Do cities with greater transformative governance capacity pursue more ambitious policies? Examining U.S. cities through the lens of climate resiliency

Municipalities face increasingly complex challenges from climate change-driven natural hazards that threaten health, infrastructure, and livelihoods. Addressing these risks requires ambitious climate policies that drive the societal transformations advocated in climate policy literature. This study examines factors enabling local governments to adopt ambitious flood risk management. Ambitious climate adaptation policies go beyond minimum regulatory requirements to reduce climate vulnerability and enhance resilience. They facilitate their community’s ability to bounce forward after confronting system disruptions and shocks. Given the dynamic nature of climate challenges, scholars emphasize the importance of having a capacity for transformation over achieving fixed outcomes. Accordingly, this study hypothesizes that city governments with higher Transformative Governance Capacity (TGC) are more likely to implement ambitious flood management strategies. TGC is characterized by behavioural qualities such as being learning-focused, proactive, and risk-accepting. Using survey data from 386 U.S. cities, we operationalize and quantify local governments’ TGC and analyze its association with ambitious flood management practices, as proxied by participation in the Community Rating System (CRS) – a voluntary programme that incentivizes communities to exceed national flood mitigation standards. The findings support the hypothesis that greater TGC is associated with higher levels of involvement in the CRS and higher CRS scores, underscoring the importance of this distinct type of behavioural capacity in addressing escalating climate threats.Cities with greater Transformative Governance Capacity (TGC) are more likely to implement ambitious policies in response to the evolving and intensifying nature of climate-related hazards requires;Core characteristics of TGC include the pursuit of forward-looking, proactive policies, engagement in collective and reflective learning, and willingness to accept risk in pursuit of long-term transformative goals;Controlling for traditional measures of local government capacity, cities with higher TGC are more likely to exceed minimum regulatory standards and implement advanced flood risk mitigation measures;Policymakers can cultivate TGC by training staff, engaging in knowledge-sharing networks, or experimenting with different governance arrangements and employing more mechanisms for citizen participation.