The relationship between the level of resilience and the level of sustainability plans and policies found in 40 American urban areas is examined. The resilience index reflects motivation, capacity and information; sustainability plans and policies are measured by a content analysis of city documents. The results show that: the presence of sustainability plans and policies is related to resilience, but not to aggregate measures of diversity, formal education or proportion of persons living in poverty; resilience has a significant impact on sustainability plans and policies even when controlling for diversity, education, poverty, and inequality; resilience is more likely to be present in a communitarian political culture; and resilience retains its impact on sustainability plans and policies even when controlling for type of political culture.

Using a sample of U.S. counties, this article explores the relationships between community level resilience, represented by capacity (social capital), information (uses of technology), and motivation (perception of threats to county,) on the one hand, and county levels of emergency management (EM) collaboration on the other. We hypothesize that the greater relative presence of bridging social capital networks will be associated with greater levels of collaboration in county EM planning, while the greater relative presence of bonding social capital networks will be associated with lower levels of collaboration. Results indicate that first there are two collaborative environments to assess—the formal and informal—and, second, the presence of political networks (seen as predominantly bridging) relative to the presence of religious networks (viewed as predominantly bonding) has a significant and positive effect on informal collaboration levels, but not on formal collaboration levels. These findings provide insight into how community context in the form of network social capital matters for collaborative EM planning efforts. These results add to prior research that focuses primarily on organizational and institutional sources of collaboration and much less on the community level contextual factors at play.

The United States spends more on health care than any other OECD country, yet the nation’s health is declining. Recent research has identified multiple sources for this decline, including one’s position in social and economic structures, environmental quality, and individual and collective social capital. This paper assesses the primary hypotheses that the health effects of household energy burden, social capital and environmental quality on aggregated community health levels remain while controlling for other determinants. The analysis moves beyond prior research by integrating multiple secondary data sources to assess those effects across US counties. Three indicators of public health are analyzed (premature mortality, self-reported health, and life expectancy). The county-level energy burden is measured by the percent of household income spent on housing energy bills for low- and moderate-income households. In addition to energy burden, social capital, environmental quality and other determinants are included in the analysis. The results produced by multivariate regression models support the primary hypotheses, even while a number of control variables also have a significant effect on health. The paper concludes that public health is associated with a complex nexus of factors, including environmental quality and social capital, and that energy burden needs to be among the considerations.

This study examines changes from 2000 to 2010 in the adoption of sustainability plans and policies in a sample of U.S. cities. The study’s framework posits sustainability initiatives as communitarian outcomes intended to meet the needs of both current and future generations. We hypothesize, accordingly, that a community’s social capital level, in the form of the relative presence of social trust, is a primary facilitating condition for the adoption of sustainability initiatives. The analysis assesses whether trust-based social capital is similarly associated with the adoption of plans and policies at both time points (2000 and 2010), as well as whether social capital is associated with change in the adoption levels documented across the ten-year period. The paper concludes by suggesting that the effect of social capital is substantially reduced in 2010 as a consequence of institutional network dynamics featured in the theory of isomorphic change.

In a small sample effects analysis of 22 Kansas counties, this research note reports the results of a pilot study of the role of social, creative, human, and political capital in the centrality of environmental and equity concerns in sustainability efforts. Social capital is measured by the relative presence of rent-seeking and non-rent-seeking networks in each county, creative capital by a measure of county creative vitality, human capital by the socio-economic status (SES) level of the county, and political capital by relative support for the Democrat candidate for governor in the most recent election. The level of racial/ethnic diversity and the Gini index of household income inequality are employed as controls. The results show that political capital has the greatest, but not the only, independent effect on the centrality of the two sustainability dimensions, particularly in regard to equity.