Office of Sustainable Communities

The Office of Sustainable Communities (OSC) is one of the largest units in the Office of Policy and has a lengthy history dating back to the 1990s when it was known as the home of the Smart Growth Program. OSC’s major focus is collaborating with and providing technical assistance, applied research, and tools to communities with an emphasis on smart growth principles such as walkability, infill development, and mixed land uses. The office is staffed with approximately 30 people divided into two units—each with their own director and associate director. The OSC staff is a highly educated group with a significant number of employees who hold doctorates. Currently, the overall goal for OSC programs is to help American communities become more sustainable, healthy, and economically vibrant places while also reducing greenhouse gas emissions and preserving the environment.

Climate Change Adaptation Staff

In contrast to OSC, the Climate Change Adaptation Staff (CCAS), with six people, is the smallest unit in OP. This group isn’t organized as a distinct office like OSC, but instead is organized as a working group in the immediate front office of OP. It is headed by a senior advisor on climate change, a highly respected and long-serving EPA senior staff member who has worked on climate adaptation issues since the 1990s. CCAS’s role is to coordinate internal EPA adaptation planning, capacity building, and mainstreaming. It also has taken a leadership role in supporting implementation of presidential executive orders, especially EO 13653 “Preparing the United States for the Impacts of Climate Change,” which directs Federal agencies to incorporate climate considerations into their activities. ^{Footnote 5} EO 13653 established the Council on Climate Preparedness and Adaptation, and authorized the chartering or re-chartering of working groups to carry out the Council’s mission. EPA was among the first major federal agencies to develop and implement climate vulnerability assessment and implementation plans. In part because of this, the CCAS staff leads have become interagency leaders and sources of advice in the effort to institutionalize climate adaptation practices throughout the federal family, focusing on activities such as climate-aware planning, staff training, workforce development, budgeting, and acquisitions.

Non-Regulatory Efforts to Encourage Sustainability

While the EPA still largely works in a top-down regulatory environment, the nonregulatory and sometimes bottom-up activities of the OP suggest the question “What is the future of regulation in the EPA?” OP is made up of a group of four program offices and two ad-hoc working group teams that seek to find ways to incorporate sustainability principles into the everyday activities of the federal government and of communities across the country. As one high-level manager pointed out in a staff meeting, “We aren’t going to be able to reduce the impacts of climate change by regulation alone.” This attitude is a cultural norm in this office, and the employees of the OP recognize both the value and the need for nonregulatory initiatives to combat the environmental challenges of the future. For example, OSC’s activities include a significant emphasis on technical assistance provision to communities to help educate, demonstrate, and integrate sustainability principles into their daily activities. These technical assistance efforts are designed to be responsive to the changing demands and needs of communities. Current major technical assistance efforts in OSC include a local foods initiative, a smart location mapping tool, technical assistance for using broadband service to promote economic revitalization, and smart growth implementation assistance. Drawing from lessons gleaned from their community-based work, OSC is finalizing the design of two new technical assistance programs including one focused on health center locations and another focused on small-scale manufacturing initiatives. All of these initiatives are nonregulatory, voluntary, and include partners external to the EPA. As an example, the Local Foods, Local Places program is offered in partnership with six other federal units across the government. Through this program, EPA staff organizes workshops where national and regional experts are brought in to assist an applicant community with a local food challenge. Ultimately, these workshops use local food and smart growth principles to foster revitalization and sustainable economic development. ^{Footnote 6}

Much like OSC, CCAS’s activities are entirely nonregulatory. The CCAS’s primary function over the last seven years has been to introduce and mainstream adaptation thinking into the EPA as a whole. Enlarging the mission of the EPA to encompass climate adaptation has been challenging: the agency’s traditional Epoch 1 regulatory responsibilities deeply shape its structure, operations, and culture. Executive Orders issued in 2009 and 2013 directed federal agencies to produce climate vulnerability assessments, and then to develop adaptation strategies and implementation plans. EPA was among the first to complete these plans: its internally accessible Adaptation Resource Center is an extensive repository of climate science information and operations guidance. The CCAS sees itself having succeeded in diffusing climate thinking widely in the agency.

Collaboration, Experimentation, and Policy Learning in the Federal Family

Both OSC and CCAS exhibit a strong commitment to collaboration and policy experimentation and are active in seeking out partnerships across the federal government as well as within the EPA itself. Learning from the successes of the very visible 2009 HUD-DOT-EPA ^{Footnote 7} Partnership for Sustainable Communities, these units have made collaboration a central part of their ongoing efforts to encourage sustainability in the United States. In addition to the internal efforts of staff, during our tenure at the EPA, a major 16-agency ^{Footnote 8} memorandum of agreement (MOA) was rolled out to help provide a framework for agencies to collaborate on place-based work. The EPA contact for other agencies interested in partnering with the agency is a staff member of OSC.

Although this MOA exists to provide some framework and contact points for cross-agency collaboration, the actual process of developing these partnerships is largely driven by individual staff members willing to reach out of their silos to other agencies or EPA units. As with anything that is voluntary and driven by individual action, partnership-building tends to be ad-hoc, fragmented, and largely based upon the willingness of individual staff members to spend the time building the partnerships. Furthermore, with this bottom-up process of collaboration, partnership-building can face significant challenges when confronting different organizational cultures, differing levels of statutory control, and uneven resource availability.

Although collaboration is a cultural norm in these offices, the reality is that the initiation of this type of work rests with individual staff members’ willingness and ability to cross internal and external bureaucratic boundaries. This bottom-up initiation has implications for human resource management in OP and across the federal government. Although short-staffed, OP has been successful in hiring highly educated people with collaborative predispositions and an ability to cross traditional subject-matter boundaries. Additionally, the presence of a significant number of ORISE fellows ^{Footnote 9} and detailees ^{Footnote 10} has provided on-going access to new ideas for OP. There is also some evidence that other agencies have similarly entrepreneurial staff interested in partnership-building as demonstrated by the periodic initiation of contact for partnership opportunities from other federal agencies. A challenge for the EPA going into the next administration will be to move beyond the bottom-up method of collaboration and facilitate a broader institutionalization of these principles into the next administration.

External Partnerships

In addition to the partnership-building efforts within the federal family, OP works hard to collaborate with an external constituency consisting of states, communities across the United States, neighboring countries, and also nonprofit groups that participate in the Smart Growth Network. ^{Footnote 11} In some cases, OP’s external engagement is an infrequent occurrence resulting from unique circumstances. Other times the relationship is long-standing with a routine structure meant to facilitate the ongoing communication and activity. For example, the Smart Growth Network holds quarterly meetings with the 40 nonfederal partners where OSC is a leader in planning and executing the meetings. At each of these partner meetings, presentations are given by content experts representing cities, nonprofits, and other organizations on a topic of interest to the group. These presentations often provide important information to the OP on what specific tools, information, and assistance communities across America would find most useful to tackle the difficult challenges of sustainability and climate change. This type of routinized collaboration provides a structure where the strategies of the EPA can be up-to-date and aligned with current needs of communities across America.

In addition to OSC’s efforts in engaging external groups, the CCAS has engaged with external constituents by providing a wealth of adaptation planning resources for use by state, local, and tribal governments. They take advice from its Local Government Advisory Committee, one of the 22 Federal Advisory Committees that EPA has organized to provide the agency with occasional external stakeholder advice. ^{Footnote 12} Furthermore, the CCAS has also broadened its collaborative activities across borders, with a recent agreement to open the federal climate adaptation community of practice to the Canadian government. Interest in climate policies in Canada languished under the conservative Stephen Harper government, but has been revived under the new government of Justin Trudeau (Davis and Shear Reference Davis and Shear2016).

Toward a Fourth Epoch in Environmental Policy?

It might be worth posing the question, suggested by our accounts above, that the Mazmanian and Kraft framework should be extended to encompass climate adaptation, climate smart growth, and climate resilience as a fourth epoch. The interdependence and complexity of the issues, the inherently intertwined global, regional, and local nature of the phenomena, and the need for more extensive collaboration, all argue layering a new fourth epoch on the earlier three. Institutionally this will require much more internal and external interaction and collaboration, more expertise, more attention to politics and policy, more attention to process: all things that Beryl Radin has written about in her earlier work on HHS (Radin Reference Radin2002).