The organisational structure of urban environmental stewardship

Abstract

How is the organisational structure of urban environmental stewardship groups related to the diverse ways that civic stewardship is taking place in urban settings? The findings of the limited number of studies that have explored the organisational structure of civic environmentalism are combined with the research on civic stewardship to answer this question. By bridging these relatively disconnected strands of research and testing their expectations on a structured sample of civic groups that were surveyed in New York City, a statistically significant relationship is found between the organisational structure of groups and both the organisational characteristics, as well as the types of environmental work they are doing. How these findings advance the research on urban environmental stewardship is discussed, as well as what these results tell us about the ways civil society engages in urban stewardship more broadly.