Making meaningful commitments: Accounting for variation in cities’ investments of staff and fiscal resources to sustainability

Abstract

Environmental sustainability is one of the great challenges of the 21st century. A number of explanations have been advanced for why some local governments make strong commitments to sustainability while others do not. Most of the extant empirical research, however, has relied on models that employ only one or just a few of these explanations. As a result, empirical analyses do not encompass a comprehensive set of variables that account for alternative explanations. This study begins to fill this lacuna by specifying an empirical model that examines six explanations for local commitment towards sustainability: local sustainability priorities, regional governance, climate protection networks, interest group support, local fiscal capacity, and characteristics of the local governing institution. Moreover, we use the designation of human and financial resources specifically for sustainability to operationalise commitment. This is a more substantive measure than has been used in previous studies. We accomplish this by utilising data from the Integrated City Sustainability Database. Our results indicate that local priorities, participation in regional governance, and membership in climate protection networks influence the likelihood of cities’ devotion of resources to sustainability. We discuss the implications of these findings for research and practice.