Research paper
Governing metropolitan green infrastructure in the United States

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landurbplan.2012.09.004Get rights and content

Abstract

In this paper we explore whether the enhancement of urban ecosystem services through large-scale, metropolitan tree-planting initiatives is being planned and executed as a component of traditional municipal government or represents new, transdisciplinary strategies in environmental governance. Drawing on qualitative interviews with stakeholders in six major cities (n = 58) we further explore institutionalization of these initiatives and relationships. While much current discourse posits government cannot “go it alone” in providing preventative, “front-end” solutions to complex environmental problems, we found the public sector dominant in the visioning, planning, and management of these green infrastructure initiatives and the role of the private sector to be minimal. We also found that, despite this dominance, the initiatives had limited success in becoming institutionalized. This dichotomy reflects that while discourses labeling the public sector unable to grapple with complex environmental issues and the private sector dominant in environmental governance regimes are premature, institutionalizing the solutions into the machinery of government remains a contested arena.

Highlights

► Public sector leads urban forest-based ecosystem services expansion. ► The private sector played little role in these green infrastructure initiatives. ► This contradicts critiques of public sector delivery of environmental solutions. ► This questions describing environmental governance as privileging the private sector.

Introduction

The complexity of contemporary environmental problems, multiple scales across which they range and diversity of communities they affect has prompted numerous researchers to argue that traditional government (“the state”) cannot, in isolation, effectively address these challenges. In response, researchers are calling for environmental governance strategies that bring together public, private, scientific, and community sector actors to inform the vision and day-to-day management of pro-active, preventative, “front-end” (as opposed to end-of-pipe) environmental solutions (Brenton et al., 2007, Durant et al., 2004, Edge and McAllister, 2009, Hemple, 1996, Seto et al., 2010, Thomas and Littlewood, 2010).

In addition, researchers note that efforts to institutionalize environmental governance strategies have been under-developed and under-researched (Hooghe and Marks, 2003, Swanson and Pinter, 2006). While new environmental governance initiatives garner significant preliminary attention, exploring the extent to which stakeholders view these initiatives as supported and internalized through institutional change and policy adoption has not received similar focus (Edge and McAllister, 2009, Kanie and Haas, 2004, Mann and Gennaio, 2010). Those initiatives that have received follow-up research were found “still not sufficiently linked to existing government planning, reporting, and budgeting processes…a serious weakness because this type of integration is a good proxy for…overall effectiveness” (Swanson & Pinter, 2006, p. 2).

This critique joins others who fear environmental governance yields not more effective governing, but rather greater private sector influence, loss of public accountability, and a merely symbolic role for community participation (Clapp, 1998, Falkner, 2003, Harmes, 2006, Sandercock, 2005, Thomas and Littlewood, 2010). From this perspective, environmental governance represents a potential means for private sector actors to create “a privileging of a business-friendly, market-oriented approach to environmental politics over a more holistic and ecology-oriented understanding of the relationship between human activity and environmental destruction. [This] ‘privatization’ … is regarded as a process that undermines established, state-centric, models of democratic accountability…” (Falkner, 2003, p. 81).

In response to these concerns, practitioners’ and researchers have joined calls for broader participation with demands to explore the “mainstreaming” and symmetry of urban environmental governance. Evidence of these, they note, would be reflected in the systematic engagement of a broad spectrum of public, private, non-profit and scientific actors in program planning and budgeting and in adoption of local policies, ordinances and regulations supportive of urban environmental agendas (Davey, 2007, Kanie and Haas, 2004, Kearns, 1992, Peris et al., 2011, Sharma and Tomar, 2010, UN, 2005).

In this paper we explore whether stakeholders’ believe efforts to expand urban ecosystem services through large-scale, metropolitan tree-planting initiatives (TPI) are planned and executed as a component of traditional municipal government or represent new, transdisciplinary strategies in metropolitan environmental governance. Further, we explore whether they view these initiatives and relationships as becoming institutionalized into the operations of municipal government. To answer these inquiries we ask the following questions:

  • What is the nature of governance in major urban TPI? Do they reflect the collaborative, transdisciplinary environmental governance approach that researchers suggest complex urban environmental projects require, or have governments “gone it alone” in planning and implementing these initiatives?

  • Have these initiatives and their relationships become “mainstreamed” as part of the city's institutional structure?

The demand for and development of new, environmental urban infrastructure places engaged stakeholders (i.e., public, private, and non-profit TPI participants and observers) in a strategic position to view changes and continuities in the governance and institutionalization of such projects. Stakeholder perspectives concerning these transformations can advance our understanding and therefore the outcome of metropolitan green infrastructure efforts. Soliciting stakeholders’ perception of the governance and institutional “mainstreaming” of TPI in their cities can help others promoting urban green infrastructure better frame the opportunities and resources such initiatives require.

We chose TPI stakeholders’ narrative statements to explore these question because researchers identify case study interviews as a method to explore ‘how’ or ‘why’ questions (Yin, 1994). Researchers recommend the narrative approach for conditions in which clear connections between current and future actions are uncertain (Uprichard & Byrne, 2006). The unprecedented development of citywide green infrastructure initiatives provides such an opportunity to examine these projects in light of both normative methods of metropolitan resource management and proposals for innovations in their governance and institutionalization.

Researchers define environmental governance as the articulation of new institutional formations to meet the growing complexity and scale of ecological challenges. Central to these formations are demands for higher levels of collaborative democratic and scientific engagement in developing solutions to pressing environmental problems (Backstrand, 2003, Bulkeley, 2003, Durant et al., 2004, Fiorino, 2006, Gulbrandsen, 2008). These demands are in reaction to assertions that “the state alone is not enough to propel changes” thus requiring increasing dependence upon “multilateral institutions, organized science, NGOs [non-governmental organizations] and social movements, and business and industry for formulating their views and conducting policy” (Kanie & Haas, 2004, p. 4).

Researchers have identified metropolitan areas as a critical arena for exploring environmental governance (Bai et al., 2010, Mol, 2009, Sellers, 2002). Cities and the urbanization process create significant environmental change across local, regional and global scales. As centers of concentrated economic activity and population their demand for large quantities of high quality energy and materials and subsequent generation of wastes are important drivers of environmental disturbance and pollution (Fernandez, 2007, Grimm et al., 2008).

Urban economic and population concentration also make metropolitan areas centers of dense information flows, social capital and capacity. These resource networks make cities locations of innovation, knowledge creation and institutional development (Cardoso and Castells, 2006, Landry, 2000). As a result, researchers argue, cities have considerable means to create new governance partnerships capable of producing solutions to environmental challenges (Rees, 1996, Rennings, 2000, Sanchez-Rodriguez, 2009, Seto et al., 2010).

Forestry researchers and advocates have defined the urban forest as “the aggregate of all community vegetation and green spaces that provide a myriad of environmental, health, and economic benefits for a community.” Planners have extended the definition to include “ecological, climatic, urban, political, and cultural conditions that foster or inhibit the growth and survival of trees” (APA, 2009, Konijnendijk et al., 2006, SUFC, 2010).

Trees on public land, including “streets, highways, parks, and public buildings,” and private land, including “private homes, condos, apartments, roof gardens, commercial and retail property…flood control channels, hillsides, utility rights of way…rail lines…airports and spandrels…are parts of the urban forest” (Lipkis & Lipkis, 1990, p. 8). Viewed from this perspective, urban forests cross numerous property, legal and policy regimes as well as a wide range of ecological boundaries. The boundary spanning nature of urban forests thus makes them key candidates for exploring new environmental governance formations.

Researchers and practitioners recognize that urban forests provide important opportunities to deliver preemptive solutions to urban environmental problems through their capacity to deliver ecosystem services as public goods (Amati and Taylor, 2010, APA, 2009, Konijnendijk, 2010, Schilling and Logan, 2008). Approximately 80 percent of the nation's population and 25 percent of its tree canopy reside in metropolitan areas of the continental United States (US) (Dwyer, Nowak, Noble, & Sisinni, 2000). These urban forests provide front-end environmental benefits through their capacity to absorb and slow storm water runoff, sequester carbon, mitigate urban heat island effects, reduce metropolitan air pollutants, and enhance capital accumulation (Akbari, 2002, American Forests, 1997, American Forests, 2002, APA, 2009, Benedict and McMahon, 2006, Learner and Poole, 1999, Muldavin, 2010, Nowak and Crane, 2002, Nowak and Dwyer, 2004). The urban forest's importance in delivering ecosystem services that contribute to urban sustainability and the opportunities metropolitan centers offer for policy innovation provide a valuable context within which to explore questions concerning environmental governance.

For the purposes of this article, institutional structure is defined as the normative outlook, operations and output of public, private and non-profit entities in program planning and budgeting and in the adoption of local policies, ordinances and regulations.

Section snippets

Methods

This study's purpose is to explore the nature of governance relations underpinning major urban TPI. Furthermore, it explores whether these relationships are becoming “mainstreamed” into metropolitan institutional structures.

To answer these inquiries we interviewed key stakeholders (n = 58) in six major cities about their perception of governance strategies supporting their city's TPI (see Table 1). Using multiple-choice and open-ended questions we also queried them about the extent TPI plans had

Vision

University of Florida urban forestry researchers note, “Plans are based on visions” (Hubbard, 2000, p. 4). Considering the origin, articulation and support of visions underpinning metropolitan TPI is fundamental to understanding the nature of governance guiding their planning and execution. To explore this we asked interviewees to articulate the overall vision of their city's TPI and identify its primary source (i.e., mayor, agency staff, private sector, NGO). We also asked interviewees to rate

Governance

Respondents clearly perceive urban forests as means to provide preventative, front-end solutions to environmental problems. Interviewees did not, in general, describe increasing canopy cover as an end in itself but rather as a form of green infrastructure delivering public goods including improved environmental education, public health and safety, water and air quality, flood control, carbon offsets, economic development and mitigation of urban heat island effects and global climate change.

This

Dr. Robert F. Young is an Assistant Professor in the Community and Regional Planning Program at the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Young works in the fields of urban planning, sustainable economic development and urban ecology. He recently co-founded the University of Oregon's Sustainable Cities Initiative. As a practitioner he has served as the Director of Planning of the Philadelphia's Recycling Office and was appointed by New Jersey Governor Christine Whitman as Director of the New

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    Dr. Robert F. Young is an Assistant Professor in the Community and Regional Planning Program at the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Young works in the fields of urban planning, sustainable economic development and urban ecology. He recently co-founded the University of Oregon's Sustainable Cities Initiative. As a practitioner he has served as the Director of Planning of the Philadelphia's Recycling Office and was appointed by New Jersey Governor Christine Whitman as Director of the New Jersey Commerce Department's Office of Sustainability. He has also served as an advisor to Governors Ted Kulongoski and John Kitzhaber of Oregon on issues of sustainable development. Dr. Young's most recent publications include articles in the Journal of the American Planning Association, Urban Forestry and Urban Greening, Journal of Environmental Planning and Management, Journal of Urban Ecosystems and a chapter in the book, Garden Cities to Green Cities published by Johns Hopkins University Press.

    Dr. E. Gregory McPherson is a Research Forester with the USDA Forest Service's Pacific Southwest Research Station located in Davis, CA. He works with a team of 3 other scientists who measure and model effects of trees on energy use, urban heat islands, air pollutant uptake, carbon sequestration, and rainfall interception. Their research is helping justify investments in urban forest planning and management. In 2000 Dr. McPherson received the International Society of Arboriculture's (ISA) L.C. Chadwick Award for Research. Greg Chairs the ISA Science and Research Committee and serves on the California Urban Forest Council's Policy Advisory Committee. He attended University of Michigan (BGS), Utah State University (Masters in Landscape Architecture), and SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry (Ph.D. Forestry).

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