Tulsa Turnaround: From Disaster to Sustainability

Abstract

The city of Tulsa, Oklahoma, has achieved international renown for its record of success in natural hazards mitigation and environmental policy innovation. One of the city's most significant achievements is the mitigation of chronic flash flooding along Mingo Creek through the adoption of structural and nonstructural controls. Subsequently, Tulsa has continued to pioneer creative ways to address environmental hazards and related risks. In this paper the writers explore the relationship between policy innovation and the individual entrepreneurs who designed and implemented the city's strategies to solve its flooding problem and its emerging orientation toward sustainability. The writers discuss these issues in the context of how innovative policies are designed and change over time. In specific, the writers identify and categorize the types of policy entrepreneurs who played important roles in flood hazard mitigation and discuss the strategies they developed to attain success. Findings are drawn from the results of a survey questionnaire distributed to Mingo Creek policy entrepreneurs and individuals who championed the city's subsequent initiatives in municipal solid waste recycling and ozone hazard mitigation. These results illustrate the key impediments that policy entrepreneurs faced and the influence of success on the strategies chosen to overcome them.