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Classifying Adoption of Sustainability Policies and Programs: Quantitative and Qualitative Methods for the Development of a Community Sustainability Typology
Citation:
Mulvaney, K., M. Nye, A. Hall, AND M. Tenbrink. Classifying Adoption of Sustainability Policies and Programs: Quantitative and Qualitative Methods for the Development of a Community Sustainability Typology. International Symposium on Society and Resource Management (ISSRM), Houghton, MI, June 22 - 26, 2016.
Impact/Purpose:
This abstract is for an oral presentation for the International Symposium on Society and Resource Management (ISSRM) to be held in Houghton, Michigan. This conference is the main conference for applied social science in environmental management. The presentation will allow for other researchers who are focused on understanding community sustainability implementation to provide feedback on our completed work as well as feedback for ongoing efforts.
Description:
Understanding how and why different communities engage with sustainability policies and actions is of critical importance for furthering implementation of innovative and conventional sustainability strategies. Despite this importance, an understanding of how and why communities are likely to adopt sustainability policies and programs remains relatively limited. Most previous studies focus solely on communities with extensive sustainability efforts. Our work expands upon identification of sustainability leaders by also identifying those communities that may be next to adopt existing programs and those who may need new alternatives or additional assistance for implementing more sustainability efforts. This work combines quantitative community typology development and engagement prediction with qualitative assessments of sustainability implementation within individual communities. Initial analysis used a cluster model to highlight key associations between human capital proxies (such as population size and diversity) and adoption of sustainability efforts. This produces nine community groupings that fall generally within the following categories of sustainability program adoption: a) high action innovators, b) communities with potential for expansion of existing sustainability programs, and c) communities that may need alternative programs or additional resources to implement sustainability efforts. In the second phase of this work, we conducted interviews in nine communities selected to represent four of the nine different community groupings. Overall, we found a high value placed on the community’s sustainability efforts, with the unique contexts for the individual cities and towns being of great importance. The findings from this work allow us to use unique attributes of individual communities to classify them into community types to better target development and implementation of different sustainability programs.