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Innovation and the Role of Collaborative Planning in Local Clean Energy Policy
Author(s) -
Pitt Damian,
Bassett Ellen
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
environmental policy and governance
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.987
H-Index - 48
eISSN - 1756-9338
pISSN - 1756-932X
DOI - 10.1002/eet.1653
Subject(s) - stakeholder , sustainability , local government , business , government (linguistics) , clean energy , environmental planning , environmental resource management , environmental economics , public administration , political science , economics , public relations , geography , ecology , linguistics , philosophy , biology
The adoption of clean energy policies is becoming more common among US localities, but is still far from universal. Policy innovation theory suggests that some shared internal characteristics should distinguish the localities that adopt those policies from others that do not. Based on a survey of US local government officials, and supplementary data from the US Census, we use multiple regression analysis to identify those distinguishing characteristics. We find that collaborative planning approaches play a crucial role in helping localities build the local civic capacity necessary to adopt these innovative policies. Our results reinforce prior studies which have found that citizen participation and stakeholder participation in planning processes can help to foster the development of innovative local policies for sustainability and climate change mitigation. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment