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Browsing School of Public and International Affairs (SPIA) by Subject "0502 Environmental Science and Management"
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- Assessing the impact of municipal government capacity on recovery from Hurricane Maria in Puerto RicoRosas, Etienne; Roberts, Patrick S.; Lauland, Andrew; Gutierrez, I. A.; Nuñez-Neto, Blas (Elsevier, 2021-07-01)A municipality's level of public engagement and especially community involvement is associated with a greater rate of recovery in Puerto Rico following Hurricane Maria in 2017. This finding is based on an analysis of the relationship between the capacity of Puerto Rico's 78 municipal governments and their rates of post disaster-recovery, controlling for both exposure to Maria and pre-storm trends. Municipal capacity for community involvement may help activate social capital and the co-production of disaster recovery. Community involvement may increase trust among local officials and residents, increase government's knowledge of community priorities, and help residents access federal and state aid. Other measures of management capacity are not consistently associated with a faster rate of post-disaster recovery. The findings suggest that investing in municipal capacity for public engagement as part of disaster preparedness may provide benefits for disaster recovery. For researchers, the combination of original survey data and readily available post-disaster indicators provides a model for assessing recovery after disaster in the short term.
- Assessing the Impact of Municipal Government Capacity on Recovery from Hurricane Maria in Puerto RicoA municipality’s level of public engagement and especially community involvement is associated with a greater rate of recovery in Puerto Rico following Hurricane Maria in 2017. This finding is based on an analysis of the relationship between the capacity of Puerto Rico’s 78 municipal governments and their rates of post disaster-recovery, controlling for both exposure to Maria and pre-storm trends. Municipal capacity for community involvement may help activate social capital and the co-production of disaster recovery. Community involvement may increase trust among local officials and residents, increase government’s knowledge of community priorities, and help residents access federal and state aid. Other measures of management capacity are not consistently associated with a faster rate of post-disaster recovery. The findings suggest that investing in municipal capacity for public engagement as part of disaster preparedness may provide benefits for disaster recovery. For researchers, the combination of original survey data and readily available post-disaster indicators provides a model for assessing recovery after disaster in the short term.
- Co-management during Crisis: Insights from Jurisdictionally Complex WildfiresNowell, Branda; Steelman, Toddi; Velez, Anne-Lise K.; Albrecht, Kate (2022-04)There is a general agreement within the wildfire community that exclusively top down approaches to policy making and management are limited and that we need to build governance capacity to cooperatively manage across jurisdictional boundaries. Accordingly, the concept of co-management has grown in popularity as a theoretical lens through which to understand cross-boundary response to wildland fires. However, definitional ambiguity has led to on-going debates about what co-management is. Further, there is limited understanding about the nature of co-management during crisis events. This had led to scholars posing the question: What is co-management in the context of jurisdictionally complex wildfire? In this paper, we seek to address this question based on interviews with leaders engaged in the management of jurisdictionally complex wildfire incidents. We propose a multi-level framework that defines co-management as strategic efforts of individual actors to cooperatively manage perceived interdependencies with others through one or more formal or informal institutional arrangements. Our findings reveal different strategic orientations to co-management that have management implications. We then demonstrate the value of the proposed framework in its ability to organize a series of diagnostic questions for diagnosing co-management situations within the context of jurisdictionally complex wildfires.
- Methodological considerations in pre- and post-emergency network identification and data collection for disaster risk reduction: Lessons from wildfire response networks in the American NorthwestFaas, A. J.; Velez, Anne-Lise K.; Nowell, Branda L.; Steelman, Toddi A. (Elsevier, 2019-11)While social network analysis continues to enjoy considerable attention, literature on social network data collection often lacks explicit attention to methods. This presents special challenges to approaching the problems of undertaking social network analysis and of studying disaster preparedness, planning, and, ultimately, risk reduction. In this paper, we address this issue by presenting our synthesis of several strategies for network analyses from our processes for network identification and data collection in a longitudinal study of multi-jurisdictional, inter-agency wildfire response networks in the American Northwest. In the course of this ongoing project, the process of detecting and collecting data on pre-existing and emergent networks in the real world was not a matter of one theoretical or empirical judgement, but rather several. We alternated between: (1) spatio-ecological detection of jurisdictions adjacent to areas at-risk for large wildfires; (2) a hybrid approach to selecting actors and agencies identified as common participants in wildfire response networks; and (3) event-based detections of parties to specific wildfire response networks. We conclude with steps for thinking through network identification and bounding, integrating networks, conceptualizing rosters and ties in initial and events-based phases, and how to manage longitudinal network data collection.
- Rocky steps towards adaptive management and adaptive governance in implementing green infrastructure at urban scale in PhiladelphiaHsu, David; Lim, Theodore C.; Meng, Ting (Elsevier, 2020-11-01)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.