Who is Next? Identifying Communities with the Potential for Increased Implementation of Sustainability Policies and Programs

Michael Nye,Kate Mulvaney

doi:10.3390/su8020182

Abstract

Understanding the system of connections between societal contexts and policy outcomes in municipal governments provides important insights into how community sustainability happens, and why it happens differently in various communities. A growing body of research in recent years has focused on understanding the socio-economic characteristics of communities and cities that are recognized as policy leaders in sustainability. In this paper, we expand the focus beyond the leaders in sustainability as we apply a selection of socio-demographic influences of community sustainability to a large sample of U.S. communities using community classification analytics to identity a range of community types and levels of engagement with sustainability. Our typology presents an integrated and comprehensive perspective on the structure of community sustainability in the United States, highlighting key points of comparison between human capital factors such as population size and density, affluence, home ownership, and adoption of sustainability policy. The analysis provides new insights not only about community leaders in sustainability, but also communities with the civic and social capacity to do more, and the challenges that may inhibit sustainability efforts in others.

Highlights

Over the past two decades, the pursuit of community sustainability has received increasing attention as a means of improving quality of life, environmental integrity, and community resilience to environmental and social change
An exploratory principal components analysis (PCA) of all socio-demographic and policy action categories listed in Table 1 was performed using varimax rotation to condense the number of socio-demographic variables
The analysis presented in this paper reveals significant structural co-dependencies between socio-demographic characteristics and implementation of sustainability programs

Summary

Introduction

Over the past two decades, the pursuit of community sustainability has received increasing attention as a means of improving quality of life, environmental integrity, and community resilience to environmental and social change. Coupled with this is the need for national, state and regional planning and environmental organizations and agencies to understand the unique challenges and opportunities that different communities face in this pursuit. Portney found inverse correlations for seriousness about sustainability with reliance on manufacturing and percent African American and Hispanic populations His analysis showed positive correlations between seriousness about sustainability with age of the population (where increased seriousness correlates with older populations) and educational levels. It is important to note that all of the communities analyzed by Portney had existing sustainability plans, which puts them ahead of most communities in terms of sustainability efforts in local governance

Objectives

Methods

Results

Conclusion