Collaborative Research: Assessing the impact of lead agency cross-functional authority on city sustainability outcomes

合作研究：评估牵头机构跨职能权威对城市可持续发展成果的影响

• 批准号: 2021035
• 负责人: Richard Feiock
• 金额: $ 12.39万
• 依托单位: George Mason University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2020
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2020-09-01 至 2022-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2021035&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Collaborative; Research; Assessing; impact; lead

Local governments have traditionally been organized around function, with agencies and departments defined by the services they produce and deliver. Although organizational structures compartmentalized according to specific expertise can produce efficiencies, this fragmentation becomes problematic when governments attempt to address complex problems that transcend multiple units. Urban sustainability is an exemplar of issues which cut across numerous responsibilities traditionally held by distinct units within a single government organization. This research examines the relationship between municipal governments’ administrative arrangements, their policy adoption and implementation choices, and sustainability outcomes. It highlights the role of lead unit cross-functional authority—which we define as the clout that an initiative’s administrative lead has over other relevant units in the city government—and assesses its impact on local sustainability outcomes. In so doing, this research contributes to an evidence-based understanding of how public organizations function in order to enhance their design, management, and overall effectiveness.This work advances convergence research drawing from organizational, policy, sustainable urban systems, and network science to increase the precision and robustness of the Functional Collective Action (FCA) framework. It provides important insight into the determinants of lead agency cross-functional authority—which extant research has highlighted as fundamental but inadequately operationalized—and its influence on policy outcome. Using urban sustainability as our policy lens, we employ a mixed-methods approach to collect and analyze data from focus groups of local government officials, public and private archival repositories, and a nationwide survey to: (a) develop a refined conceptualization and empirical measure of cross-functional authority that captures its various dimensions and mechanisms of influence; (b) develop a comprehensive national dataset of multiple sustainability outcome measures that are comparable across cities; and (c) create the first longitudinal database on local sustainability policies spanning a ten year period, which is often considered the minimum amount of time necessary for nuanced examination of policy implementation and policy change. The collection of data will enable improved testing of local institutional and governance theories and its analysis will facilitate advances in urban management and sustainability outcomes.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

传统上，地方政府是围绕职能组织的，由他们生产和交付的服务定义的机构和部门。尽管根据特定专业知识对组织结构进行了划分的组织结构可以提高效率，但是当政府试图解决超越多个单位的复杂问题时，这种分裂就变得有问题。城市可持续性是一个典型的问题，这些问题涉及单个政府组织中不同部门所承担的许多职责。这项研究考察了文化政府的行政安排，其政策采用和实施选择以及可持续性成果之间的关系。它强调了主要单位跨职能权威的作用，我们将其定义为倡议的行政领导对市政府中其他相关部门的影响，并评估其对当地可持续性结果的影响。这样一来，这项研究为公共组织如何运作以增强其设计，管理和整体有效性有助于基于证据的理解。这项工作从组织，政策，可持续的城市系统和网络科学提高了收敛研究图，以提高功能集体行动（FCA）框架的精确性和鲁棒性。它提供了对主要代理机构跨职能权威决定者的重要见解 - 现存的研究以城市可持续性为我们的政策镜头，我们采用混合方法来收集和分析地方政府官员，公共和私人档案馆的焦点小组的数据，以及一项全国调查，以及一项对概念化和经验机制的构图和各种维度的机制，以构成各种有影响力的机制。 （b）制定一个全面的国家数据集，了解各个城市可比的多种可持续性结果指标； （c）创建有关跨越十年期间的本地可持续性政策的第一个纵向数据库，这通常被认为是细微审查政策实施和政策变更所需的最短时间。数据的收集将能够改善对地方机构和治理理论的测试，其分析将有助于城市管理和可持续性成果的进步。该奖项反映了NSF的法定任务，并被认为是通过基金会的知识分子优点和更广泛的影响审查标准通过评估来获得的支持。