Sustainable Cities in the U.S.: Policy for Democracy and Participatory Feedback

• In Event: Disasters and Resilience Policies in Global Cities

Abstract

This paper will analyze the institutional field of sustainable cities in the U.S over the long arc of its development through the lens of two forms of policy analysis: 1) public policy for democracy, and 2) participatory policy feedback. It will suggest implications for Green New Deal design.

My paper will build upon a forthcoming book, Sustainable Cities in American Democracy (UP of Kansas, 2021). The paper utilizes a wide array of sources: interviews with civic and professional association leaders, planners and public administrators in local government, as well as in several community-based grant programs and sustainable community offices in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency; civic association and government archives; strategic planning and framework documents; annual reports, financials; board membership.

Policy design for democratic participation and community problem solving in the sustainable cities field is quite different than the major “classic” designs engaging mass publics of Social Security (Campbell) and the G.I Bill (Mettler). Drawing upon “policy for democracy” (Ingram, Rathgeb Smith, Schneider), I examine two broad types, as well as interactive effects. The first has been the development of legal norms and statutory requirements that provide access to information, public hearings, considered alternatives, judicial review, legal standing, and citizen suits. The second has been an array of programs, sometimes but not always explicit in statute, that provide a mix of resources and tools that enable local civic groups, associational networks, and deliberative multi-stakeholder partnerships to build organizational and institutional capacity for problem solving. While somewhat inexact given the mix of components, the first can be called a “rights-based” and the second a “tools-based” urban environmental policy design for democracy.

I focus on two policy areas where moderately robust designs emerged to help build their respective fields within the larger sustainable cities field (watersheds and transportation planning), and one field where policy design has been much weaker (urban agriculture).

The “rights-based” variant in water policy has been important since at least 1946, with the Federal Water Pollution Control Act (buttressed by the Administrative Procedure Act). It was reinforced by amendments in the 1956 water pollution compromise for “enforcement conferences” that avoided strong federal policing powers, but in exchange for 15 years of field-configuring conferences and workshops in cities across the country that established a template of shared civic leadership. This occurred especially through multitiered environmental and civic associations (Skocpol) that engaged their chapters and collaborated among each other. I examine how the League of Women Voters developed an especially effective niche strategy on water pollution within this framework. The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA, 1970), as well as specific statutes such as the Clean Water Act (1972), further enhanced participatory rights-based designs.

While the command-and-control features of the Clean Water Act crowded out the one section of the law that designed for participatory planning in basins during the 1970s, new policy designs emerged with the Chesapeake Bay Program and the National Estuary Program (NEP) in the 1980s. Then a broader set of watershed grants and tools in the 1990s and 2000s helped to build the urban watershed field at the local level and through affiliated (but not multi-tiered) associations, such as the River Network and Restore America’s Estuaries. While not specifically urban programs, major coastal and inland cities provided key venues for action. The Office of Wetlands, Oceans, and Watersheds (OWOW at EPA) provided programmatic support of four “tools-based” design components: 1) grants to local groups, partnerships, and training intermediaries; 2) data, planning, monitoring, and restoration toolkits, often co-produced with civic associations to make them usable and community-friendly; 3) management and governance templates for collaborative planning; and 4) networking events, such as regional and national watershed forums, among grassroots as well as associational and professional actors.

The Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act (ISTEA) of 1991 (and its successor laws) provided both rights-based and tools-based design components, as well as local grants for biking and walking infrastructure improvements. These helped spur the growth of biking and pedestrian associations, collaboration with AARP chapters on age-friendly streets, and enabled a shift from contention to collaboration in urban governance strategies in specific cities, as well as through the competitive field dynamics among the two major national civic associations in this field. A comparison of ISTEA with urban farming policies and grant programs highlights some of the features that have been most and least effective.

Author

• Carmen Joseph Sirianni