Overcoming collective action barriers to energy sustainability: A longitudinal study of climate protection accord adoption by local governments

Abstract

High levels of observed city involvement in energy and climate initiatives indicate that free-riding has been much less of a barrier to local climate protection efforts than suggested by theories of collective action. This study investigates why local governments have adopted various energy and climate change policy instruments despite the non-excludability of climate benefits. This paper advances theories of institutional collective action (ICA) and policy diffusion by testing ICA based hypotheses that local officials are able to overcome collective action problems to the extent that the costs of these initiatives are minimized through policy network interactions, the extent to which climate action produces localized benefits or compliments local environmental, development or growth management efforts, and the extent to which energy and climate protection efforts generate selective benefits to elected and appointed local government officials who advance their career interests depending on the existing configurations of political system institutions. Analysis of adoptions of the Climate Protection Agreements by Florida Cities indicates larger cities are more likely to adopt climate agreement, while district elections decrease the likelihood of climate policy adoption. Moreover, economic development rather than growth management or environmental problem situation is linked to climate initiatives.

Introduction

Climate change and energy sustainability have emerged on the world stage in the past decade in a highly visible fashion since the Kyoto Protocol was signed in 2005, building on decades of international work on climate change reduction efforts. Even cities have taken a position on this hot topic as more than 400 US cities had signed the U.S. Conference of Mayors Climate Protection Agreement (CPA) by 2007. Yet this action raises a paradox in public policy research as climate protection policies address a classic common pool resource area in which individual cities would seem to have an incentive not to adopt any stringent policies. As is so well detailed in Garrett Hardin's The Tragedy of the Commons [1], from an economic perspective, cities might be expected to free ride on the actions of other governments that undertake the costs and efforts necessary to reduce carbon emissions and will not voluntarily sign up, especially since a city's individual contribution to solving the global crisis is miniscule. Reductions of emissions solely within the jurisdiction of a city only alter climate change risks for that jurisdiction if they reduce the earth's total concentration of greenhouse gases by a meaningful amount. Nonetheless, cities do voluntarily adopt climate protection commitments. Therefore, we ask whether political, institutional or socio-economic factors contribute the most to explaining policy adoptions in this new policy area.

A series of studies have been conducted to explain the motivations for local adoption of climate policies and actions, however, there are three types of limitations of the extant literature that this paper intends to make progress on. First, there is not sufficient attention to the institutional collective action nature of the problem. The collective action problems were mentioned in many studies, but the theorization of the analytical framework was not explicitly based on the collective action problems among local governments. This paper integrates the hypotheses into the Institutional Collective Action (ICA) framework, which could provide a coherent theoretical explanation for the local climate actions. Second, there is not sufficient attention to the influence of local policy diffusion on local governments’ adoption of climate actions. This paper further develops the policy diffusion framework at the local level by testing how the climate actions of neighbors influence cities’ climate actions with a longitudinal data set.

We use the theoretical frameworks of institutional collective action (ICA) and policy diffusion to develop hypotheses related to why cities voluntarily adopt climate change policies. This work is the initial product of a larger project to extend theories of ICA and policy diffusion to investigate a wide array of local government level energy and sustainability policies [2]. ICA provides a framework to integrate factors that contribute to voluntary cooperative actions on such policies [3], [4]. Few studies examine policy innovation related to common pool resource policies. Furthermore, the literature on policy innovation in cities is relatively small, and the climate protection agreement is a case of a rapidly diffusing policy, a type of policy innovation, which has not yet been studied extensively. Thus in this work, featuring an important policy area related to globalization – climate change policy, we extend the policy innovation and diffusion framework [5] to a new policy type, and bring in the powerful ICA theoretical framework to generate factors related to policy innovation to be tested in our multivariate model. We estimate the timing of local adoption of climate protection agreement in Florida cities using a panel logit with Generalized Estimating Equations (GEE) estimation. The results indicate larger cities and adoption by neighbors increase the likelihood of Energy/Climate Protection (E/CP) policy adoption, while district elections decrease the likelihood of E/CP policy adoption.