Sustainability requires reversing human-caused degradation of the planet’s carrying capacity through a litany of economic, ecological and societal governance adjustments. Local governments interested in sustainability have tended to adapt strategic planning techniques or processes which identify a local government’s mission, goals and objectives and link them to a desired vision, direction and outcomes.
Integrated Local Sustainability Strategies, Capacities, and Performance Management
The Integrated Local Sustainability Strategies, Capacities, and Performance Management project seeks to advance our understanding of how local governments in Indiana can effectively integrate sustainability planning, capacity-building, and performance management. It recognizes sustainability's challenges, requiring communities to formulate long-term strategies and develop the capabilities to implement them. The research involves analyzing Indiana municipalities to uncover how they engage in sustainability planning, develop the necessary capacities, and assess and enhance their performance, utilizing various research methods.
One of the recent work products from this effort is the 2026 Indiana Energy Playbook. This playbook is designed to help reduce energy costs, improve public facilities, and support residents and businesses facing rising utility expenses across Indiana. It is a practical, step-by-step manual—you can follow from start to finish or jump around to the sections that best match your current needs. It was developed by graduate students as part of the O'Neill School's S515 Sustainable Communities course with support from the U.S. National Science Foundation (Award # 1941561).
The Indiana Resilient Communities Study
These reports summarize responses to two waves of surveys administered to 305 Indiana municipal governments in 2022 and 2025.
This report summarizes survey data provided by government officials from 153 Indiana cities and towns who completed the survey between January 28 and June 10, 2025. It was part of a study on local government sustainability strategies and capacities funded by the National Science Foundation. Dr. Aaron Deslatte led the study with support from the Indiana University Center for Survey Research.
This report summarizes survey data provided by government officials from 174 Indiana cities and towns who completed the survey between February 18 and July 20, 2022.
Compared to larger cities, smaller local governments with economic and social disadvantages are less understood in their progress toward sustainable development. Since economic growth is often central to constrained local governments, their constrained capabilities exacerbate the challenge for public managers to shift gears from traditional economic development to sustainable development. When capabilities are limited within existing functions, the municipality may need to look outside its organization to meet its goals. Public administration scholars have argued that collaboration can help overcome such challenges. However, a significant gap remains in understanding that the choice of different capability-based collaborative mechanisms affects organizational outcomes. This paper examines how the choice between alternative capability-based collaborative mechanisms influences the sustainable development efforts of resource-constrained local governments. Using Institutional Collective Action (ICA) as a theoretical lens, we contend that public managers choose mechanisms that minimize the risk of collaboration. Drawing on novel Bayesian machine-learning methods and data from smaller, resource-constrained local governments in Indiana, we find evidence that collaborative mechanisms that reduce information-related collaboration risks drive greater engagement in local sustainable development. Additionally, this effect becomes larger when the municipality uses more than one collaborative mechanism. These results suggest that, considering the extreme resource constraints of smaller and rural local governments, collaborative mechanisms can generate positive-sum effects for sustainable development efforts.
Local governments tend to produce disjointed planning and implementation responses to ambiguous problems. This study adapts a cognitive science framework known as active inference to investigate local government resilience planning and management processes. We contend that disconnects between planning and management reflect the inadequacy of the “knowledge infrastructure” systems which could enable more adaptive responses. Using a mixed-methods approach to study stormwater resilience in the U.S. state of Indiana, we find evidence that municipalities integrate planning and management efforts relative to experienced flooding impacts. However, they are less likely to proactively develop information on longer-term or more distant climate impacts.
Local governments must balance their growth ambitions against needs arising from social inequities. The Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) program aims to redress these disparities by directing funds toward disinvested tracts. We ask whether a city's institutional design, public and private actor composition, and resource availability influence the decision to invest in communities with greater levels of social need. Utilizing a social equity framework, we connect place-level procedural fairness mechanisms with neighborhood-level access equity consequences. Combining U.S. local government survey data over two decades with census tract-level CDBG expenditures, we find that in neighborhood where 51 percent or more of the families are low-to-moderate income (LMI), its likelihood of receiving funds increases with its share of LMI population relative to the city's, but at a diminished rate compared to non-LMI tracts. Further, city-level factors moderate this relationship (e.g., including community development corporations in planning processes).
Climate challenges in the 21st century have given rise to re-thinking the role of local governments in confronting larger-than-local challenges. However, anthropogenic climate change has become a weaponized partisan issue, and surveys show a growing partisan tribalization over climate science. Empowering local governments to take broader climate and sustainability actions is one avenue for addressing this. This study tests a localism hypothesis, which holds that citizens will be more supportive of local climate efforts when the benefits are internalized by the community. This deference to locally directed actions springs from the predisposition for decentralization of political authority widely attributed to localism, a directional goal of motivated reasoners which may feed into social identity, cohesion and shared community values. Through three survey experiments, the study finds citizens are more likely to favor continuation of local climate-related programs in the face of high performance and politicization at the federal level.
For decades, the world’s largest and most globally significant cities have been pledging to tackle climate change, resilience, sustainable development and social injustices through a proliferating ecology of plans. Far less is understood about what is happening in smaller communities. This study employs an institutional lens and automated text analysis to examine the resilience and sustainability “shared strategies” embedded in local land-use plans, which are used in many countries to guide the spatial distribution of development in metropolitan regions. We find evidence that communities that are more highly educated and less racially diverse focus more on “quality of life” amenities within their plans, such as pedestrian resources and environmental amenities. By contrast, communities that are more racially diverse focus greater attention on green stormwater infrastructure to address flooding. Plan “quality” is negatively associated with an amenities’ focus. Taken together, these findings suggest comprehensive land-use planning is both a means for reflecting exclusivity as well as pursuing community needs or goals related to specific resilience or sustainability themes.
Strategic plans are widely used by municipalities as a means of directing their own activities, but relatively few studies have examined factors associated with cities’ decisions to embed sustainability principles within them. Drawing from literature on planning processes and organizational capacity, this paper tests whether perceived staff support for sustainability initiatives influences the integration of sustainability into strategic plans, and whether administrative capacity has a moderating effect on this relationship. This study presents new findings about how cities are advancing sustainability objectives and about the role that designated sustainability offices can play in the strategic planning process.
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.
This Element explores the role of public managers as designers. Drawing from systems-thinking and strategic management, a process-tracing methodology is used to examine three design processes whereby public managers develop strategies for adapting to climate change, build the requisite capabilities and evaluate outcomes. Across three cases, the findings highlight the role of managers as 'design- oriented' integration agents and point to areas where additional inquiry is warranted. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Affordable housing that incorporates sustainability goals into its design has the potential to address both health and economic disparities via enhanced energy-efficiency, structural durability and indoor environmental quality. Despite the potential for these win-win advances, survey data of U.S. local governments indicate these types of equity investments remain rare. This study explores barriers and pathways to distributional equity via energy-efficient housing. Using archival city sustainability survey data collected during a period of heightened U.S. federal investment in local government energy-efficiency programs, we combine machine learning (ML) and process-tracing approaches for modeling the complex drivers and barriers underlying these decisions. First, we ask, how do characteristics of a city's organizational learning methods—its administrative structure, past experience with housing programs, resources, stakeholder engagement and planning—predict policy commitments to green affordable housing? Using ensemble ML methods, we find that three specific modes of organizational learning—past experience with affordable housing programs, seeking assistance from neighborhood groups and the technical expertise of professional green organizations—are the most impactful features in determining city commitments to constructing green affordable housing. Our second stage uses process-tracing within a specific case identified by the ML models to determine the ordering of these factors and to provide more nuance on green-housing policy implementation.
A normative assumption of government reform efforts such as New Public Management is that fostering a more innovative, proactive, and risk-taking organizational culture—developing what has been described as an “entrepreneurial orientation” (EO)—improves performance. But in arenas like urban sustainability, performance can be an ambiguous, multifaceted concept. Managers’ assessments of their own nimbleness, innovative thinking, and risk culture are also likely to influence how they interpret the risk-reward balance of opportunities to enhance organizational performance. This study examines how meso-level organizational decisions impact managers’ individual risk-assessments of sustainability initiatives. We do so through a combination of Bayesian structural equation modeling of US local government survey data collected over two time periods, and an artifactual survey experiment with empaneled local government employees. This multimethod design allows us to examine the role of organizational performance and EO—meso-level learning heuristics—in shaping the micro-foundations of managerial risk assessment. The organization-level observational results indicate that local governments engage in risk-seeking behavior in order to minimize their potential for losses of prior effort. Experimental results confirm local government administrators are loss-averse when asked to evaluate the merits of initiating a hypothetical sustainability program.
Understanding how the public assesses the performance of complex, intergovernmental efforts such as sustainability is critical for understanding both managerial decision-making and institutional design. Drawing from the performance and federalism literature, this study investigates the role that distinctive elements of negativity bias play in citizen assessments of intergovernmental performance. In three survey experiments, this study exploits a well-known intergovernmental initiative to explore the effects of episodic performance information on citizen support for varying sustainability-related activities. Two inter-related research questions are addressed. First, does the positive or negative valence of citizen performance assessments vary with the type and scope of activity? Second, does positive or negative performance information tend to dominate in more realistic scenarios in which both types of stimuli interact? The results advance theoretical understanding of public performance with evidence that the type of activity can influence citizen assessments both positively and negatively. Additionally, partisan cues can overwhelm otherwise positive views of performance in some contexts, a concept described in the psychology literature as negativity dominance. The findings add important insights by showing that biased reasoning of citizens is not just a blanket affective association with constant treatment effects across any type of governmental effort, but is contingent on both the activity and political context.
Metropolitan Governance and Management Transitions Laboratory resources
