Collaborative Activity and Partnerships in Response to Problem Severity: The case of Sea Level Rise in US Cities

EasyChair Preprint 1161

Abstract

The absence of federal strategies in the United States for climate change adaptation leaves state and city governments with broad discretion to undertake such measures. Yet, cities may be unable to adapt to climate change without external assistance, particularly in states where the state leadership has not recognized the need to provide political and financial support to local governments. Collaboration allows cities to pool resources and work across boundaries to ameliorate substantial problems such as climate change.

Drawing on Agranoff’s (2008) work on public networks, we develop a typology of collaborative activities of public organizations in connection to the severity of a public problem. We test the applicability of our typology in the context of municipal government preparedness to sea level rise in the U.S. Specifically, we focus on collaboration of municipal governments with other cities, nonprofits, and businesses to address the threat associated with sea level rise. We hypothesize that the type of collaborative activity that cities undertake will correspond to the severity of threat they face. The study uses survey data collected in 2016 to measure the collaborative activities of municipalities. To assess the threat level, we rely on data from Climate Central.

The study has important implications for policy and practice, as it sheds light on whether collaborative activity of public actors in response to natural disasters unfolds in a predictable manner and how it changes depending on the severity of the public problem at hand.

Keyphrases: climate change adaptation, collaboration, local governments

@booklet{EasyChair:1161,
  author    = {Vaiva Kalesnikaite and Milena Neshkova},
  title     = {Collaborative Activity and Partnerships in Response to Problem Severity: The case of Sea Level Rise in US Cities},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint 1161},
  year      = {EasyChair, 2019}}