Climate change—and the disasters it fuels—are exposing the limitations of conventional policy responses. Given the scale and urgency of the crisis, incremental improvements are no longer sufficient. Instead, meaningful transformation is required, particularly in urban areas where both populations and vulnerabilities are concentrated. Local governments’ responses to anticipated yet uncertain disruptions fall along a spectrum, ranging from inaction to transformative change that fundamentally reshapes urban systems. This research project explored how characteristics of local decisionmakers associate with cities’ capacity to transform in the face of new and uncertain threats. In so doing, it emphasizes the reality that decisionmakers draw from their own personal, professional, and relational perspectives as they negotiate policy positions and share information in effort to shape urban governance.

Our research delineates and analyzes the networked micro-decision context (NMDC), which is the arena wherein interactions among policy actors shape a government’s decisions about whether and how to tackle a public problem. We leverage and combine insights from political, policy, and network sciences to assess how variations within NMDCs affect the degree of transformativeness of governance responses. 

Transformative Governance Capacity