Search results

This policy history describes how community choice aggregation was created in Massachusetts by a small group of advocates and subsequently spread across the US. Twenty-one interviews with key participants, primary materials from government and personal archives, and newspaper articles were used to attribute and corroborate these events. A new finding is that community choice aggregation was created as part of electric sector restructuring efforts in Massachusetts in 1997, but that this new policy was barely perceived by many stakeholders in the larger restructuring process, and was included by legislators in response to advocates who organized local governments through direct democracy strategies. Kingdon's multiple streams approach provides a useful framework to understand how organizing by advocates led to successful passage of legislation in Massachusetts. The spread of community choice aggregation to other states occurred through organizing that combined advocacy with policy learning and emulation. CCA has since been adopted by more than 1800 local governments that represent more than 36 million people in six states. This article concludes by discussing the early outcomes, current status, and some prospective implications of community choice aggregation.

This paper argues that government leadership both at the federal and local levels remains central to implementing green infrastructure for stormwater management. We conducted interviews with more than forty city, federal, and regional staff on how and why they work to implement green infrastructure, and interpreted the material using literature from environmental governance and water management. We found that government and non-governmental actors tend to act in different ways to support green infrastructure. Government actors at federal and local levels often take the lead role in driving green infrastructure via policy and political support, and coordinating measurement of green infrastructure practices, while non-governmental actors lead in information sharing. We also found that government and non-governmental actors work together to build local capacity by providing resources to support local collaboration and partnerships. We conclude by highlighting key areas of collaboration between government and non-governmental actors to enhance the implementation of green infrastructure.

We empirically examine the innovation consequences of organizational knowledge brokering, the ability to effectively apply knowledge from one technical domain to innovate in another. We investigate how organizational innovation outcomes vary by founders' initial mode of venture ideation. We then compare how firms established with knowledge-brokering-based ideation differ in their methods of sustaining ongoing knowledge-brokering capacity compared with firms not established in such a manner. We do so by tracking all the start-up biotechnology firms founded to commercialize the then-emergent recombinant DNA technology (the sample of initial knowledge brokers) together with a contemporaneously founded sample of biotechnology firms that did not license the DNA technology (the sample of initial nonbrokers). Our results suggest that (a) ongoing knowledge brokering has an inverted U-shaped relationship with innovative performance in general; (b) initial knowledge brokers have a positive imprinting effect on their organizations' search patterns over time, resulting in superior performance relative to nonbrokers; and (c) initial nonbrokers rely more on external channels of sourcing knowledge, such as hiring technical staff, relative to initial brokers, reinforcing the imprinting interpretation. The described imprinting mechanism differs from extant mechanisms such as partner affiliation- and trigger-based mechanisms in explaining entrepreneurial performance differentials.

Many scholars have recently looked to adaptive management and adaptive governance as new approaches to implement green infrastructure. Much of the recent scholarship, however, that argues for combining the three concepts of adaptive management, adaptive governance, and green infrastructure is either theoretical, at early planning stages, or based on relatively small experiments. Since green infrastructure is now being implemented in a number of cities at large spatial scales, this paper examines how and whether combining these theories helps to solve anticipated problems compared to earlier work on environmental governance and political implementation. The city of Philadelphia has become known as a national and international leader in using green infrastructure for stormwater management. This paper therefore analyses Philadelphia's early experiences in the period from 2009 to 2015 as a test at urban scale of the usefulness of theories of adaptive management and adaptive governance in implementing green infrastructure. The city of Philadelphia found itself rapidly changing its implementation approach multiple times in response to political pressure. The city's changing responses illustrate challenges in implementing environmental policies among actors with differing levels of political power, economic interests, and participation. This paper describes the rapid changes in programs using mixed methods and data sources including quantitative analysis of the city's billing and program data, qualitative interpretation of media and public documents, and subsequent interviews with city officials. Understanding how and why Philadelphia rapidly changed its approach will be interesting to policymakers and advocates in other cities who also intend to implement green infrastructure at urban scale. ; Accepted version

Many scholars have recently looked to adaptive management and adaptive governance as new approaches to implement green infrastructure. Much of the recent scholarship, however, that argues for combining the three concepts of adaptive management, adaptive governance, and green infrastructure is either theoretical, at early planning stages, or based on relatively small experiments. Since green infrastructure is now being implemented in a number of cities at large spatial scales, this paper examines how and whether combining these theories helps to solve anticipated problems compared to earlier work on environmental governance and political implementation. The city of Philadelphia has become known as a national and international leader in using green infrastructure for stormwater management. This paper therefore analyses Philadelphias early experiences in the period from 2009 to 2015 as a test at urban scale of the usefulness of theories of adaptive management and adaptive governance in implementing green infrastructure. The city of Philadelphia found itself rapidly changing its implementation approach multiple times in response to political pressure. The citys changing responses illustrate challenges in implementing environmental policies among actors with differing levels of political power, economic interests, and participation. This paper describes the rapid changes in programs using mixed methods and data sources including quantitative analysis of the citys billing and program data, qualitative interpretation of media and public documents, and subsequent interviews with city officials. Understanding how and why Philadelphia rapidly changed its approach will be interesting to policymakers and advocates in other cities who also intend to implement green infrastructure at urban scale. ; Accepted version