Implementing Community Sustainability Plans through Partnership: Examining the Relationship between Partnership Structural Features and Climate Change Mitigation Outcomes

Xinyu Sun, Amelia Clarke and Adriane MacDonald
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Xinyu Sun: Department of Biology, Queen’s University, Kingston, ON K7L 3N6, Canada
Amelia Clarke: School of Environment, Enterprise and Development (SEED), University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON N2L 3G1, Canada
Adriane MacDonald: Dhillon School of Business, University of Lethbridge, Lethbridge, AB T1K 3M4, Canada

Sustainability, 2020, vol. 12, issue 15, 1-20

Abstract: Addressing society’s most complex challenges, such as climate change, requires bringing together stakeholders from the business, government, and nonprofit sectors. At the municipal level, multi-stakeholder partnerships are often formed to implement community sustainability plans. However, these partnerships can create new challenges, as it is cumbersome to coordinate action among a group that is made up of such diverse stakeholders. Past research suggests that it is important for these partnerships to have the appropriate structures in place to mitigate some of the coordination challenges to which they are prone. Yet, very few studies have examined the influence that different structural features have on plan outcomes. This article seeks to address this important research gap by using quantitative methods to examine five different features that can compose partnership structures—oversight, monitoring and evaluation, partner engagement, communication, and community wide-actions and their impact on climate change mitigation outcomes. Based on data collected through a global survey and publicly available greenhouse gases emission data from 72 different partnerships that implement community sustainability plans (CSPs), this study finds that structural features related to oversight and community-wide actions are positively associated with climate change mitigation outcomes. These results indicate that certain features of partnership structures may be more important for achieving desirable climate change mitigation outcomes, and thus contribute to research on collaborative governance structures and climate action.

Keywords: cross-sector partnership; climate change; climate action; climate mitigation; urban sustainability; sustainable communities; Local Agenda 21; collective action; collaboration; SDG 17 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

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