Metropolitan Planning Organizations and Climate Change Action

Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPO) sit at a unique nexus of government arrangements and missions that could be effective for addressing issues of climate change. Using survey and secondary data this study investigates the potential of metropolitan planning organizations to play a formative role in climate change action and policy. We examine factors that promote MPOs involvement in climate change issues by bridging two types of literatures in a quantitative modeling framework: the institutional responses to environmental change, driven by conceptualization of urban systems as social-ecological systems, and the public policy, regional planning and local politics literature. We find robust MPOs, capacity and the organization members' mental models play significant predictors for MPOs engagement in activities directly or indirectly related to climate change.