This site is based on the Bureau of Census data on Urbanized Areas. News, action alerts, population facts. Find data on reproductive rights, violence, and health. Zero waste is the recycling of all materials back into nature or the marketplace in a manner that protects human health and the environment. A web site dedicated to population, health, and environment connections in different regions of the world.
It can be downloaded as a PDF file. How much do you know about world population? Challenges for the 21st Century by L. Bertrand Seven Locks Press, examines patterns of demographic behavior and then looks at their potential impact on human societies in the 21st Century.
NumbersUSA provides an interactive USA map — click on a state and view the population issue record of your congressmember. Follow directions to send email to Congress with your views. The Campaign for Environmental Literacy seeks to first secure and then significantly increase the amount of U. You can take a stand by joining the Redefining Progress Campaign or other supporting other programs and activities. You can choose from a number of activities such as emailing Congress, choosing an action alert, and becoming a member of PAI.
Organization advocates reproductive choice and sex education. Provides voting records and updates on related legislation. This lesson has been written by a science educator to specifically accompany the above article. It includes article content and extension questions, as well as activity handouts for different grade levels. This lesson examines the quality of life and ecological implications of overpopulation. Students can graph estimated population statistics, investigate local efforts in sustained development, speculate on lifestyle changes due to population growth… and more!
October Shinjuku ward of Tokyo, Japan at night. Population and the Environment: Lessons for middle school The following links will take you to middle school lessons available on other web sites: They are a hybrid-cross between a graph and a map. Because of their visual nature these charts are easier for students to absorb and remember statistical geographical data. A public domain photo library provides royalty-free pictures. Provided by the United States Census Bureau.
Includes annual growth rate and annual increase. Evidences from Uttar Pradesh. Population and Development in Uttar Pradesh. New Delhi, India, B. National Research Council P. Harnessing the market for the environment. A Time for Choices.
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Of the 2, actions identified in Agenda 21 for achieving greater sustainability, approximately two-thirds require the active involvement of local government Keen, Mahanty, and Sauvage By , urban areas are expected to be home to two-thirds of the global population United Nations The scholarly work on local sustainability is now quite diverse. The literature includes reviews of sustainability ideals and principles Fiorino ; Mazmanian and Kraft ; Pezzoli ; Wheeler , examples of local programmatic initiatives that promote sustainability Portney ; Yanarella , descriptive and explanatory studies of the types of policies cities have adopted Francis and Feiock ; Jepson ; Portney ; Svara, Read, and Moulder , the identification of mechanisms used to encourage participation by stakeholders in decision making Hawkins and Wang , explanations for why cities commit human and financial resources and become affiliated with institutions that promote sustainability Feiock et al.
In light of this existing research base, studies on sustainability, it is argued, should be more focused on implementation and management Conroy and Beatley ; Laws et al. They argue more study is needed to better understand the conditions for the efficient and effective administration of local initiatives. Few studies, however, have focused on explaining the local administration and management of sustainability efforts in general and, more specifically, the organization of sustainability efforts in terms of the city departments and agencies responsible for policies, programs, and activities.
As a result, we know very little about the way sustainability efforts are or should be organized in cities Feiock et al. These questions are especially important in the administration and management of sustainability efforts, which depending on the local context may emphasize the interrelationships among a relatively large number of variables. For example, water quality monitoring in an environmental division, infrastructure provision in a public works department, and land-use projects promoted by an economic development office all directly influence sustainability.
However, these units may not communicate regularly or share a single vision. Thus, because the fragmentation of policy making and implementation within city government makes coordinating sustainability efforts particularly difficult, coordinating mechanisms, including administrative structures, may be required to effectively integrate the diverse goals of city departments Keen, Mahanty, and Sauvage Creating a specific administrative department or office charged with leading sustainability efforts is one strategy to handle coordination challenges and may indicate strong local support.
While this may not ensure compliance by other functional departments, at least theoretically, compliance seems more likely when sustainability is perceived as a high priority for the upper management of the city. At the center of decisions about administrative structure is the fundamental tension about how governments should intertwine and balance professional policy knowledge with democratic decision making Bourdeaux ; Shulock The role of interest groups in the policy making process is especially salient in debates over administrative structures, particularly with regard to sustainability initiatives.
For example, local pro-growth interests, such as builders and developers, are often portrayed in the literature as preferring less local government intervention, particularly if the land-use policies that redefine property rights or resource allocations have negative consequences for their private interests Alston, Eggersston, and North ; Liebecap ; Lubell, Feiock, and Ramirez de la Cruz , In comparison, slow-growth interests, composed of environmental organizations, may push for more policy at the local level to conserve land from development and pressure local elected officials to pursue policy related to the broad goals of sustainability.
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In both cases, interest groups actively seek to shape the agendas of policy makers and influence the decision-making process so that it aligns with their particular position. Within this context, much of the research on the structural design of local government emphasizes a political institutions perspective.
This literature makes a distinction between cities with an elected mayor and an appointed city manager. Under the more politicized character of the former type of governing institution, policy outcomes are more likely to reflect the pressures of interest groups and mass political appeal Sharp Under a manager-council government, the orientation toward efficiency and economic development translates into outcomes that are more insulated from interest group pressures Choi, Feiock, and Bae ; Stein Early studies reported that municipal fiscal policy is unrelated to differences in form of government Deno and Mehay ; Hayes and Chang ; Liebert ; Morgan and Pelissero , but research over the last 10 years estimating more sophisticated models and examining specific policy choices rather than budgets reports clear and consistent impacts from local government structure Carr Differences in form of municipal government has been found to significantly influence fiscal outcomes Craw ; Karuppusamy and Carr , service contracting Feiock and Jang ; Hefetz and Warner ; Levin and Tadelis , economic development Feiock and Kim ; Hawkins ; Kwon, Berry, and Feiock , and growth management and sustainability policy Bae and Feiock ; Krause ; Lubell, Feiock, and Ramirez de la Cruz ; Ramirez de la Cruz ; Sharp, Daley, and Lynch The structural design thesis predicts that agencies that are highly buffered from political influence produce more accurate and less biased policy information than agencies that have weaker institutional autonomy.
If policy information produced by technical experts within government is politicized and generated in response to political demands, it may be contrary to information produced through expert and independent analyses Moe Given the important implications of where policy responsibility is located in the local government bureaucracy, one might expect to find a rich empirical literature in public administration addressing the issue.
That expectation is quickly dashed, however, as almost no attention has been given to the assignment of functions to agencies. Comparative studies investigate how workplace characteristics, political structure, and form of government, as defined in city charters, influence decision making. However, the assignment of responsibilities to specific bureaucratic agencies or departments, the scope of involvement of multiple departments in program decisions, and the use of cross-cutting agencies to coordinate action have been neglected.
Taken together, this has produced a significant gap in our understanding of local bureaucracy and administrative governance. The limited literature to date is based on the federal government and focuses almost exclusively on Congress. This literature addresses the design of administrative agency responsibilities in the legislative appropriation process.
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The principal agent approach applied in much of this work yields important insight, but its focus on delegation and agency structure addresses assignment only peripherally. At the local level, the assignment of programs to agencies is more complex because local executives can play a more prominent role. Theory and empirical research on the assignment of functions to agencies in local government is almost entirely absent. The one area in which assignment has been studied is economic development.
Fleischmann and Green investigate whether primary responsibilities for development are housed within the executive, in a separate department, as part of larger agency, or in a decentralized line department. Park and Feiock examine changes in the location of development responsibility over time. These studies were not based on a theory of assignment and their analysis was mostly exploratory. They report that larger cities and the cities with a greater number of development programs are most likely to have a specialized separate department for promoting development Fleischmann and Green and that demographically homogenous communities were more likely to locate functions in the executive Park and Feiock Although this study does not advance a complete theory of agency assignment at the local level, we begin to fill this lacuna by testing explanations based on interest group support, governmental capacity, policy characteristics, and institutional structures that shape the incentives of local decision makers.
We focus on two dimensions of assignment of bureaucratic responsibility for sustainability: Specifically, whether the locus of responsibility lies within the executive or a line department and whether it is structured as a specialized independent unit, added as a specialized unit to an existing department, or integrated into an existing department. For this reason, they may receive higher priority, but decisions are less insulated from political intervention.
When sustainability responsibility is located in a specialized unit, it is able to take an integrative approach, but the exclusive focus on sustainability also makes it more exposed to interests mobilized on that issue. At the national level, agency design has been linked to political incentives that shape future agency decisions as well as to factors that influence their exposure to future political interventions Moe We argue that, at the local level, the community, policy, and institutional environments faced by local officials shape their motivations to assign functions to specific types of agencies.
Local governments can play a key role in advancing sustainability by establishing administrative structures for managing decision-making processes and project implementation. A practical challenge in pursuing sustainability, however, lies in the multidimensional characteristics of the concept Saha and Paterson ; Wheeler ; Yanarella For example, a local government may adopt policies that aim to minimize energy use and conserve natural resources while also encouraging development and expanding access to economic opportunity to improve quality of life.
Although these actions are all oriented toward improving sustainability, the commonly held assumption of trade-offs between development and environmental protection can undermine the building of a broad base of support for local actions. ICLEI-Local Governments for Sustainability, an influential national association of municipalities committed to climate action, sustainability, and clean energy, defines sustainability broadly in a technocratic manner and encourages actions by local government members across multiple program areas.
We anticipate that affiliation with ICLEI may produce a preference for an encompassing specialized unit able to utilize technical knowledge to inform policy and to integrate related policy areas that create policy spillovers Feiock A specialized unit may also result from sustainability policy being more mature, as indicated by earlier initial membership with ICLEI. City size and fiscal resources have been linked to the policy outputs of numerous specialized agencies including sustainability Wang et al. The establishment of an office focused exclusively on sustainability is likely to involve substantial start-up costs.
For this reason, we expect that cities with greater population and fiscal resources will be more likely to choose this organizational arrangement. Although it is likely to influence structure, government capacity is not expected to systematically influence the location of sustainability in terms of its placement within the executive or a line department. The link between community policy preferences and policy choice is much studied and debated, but the relationship between community preferences and the bureaucratic organization for the delivery of those services has attracted little attention.
This is regrettable since agency choice has profound policy ramifications. In the case of local government sustainability programs, we expect that when levels of community support are high, sustainability will be institutionalized as a specialized unit within the executive or as its own independent dedicated office or department. These choices signal a significant commitment on the part of the city Portney Thus, where there are high levels of public support, these assignments are more likely. Although support may vary between different community stakeholders—including environmental, business, and neighborhood associations—the presence of an organized group in favor of sustainability is expected to increase the likelihood of executive or independent placement.
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Creating agencies involves political transaction costs because of uncertainty regarding agency action and the potential interventions of future policymakers De Figueiredo Specialized agencies have wide discretion over policies and are relatively insulated from temporal political changes. At the national level, Presidents generally oppose attempts to insulate since they are held accountable for performance whether they are involved or not Lewis In a similar way, we anticipate that mayors seek control over sustainability activities, the performance of which may affect their political careers.
At the local level, the more prominent role played by local executives in agency assignment makes form of government particularly important. We expect mayor-council governments to be linked to a preference to locate sustainability functions within the executive. When governmental authority is divided in separation-of-powers systems, independent agencies are often granted more discretion, whereas executive agencies are advantaged under unified governments. The transfer of discretion is also asymmetric, since the executive is not anxious to devolve power in executive agencies under divided government Volden At the local level, separation of powers is manifest in mayor-council government where there is an independently elected executive Svara Separate powers also create multiple principals problems that can impede auditing of policy performance Gailmard They argue that local officials trade off bureaucratic costs with the agency costs of delegation when deciding how to deliver local public services.
Legislative representation at the local level is also salient to assignment decisions. Recent work links council size to constituency representation at the local level. Shepsle and Weingast argue that large council size results in increased logrolling.
Exchange of political favors is facilitated by combining multiple functions within agencies and structuring them to be responsive to political interventions. The structure of local representation i. Council members elected at-large are more likely to have a city-wide orientation, whereas those elected by district tend to focus more on distributing benefits to their particular neighborhood or district. Although sustainability is thought of as producing broad encompassing benefits for society in general, the individual programs that make up sustainability efforts are often highly geographically based and allocate benefits to specific areas.
Recent evidence suggests that when sustainability is directed to the community rather than just governmental operations, it is often focused on projects and programs directed toward particular neighborhoods and geographically based interests Bae and Feiock A parallel exists with economic development. Although new development benefits entire cities and regions, the economic benefits are often concentrated in specific neighborhoods. A survey of city council members revealed that, in cities with district-based representation, elected officials often treat development projects as pork-barrels to be distributed to electoral districts Clingermayer and Feiock Extant research has not identified links between specific administrative structures and the implementation of functions yielding distributive and community-wide benefits, respectively.
On the one hand, because of their relative visibility and autonomy, agencies with a single specialized function may be more prone to the influence of distributive politics. On the other hand, a specialized agency may be better able to assume a comprehensive and integrated perspective of its function, making it less accessible to distributive politics. This leaves questions about the likely influence that legislative structure has on sustainability administration open to empirical examination.
The above discussion suggests five hypotheses about factors that influence the organization of responsibility for sustainability within city governments and sets the stage for the development of a more complete theory of agency assignment at the local level. Cities with broad and mature scopes of sustainability are more likely to have created specialized administrative units for sustainability. City governments with greater internal capacity are more likely to have specialized units for sustainability.
City governments that receive greater support for sustainability from community stakeholder groups are more likely to place its responsibility within the executive or as an independent department or office. Cities with mayor-council forms of government are more likely to place responsibility for sustainability in the executive.
The size and electoral structure of city councils influence where responsibility for sustainability is placed within the local government bureaucracy. Cities with larger councils and a greater proportion of council members elected by district are more likely to have a specialized unit administering sustainability. Cities with larger councils and a greater proportion of council members elected by district are more likely to have sustainability integrated into existing operations. This study examines factors that influence the organizational structure and location of sustainability activities in US cities with populations greater than 50, As of , US cities exceeded this population threshold.
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Because not all of these cities are engaged in sustainability, we utilize filters to ensure our sample includes only cities that have undertaken sustainability efforts. ICLEI membership entails a cost in the form of an annual fee, so it is reasonable to assume that participating cities are serious about implementing sustainability efforts. Previous research also shows that, all else equal, cities in ICLEI have a larger number of sustainability activities in place than do nonmember cities Krause In order to capture as many of those as possible, we apply a second filter—having city staff designated as responsible for sustainability—to all nonmember cities for which this information is available.
The locus of responsibility for sustainability within city government is assessed along two dimensions: Together, this results in five distinct organizational placement options that comprise the categories of the dependent variable in the subsequent analysis. The majority of the data for the dependent variable was obtained from the responses to one of two independently administered surveys to local government officials. Data for the remaining observations came from a search of city webpages. Dependent variable data were obtained for of the cities meeting the filter criteria.
Data for independent variables come from a variety of archival and survey-based sources as described in table 1. The first three independent variables show the perceived level of support that local sustainability efforts receive from different community stakeholder groups, namely environmental, business, and neighborhood associations. Population and own source revenue both indicate city government capacity. Larger cities often have larger governments with more employees, some of whom may be assigned specialized functions. Cities with stronger finances, operationalized here by per-capita own source revenue, may likewise have a greater ability to pursue special projects and priorities.
The institutional structure of city governments may influence the locus of sustainability activities and is operationalized by the independent variables: State governments place different amounts of emphasis on sustainability and their pressure or support may influence where and how local efforts are structured.
California arguably has the most significant sustainability orientation and, with Senate Bill , is the only US state that directs local governments to consider climate change in transportation and land-use planning. It is possible that, after being engaged in sustainability efforts for an extended period of time, cities may adjust the placement of administrative responsibility in systematic ways as they learn about implementation challenges through experience.
Cities that were members of ICLEI in , the earliest year for which membership data could be gathered, had been active in sustainability at least 3 years prior to the data collection about organizational structure. This indicates a minimum level of policy maturity. An overview of the primary locus of responsibility for the administration of sustainability shows considerable variation across cities.
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Local governments have not coalesced around a single organizational approach or structure to manage this issue. Figure 1 shows the primary functional location of sustainability and reveals that no single department is home to sustainability efforts in more than a third of the sample cities. Although not examined in this study, the priorities and capacities of these departments likely differ and shape the subsequent sustainability actions taken by cities.
The right column of figure 2 lays out the five dependent variable categories that result from the combination of organizational location and structure described previously and includes the number of cities characterized by each. Champaign, Illinois, is an example of a city that utilizes this administrative arrangement: The next category of dependent variable indicates cities that have created a specialized unit for sustainability and located it in its executive.
In Lancaster, Pennsylvania, for example, sustainability efforts were added to the responsibilities of existing employees within the department of public works. As an illustration, the City of El Paso, Texas, has a small, three person, sustainability program located within its division of community and economic development. San Francisco, California, is one such city and its comprehensive Environment Department contains divisions related to energy, transportation, zero waste, health, buildings, education and equity, and climate change.
The first set of analyses considers the factors that influence the assignment of bureaucratic responsibility for sustainability along the two primary dimensions of location and structure. Table 2 presents the results of two logistic regressions that separately focus on whether the locus of responsibility lies within the executive or a line department and whether sustainability is assigned to a specialized unit responsible for its advancement. On the other hand, the likelihood that a city has created a specialized unit to implement sustainability efforts is significantly greater in cities with larger populations but decreases as a higher percent of city council members are selected via at-large elections.
The substantive impact of population is modest, with every additional 10, people living in a city increasing the likelihood that it has a specialized unit for sustainability by 0. The substantive effect of at-large council members is greater: In our sample, 76 cities have councils elected entirely by district and have them elected entirely at large. As discussed previously and illustrated in figure 2 , the two overarching dimensions of location and structure are arranged to create five distinct classifications that, together, characterize the bureaucratic options for the administration of sustainability by city governments.
Table 3 presents the results of a multinomial logistic regression that assesses the factors that influence the organizational arrangement of sustainability. Of the cities in the sample, have their sustainability efforts headquartered in a specialized unit that is located within a line department. This is more than any other single arrangement and, as such, is designated the base outcome. The results, therefore, indicate the factors that make each of the other four possible arrangements more or less likely relative to that placement.
Relative to the base outcome, greater support from the business community slightly reduces the likelihood that responsibility for sustainability is placed as a specialized unit in the executive outcome 1 , and greater support from environmental groups is associated with a decreased probability that it is its own independent specialized unit outcome 2 , all else equal.
Cities with larger populations, all else equal, are more likely to locate responsibility for sustainability as a specialized unit in the executive outcome 1 than as a specialized unit in a line department. Having a larger population decreases the relative likelihood of its integration into the executive without a specialized unit outcome 3. However, although statistically significant in both cases, the size of the impact of population on sustainability placement is small.
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Compared to the base outcome of placing sustainability as a unit within a line department, better financial health and an early commitment to sustainability increase the likelihood of cities having created an independent office or department for sustainability outcome 2. This again is a relatively modest impact and equates to cities with values one standard deviation above the mean being 3.
Cities in the state of California are modestly more likely to place responsibility for sustainability as a specialized unit in an existing line department base outcome than in the executive or as an independent unit. Early commitment to broad sustainability, as operationalized by ICLEI membership, has a larger substantive impact: Finally, having a larger percent of representatives on city council elected at-large is associated with an increased likelihood that cities will incorporate responsibility for sustainability into the existing structure of a line department outcome 4.
The organizational locus of a program within city government is a function of political, financial, and institutional dynamics. Because sustainability is a relatively new area in local governance, little empirical evidence exists on how cities administratively structure sustainability efforts and the factors that influence these decisions.