Introduction:

This initiative conducts annual national surveys targeted at municipal decision-makers, including mayors, council members, and city managers. The surveys aim to collect insights and proposed solutions concerning sustainable development and natural disaster resilience at the local government level. Additionally, we facilitate collaborations among citizens, academic institutions, and our local government partners. This project is housed in the FSU Sustainability and Governance Lab.

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Principal investigator:

• Yixin Liu, Postdoc Scholar, Syracuse University

Co-principal investigators:

• Tian Tang, Associate Professor, Florida State University
• Heewon Lee, Assistant Professor, University of Cincinnati
• Yuhao Ba, Assistant Professor, National University of Singapore

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Research Themes:

1. Government-citizen collaboration in disaster resilience planning

Significance: This project develops strategies to enable local governments to encourage residents to participate in the decision-making process, ultimately aiming for more accessible disaster resilience planning.

Lead Researcher: Yixin Liu (Syracuse University)

Project:

• Trust and two-way coproduction: Pair experiments on citizens and policymakers.
• The mechanisms of reciprocity in collaborative network.

2. Public values in practitioner-scholar research collaboration

Significance: This project explores the common values of equity, effectiveness, and accountability share between local government practitioners and academic scholars as they address challenges in sustainability and resilience.

Lead Researcher: Tian Tang (Florida State University) and Heewon Lee (University of Cincinnati)

Project:

• What public values does practitioner-scholar research collaboration seek to create? Evidence from a field experiment.

3. Public leadership styles and civic engagement in sustainability development

Significance: This project merges survey and Twitter data, utilizing pre-trained machine learning models to offer practical and effective communication strategies for local governments. These strategies are designed to engage citizens on sustainability issues.

Lead Researcher: Guimin Zheng (Florida State University)

Project:

• Public leadership styles and civic engagement: Evidence from government social media use.
• Understanding citizens’ value positions of automated decision-making in government.

4. Nonprofit-government collaboration in local environmental management

Significance: This project combines surveys from local policymakers and nonprofit leaders to offer recommendations for fostering cross-sectoral collaborations in the implementation of environmental policies.

Lead Researcher: Yuhao Ba (National University of Singapore)

Project:

• Policy actors in the same bed with different dreams: Experimental evidence of cross-sectoral partnership in local environmental actions.