My colleague Jeff Berry and I have been working with some students (Katie Bond and Kelli Farrington) over the last few months on a very ambitious project to conduct a survey of local public officials to get their views of sustainability, green jobs, and many related issues. The focus of this project is on 50 of the largest 54 cities in the US.
We have already surveyed all of the city councilors in these cities -- there are currently about 541 such councilors -- sometimes also called aldermen or commissioners -- and we have heard from 170 of them so far. Four cities have proven to be much less responsive to our survey than the others -- none of the councilors in Sacramento and Santa Ana, California, Miami, FL, and Columbus, OH. If you know any councilors in those cities, perhaps you could convince them to fill out the questionnaire either on paper or online.
The project also includes surveys of all major city administrators and managers -- mostly department heads -- as well as the leaders of local nonprofit groups working on issues of economic development and sustainability. In total, we have distributed around 3000 questionnaires.
We have just completed some analysis of the city councilors' responses that we have received so far, and have written a paper that will be presented at the American Political Science Association conference in Toronto over Labor Day weekend. Check back in a few weeks and I'll post this paper here on th"Our Green Cities" blog and web site.
Congratulations to Elinor Ostrom!
I just wanted to post my heartiest congratulations to Elinor Ostrom from Indiana University upon winning the Nobel Prize in Economics. As you may know, Lin is not an economist, she is a political scientist. So that makes the award all the more pleasing to those of us in political science but who work at the intersection with economics.
Our Tisch College at Tufts had Lin to campus last spring to receive the 2009 Tisch Civic Engagement Research Prize. Not quite the Nobel Prize, this award nonetheless is designed to recognize the outstanding research contributions to understanding civic engagement. Of course, Ostrom's work on common pool resource issues, especially water-related issues, is just outstanding. Over the last few years, in working with colleagues around the University, including engineers and public health scholars, on issues of water policies, I have come to see how extremely important Lin's work has become outside of the confines of political science.
My personal interest in Lin's work comes from trying to understand the relationship between civic engagement and participation and cities' pursuit of sustainability policies. Some of my recent research (available soon on the Our Green Cities web site) shows that there is a tendency for cities with residents who are more civically and politically engaged are more likely to adopt and implement sustainability policies. Ostrom's work provides the theoretical and empirical foundation for this exploration.Posted at 03:17 PM in General Comments | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)