many of the most pernicious contemporary urban problems require local governments to organise collectively across jurisdictions and reorganise or coordinate internally across bureaucratic silos. Climate change, for example, is a complex system phenomenon impacting a range of interconnected socio-environmental systems in a region, such as water, transportation and energy infrastructures which may not be directly under the control of a single department or government. This often requires managers and policymakers to coordinate policy responses across siloed units within governments and through network-based arrangements across governments. Theories of polycentricity and collective action have long drawn attention to the barriers and opportunities of collaboration and multilevel governance in fashioning adequate responses to complex problems. However, these approaches typically fail to explicate the relationships or interactions between internal and external collaboration risks and the institutional mechanisms for ameliorating them. This article empirically explores this relationship between functional collective action (collaboration across departmental units within a single government) and intergovernmental collective action (collaboration across governments). Situated in the context of climate adaptation and electric vehicle (EV) policy efforts in cities, the article highlights the need for greater scholarly attention more broadly to the development of institutional collective action theory.
Deslatte, Aaron, Michael D. Siciliano, and Rachel M. Krause. "Local government managers are on the frontlines of climate change. Are they ready?."Public Administration Review (2023).
State and local governments in the United States are the implementation agents for a vast swath of federal policies. As the country embarks on an unprecedented foray into fiscal federalism to combat climate change, we face a stark reality: many local governments are not ready. Drawing from recent data and evidence on local sustainability activities, we argue policy makers and managers at all levels of governance need to apply the lessons learned over the last two decades of subnational climate efforts. For local government managers working in the 21st century, climate change will likely be a defining social dilemma of their lifetimes. After years of inaction, the United States has taken a major step in trying to meet its greenhouse-gas mitigation pledges. But implementation requires understanding both the opportunities and opportunity costs posed by such generational investments.