City governments have an opportunity to address historic environmental injustices through the management of their urban forests. When applying environmental justice to the management of urban trees, the common approach is to plant new trees in areas with high proportions of underserved residents and low tree canopy. This is the approach taken by many programs, such as the MillionTrees programs in Los Angeles and New York City. However, these initiatives do not always result in just outcomes and, in some cases, exacerbate existing inequities. This suggests the need for a model of urban tree canopy (UTC) justice that encapsulates distributive, procedural, and recognition justice. In this thesis, I suggest such a model of UTC justice that incorporates ecosystem services and disservices to understand resident satisfaction with neighborhood trees. I then apply the model to the case of the Phoenix, Arizona metropolitan area by assessing local UTC plans for mentions of environmental justice. Finally, I use multiple regression analysis to identify the relationship between neighborhood tree canopy percentage and resident satisfaction with neighborhood trees. Results indicate that tree canopy is a statistically insignificant determinant of resident satisfaction in 23 of 30 models. This supports my model of UTC justice in that it suggests that there is a confounding variable between UTC provisioning and resident satisfaction. This thesis culminates in recommendations for city governments, including the use of longitudinal socioecological surveys to evaluate the need for and success of UTC plans for environmental justice.

Political polarization, or the inclination to align with the identity, ideologies, and candidates of a party that results in subsequent partisan animosity that creates divisions between these groups, can prevent important policies from getting passed. Policies related to sustainability, defined as that which “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs,” have been found to be particularly vulnerable to polarization (Brundtland, 1987). This research analyzes literature and expert interviews to provide recommendations and strategies that can be employed by sustainability advocates to get important policies passed despite the divisive political arena. The research concluded that public salience of sustainability issues, presentation of the co-benefits of sustainability policies, relationships amongst elected officials, and use of politically neutral language are especially important to garnering bipartisan support for sustainability policies. Based on these conclusions, strategies were recommended for sustainability advocates to use to overcome political polarization including bolstering communication skills to demonstrate how people are affected by sustainability issues and can benefit from sustainability policies and giving careful and continuous consideration to the words, phrases, and labels used to describe sustainability policies. A final recommendation is to examine political polarization and sustainability at the municipal level since this research indicated that this is a relatively under-examined context.

The food-energy-water (FEW) nexus refers to the interactions, trade-offs, and relationships between the three resources and their related governance sectors. Given the significant interdependencies, decisions made in one sector can affect the other two; thus, integrated governance can reduce unintended consequences and lead towards increased resource security and sustainability. Despite the known benefits, many governance decisions continue to be made in “silos,” where stakeholders do not coordinate across sectoral boundaries. Scholars have begun to identify barriers to the implementation of integrated FEW nexus governance, yet there is still minimal understanding of the reasons why these barriers exist and no theoretical framework for evaluating or assessing FEW nexus governance. Integrating the theory of collaborative governance with the concept of the FEW nexus provides an opportunity to better understand the barriers to and structures of FEW nexus governance and to propose solutions for increased collaborative FEW nexus governance in practice. To investigate this governance system, I examined the collaborative governance of the FEW nexus in the context of extreme urban water challenges in two urban case cities: Phoenix, Arizona, USA and Cape Town, South Africa. First, I performed a media analysis of the 2018 Cape Town water crisis to understand the impact of the water crisis on the FEW nexus resource system and the collaborative governance employed to respond to that crisis. Second, I conducted a systematic case study of FEW nexus governance in Phoenix, Arizona to understand barriers to collaborative governance implementation in the system and to identify opportunities to overcome these barriers. Finally, I presented a framework of indicators to assess the collaborative governance of the local FEW nexus. This dissertation will advance the sustainability literature by moving the concept of FEW nexus governance from theory and conceptualization towards operationalization and measurement.

Our dependence on fossil fuels is driving anthropogenic climate change. Solar energy is the most abundant and cleanest alternative to fossil fuels, but its practicability is influenced by a complex interplay of factors (policy, geospatial, and market) and scales (global, national, urban). This thesis provides a holistic evaluation of these factors and scales with the goal of improving our understanding of the mechanisms and challenges of transitioning to solar energy.

This analysis used geospatial, demographic, policy, legislative record, environmental, and industry data, plus a series of semi-structured, in-person interviews. Methods included geostatistical calculation, statistical linear regression and multivariate modeling, and qualitative inductive analysis. The results reveal valuable insights at each scale, but moreover a gestalt model across the factors and scales draws out a larger pattern at play of the transmutational weighting and increasing complexity of interplay as the level of analysis cascades down through the three geographic scales.

Despite widespread acknowledgement of the need for transformation towards sustainability, the majority of cities appear stuck in incremental change instead of far-reaching, radical change. While there are numerous obstacles to transformational change, one critical aspect is the process of selecting impactful sustainability programs. The unique and complex nature of sustainability suggests a different approach is needed to program selection than is normal. But, to what extent are cities adapting selection processes in response to sustainability and what effect does this have on sustainable urban transformation? Could there be a more effective process to select programs with greater transformational potential? This dissertation investigates these questions using case studies and action research to add to the general knowledge of urban sustainability program selection and to develop practical knowledge (solutions) for more effective sustainable urban transformation.

The dissertation consists of three studies. Study 1 uses a case study approach to investigate existing sustainability program selection processes in three cities: Avondale, USA; Almere, the Netherlands; and Freiburg, Germany. These cities all express commitment to sustainability but have varying degrees of sustainable development experience, accomplishment, and recognition. Study 2 develops a program selection framework for urban sustainable transformation drawing extensively from the literature on sustainability assessment and related fields, and on participatory input from municipal practitioners in Avondale and Almere. Study 3 assesses the usefulness of the framework in a dual pilot study. Participatory workshops were conducted in which the framework was applied to real-world situations: (i) with the city’s sustainability working group in Avondale; and (ii) with a local energy cooperative in Almere.

Overall, findings suggest cities are not significantly adapting program selection processes in response to the challenges of sustainability. Processes are often haphazard, opportunistic, driven elite actors, and weakly aligned with sustainability principles and goals, which results in selected programs being more incremental than transformational. The proposed framework appears effective at opening up the range of program options considered, stimulating constructive deliberation among participants, and promoting higher order learning. The framework has potential for nudging program selection towards transformational outcomes and more deeply embedding sustainability within institutional culture.

I present a new framework for qualitative assessment of the current green purchasing practices of U.S. state governments. Increasing demand from citizens for green public purchasing has prompted state governments to adopt new, and improve existing, practices. Yet there has been little assessment of public green purchasing in academic research; what has been done has not provided the conceptual support necessary to assess green purchasing practices as a single component of the procurement process. My research aims to fill that gap by developing a conceptual framework with which to assess the status of green purchasing practices and by applying this framework to determine and describe the status of green purchasing in the five most populous U.S. states. The framework looks at state purchasing practices through the lenses of policy, policy implementation, and transparency.