Imagine your city announces its new Climate Action Plan. You’re so excited to see the administration taking action on climate change in a concrete way because you know how important this issue is to your future. However, you realize that it’s published within the final two months of your mayor’s term as he is leaving the administration to run for president. This makes you wonder if the publication of the plan was more of a symbol, something pretty to add to his resume as he seeks a higher position, and whether or not these environmental goals will be met at all. This was the position I found myself in, and it is the reason I chose to research how cities choose to hold themselves accountable when it comes to climate planning.
To figure out what kinds of plans are more likely to inspire real change in a community, I compared climate action plans from South Bend and Bloomington, Indiana. I conducted a document analysis of each plan. In the first cycle of coding, I separated goals into three categories: performance indicators, performance benchmarks, and performance outcomes. Performance indicators are goals that can be used to show progress, but they lack specific metrics or deadlines. Performance benchmarks are goals that show progress by setting an amount of progress to be accomplished by a specific deadline, and this progress will be compared to an identified baseline. Performance outcomes are just descriptions of an organizational result, but I didn’t find any of these in either plan. In the second cycle of coding, I placed goals into categories based on whether they were good for legitimacy-seeking, accountability purposes, management purposes, or a combination of these three. The document analysis was supplemented with interviews with local officials from both cities in order to better understand the context of each plan and potentially explain why the plans were written the way they were written.
Both plans were much more reliant on performance indicators than performance benchmarks, a poor sign for accountability purposes given the specificity of benchmarks. In Bloomington’s plan, 29% of the goals were coded as performance benchmarks, but South Bend’s plan had just 10% of its goals coded as performance benchmarks. The second cycle of coding was also telling of each city’s priorities with 55% of South Bend’s goals being best-suited for legitimacy-seeking or internal management decisions but only 33% of Bloomington’s goals being best for the same purposes.
This document analysis showed that South Bend’s plan is geared towards legitimacy-seeking while Bloomington’s is written more with performance management in mind. The interviews with local officials were crucial to understanding why this is the case. First, the South Bend official revealed a drastic budget cut for the Office of Sustainability, reflecting the priorities of the new mayor compared to Mayor Pete Buttigieg who oversaw the writing of the plan. The budget cut on top of already unstable funding makes it difficult to write a plan in a way that can hold the administration accountable, and it’s possible that the Buttigieg administration kept the plan on the vague side on purpose in order to not commit the new administration to accomplishing specific goals by hard deadlines. Bloomington’s plan, on the other hand, was written by the same administration that will be implementing it, allowing them to be more specific because they would not be committing a new administration to anything. The City of Bloomington also has a stable source of funding for sustainability initiatives and has established itself in the community. Thus, it makes sense that South Bend is still working on legitimacy-seeking and that Bloomington is able to focus more on accountability since it is past the legitimacy-seeking stage.
Overall, my research shows that not all climate action plans are created equal… and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. If South Bend were to write its plan with accountability in mind before it has established itself as a trustworthy organization in the environmental realm, it would look even worse in the long run as it would have outlined goals it has no way of meeting. Leaving flexibility in order to get to a place where a city can be more specific in the future is still a step in the right direction, but it’s important to understand the way plans are written in order to hold our local administrations accountable in the right ways. For example, including more indicators than benchmarks gives the administration the chance to manipulate the data, so it’s important to stay vigilant and demand the whole story. I hope my research is able to empower local officials who are involved in the production of climate action plans, but I also hope my research is able to empower citizens to be more involved and hold their local officials to their words.
Sydney Granlund is a senior at Indiana University’s O’Neill School of Public & Environmental Affairs who will soon be joining the Indiana Department of Environmental Management.
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