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

传统上，地方政府是按照职能来组织的，机构和部门是根据它们提供和提供的服务来定义的。虽然根据特定专业知识划分的组织结构可以提高效率，但当政府试图解决超越多个单位的复杂问题时，这种碎片化就会产生问题。城市可持续发展是一个典型的问题，它跨越了传统上由单一政府组织内不同单位所承担的众多责任。本研究考察了城市政府行政安排、政策采纳与实施选择与可持续发展成果之间的关系。它突出了领导单位跨职能权威的作用——我们将其定义为一项倡议的行政领导对市政府其他相关单位的影响力——并评估了其对当地可持续发展成果的影响。在此过程中，本研究有助于以证据为基础理解公共组织如何运作，以提高其设计，管理和整体有效性。这项工作推进了从组织、政策、可持续城市系统和网络科学中汲取的融合研究，以提高功能性集体行动（FCA）框架的准确性和稳健性。它对领导机构跨职能权威的决定因素及其对政策结果的影响提供了重要的见解，现有的研究强调了这一点，认为这是基本的，但没有充分实施。以城市可持续性为政策视角，我们采用混合方法收集和分析来自地方政府官员焦点小组、公共和私人档案库以及全国调查的数据，以：(a)制定跨职能权威的精细化概念和经验衡量标准，捕捉其各个维度和影响机制；(b)建立可在各城市间进行比较的多种可持续性成果衡量指标的综合国家数据集；(c)建立第一个关于地方可持续性政策的纵向数据库，时间跨度为10年，这通常被认为是细致审查政策执行和政策变化所需的最短时间。数据的收集将有助于改进对地方体制和治理理论的检验，数据的分析将有助于在城市管理和可持续性成果方面取得进展。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.