Browsing by Author "Kauneckis, Derek"

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The Emerging Polycentricity of Subnational Climate Adaptation in the United States
(2019) Kauneckis, Derek
"Climate change is a global issue with highly localized impacts. In the face of national inaction subnational government have taken the lead on climate change policy. While effective mitigation efforts requires large-scale national coordination, some subnational governments have begun to enact adaptation policies to address climate risks within their jurisdictions and to coordinate across jurisdictions. Understanding how cooperation occurs across jurisdictional boundaries is one of the key challenges to designing effective climate policies. Using a national dataset on subnational government climate policy activities, this paper examines what influences whether a subnational government agency has enacted a climate adaptation action. It initially focuses on characteristics of subnational jurisdiction themselves that facilitate or hinder local action. This includes population density, political party vote share, exposure to risk from sea level rise, and intensity of state-level climate planning effort. The model then examines the influence of participation within either a formal or informal climate policy network and the scale of the political jurisdictions that network partners operate. Using a classic definition of political jurisdictions within a federal system this includes partners whose activities are focused on the local urban scale, county, state and national. The final model examines patterns of cross jurisdictional cooperation and whether a network includes members who are explicitly engaged in county-to-county cooperation within or across state boundaries and network partners who are organized to facilitate interstate cooperation. The paper concludes with a discussion of the nature of polycentric governance in climate adaptation policy and the importance of the results for understanding inter-jurisdictional cooperation on climate issues."
The Political Economy of Environmental Nongovernmental Organizations: Funding, Agendas and Strategic Actors in Public Policy
(1998) Kauneckis, Derek
From pp 1-2: "Environmental nongovernmental organizations (ENGOs) have become increasingly in public policy since the 1970s. With recent efforts towards decentralization and privatization their function has increased beyond agenda setting and includes policy evaluation and implementation (Clark 1995, Salamon 1994). Even multilateral development organizations have increased the involvement of ENGOs in development projects as an answer to cries for more accountability and a greater inclusion of civil society (World Bank 1996). Yet in spite of the increased activity og ENGOs there is a curious lack of theory. Public policy analysts have tended to assume that ENGOs are of one type and exhibit homogeneous behavior in the public policy settings. They are assigned the category of public interest organizations and understood to generally represent members' interests. "This paper presents a basic model of environmental nongovernmental organizations and their behavior in policy situations. It develops a classification of three basic types of environmental groups; collective action organizations, interest groups and bureaucratic organizations. These are defined based on internal institutional structures and incentives. It then lays out a framework to understand dynamic between environmental membership organizations and donors. Finally, the paper makes some theoretical predictions on the behavior of these organizations in a policy setting. "It is premised on the idea that the behavior of an organization in a public policy context is largely determined by the institutional constraints under which the organization operates. The focus of this paper is not on the external political frame under which organizations operate, but rather the internal structures which mediate their behavior."
The Polycentricity of Innovation: Explaining Variation in the New Role of the States in Science and Technology Policy
(2009) Kauneckis, Derek
"There have been important shifts in the locus of activity in science and technology (S&T) policy within the American federal system. Traditionally the states have followed a research agenda set at the national level and acted as the implementation organization for federal funds. Today the states have taken on an increasingly proactive role as active partners in collaborative arrangements, provide independent funding for local research priorities, as well as setting their own agendas even counter to those the federal level. While the most high profile cases include stem cell research, alternative energy and climate change mitigation these are indicators of an increasingly autonomous and independent role of the states in directing S&T policy. This paper examines the types of state-level activities, their distribution and provides evidence to explain the variation. It uses a theoretical framework derived from research on public goods production within polycentric systems of governance to explain the various strategies adopted by the states in this new landscape of S&T policy. The paper concludes with implications for redesigning federal S&T support as well as lessons for state governments."
Preferences on the Landscape: How Much do Individual Values Matter?
(2000) Kauneckis, Derek; Novac, Christina
"Models of land-cover change have typically examined the phenomena on a regional scale. These models are often empirical driven and at best infer the motives driving individual actors. Those models examining the decisions of individual actors assume purely economic motives, with land cover understood purely as a factor in production. This paper seeks to explain the micro-level processes at work in determining land cover change. It accepts that economic incentives and conditions are important, but that there may be important differences in the preferences of a population that explain the variation observed across a landscape. The analysis concerns landowners values and use of forest cover and how they interact interaction with the characteristics of individual private parcels to affect land cover. Using a multinomial logit, it examines the impact of parcel size, agricultural use, the length of ownership, existing rules affecting land use, the presence of a residence, as well as landowners valuation of forest resources on the change in forest cover on a parcel from 1972 to 1997. Of these variables, parcel size, agricultural use and length of ownership were all found to be significant at a 0.05 level. Landowner valuation of forest cover was weakly significant at a 0.13 level. Of the factors examined here, parcel size had the greatest effect on forest cover change. Surprisingly, smaller sized parcels (< 40 acres) had the highest probability of having experienced a net forest gain during the study period. As expected, parcels with a larger percent of area under agriculture had a higher probability of having experienced a net forest loss than did parcels with a smaller percent of area under agriculture. The most interesting result is the effect of individual landowners preferences. While they affect the likelihood that a parcel had experienced a change in forest cover in the past, they did not determine the direction of that change. It was equally likely for parcels with landowners expressing strong forest conservation values to have experienced net forest loss or gain. The results lead to interesting implications for a theory of the causes and impact of land cover change in industrial societies."