HCBE Faculty Articles

Where Is What Called Sustainability? A Survey of Policies Ostensibly and Explicitly Linked to Sustainability in the United States

Document Type

Article

Publication Title

Planning Practice and Research

ISSN

0269-7459

Publication Date

2014

Abstract/Excerpt

This paper discusses the outcome of a survey of US planners working in local governments with a population of over 25,000. The survey asked in which of 72 action areas ostensibly linked to sustainability had their government enacted policy, of these which did they explicitly link to sustainability and if they associated implementation with political conflict. We also considered the geographical variation of policies. We wished to find out if policy-makers more frequently associate sustainability with some policies over others. We hypothesized that between regions there would be significant variation in the number of policies pursued and in which were linked to sustainability, and that political conflict may explain this geographical variation. However, our findings were more limited: we found that planners are more likely to explicitly link policies pertaining to environmental goals with sustainability, and that there is geographical variation in what policies local governments pursue, although in only a few cases we found variations of statistical significance.

DOI

10.1080/02697459.2014.945377

Volume

29

Issue

4

First Page

405

Last Page

425

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