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Planning in the Hollow State: The Performance and Drivers of Successful Hazard Mitigation Planning
Wu, Yiwen
Wu, Yiwen
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Abstract
Over the past five decades, public services, including those provided by the local governments (i.e., city and county governments), have been ‘hollowed out’ in favor of external consultants, which has had profound implications on urban and environmental planning. However, contracting out in planning has been overlooked, and we have a limited understanding of how contracting out has changed the planning performances in areas like environmental planning. Planning for hazard mitigation, led by the federal mandate of the Disaster Mitigation Act (DMA), provides an ideal testbed to examine how consultants have shaped the planning outputs and outcomes since the establishment of the DMA two decades ago. This dissertation consists of three studies that examine planning consultants’ influence on planning performances, assess consultants’ mediating role in planning grant management, and explore consultants’ practices on operationalizing social equity in hazard mitigation. The first study, which is under peer review at the time of submitting this dissertation, examines consultants’ impact on plan quality. The second study assessing consultants’ mediating impacts on acquiring federal grants for localities aims for a peer review publication, providing implications for planning practitioners working in areas like infrastructure planning, housing, transportation, and energy planning. The third study applies a qualitative approach to learn planners’ experiences, strategies, and challenges for operationalizing social equity in their daily planning work. The findings of all three studies underscore localities’ growing reliance on external expertise in environmental planning and raise important questions about the performance of planning outsourcing and the policy framework that incentivizes massive contracting out in a federalist system.
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Date
2025-01-01
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University of Kansas
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This item contains archived web content.
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Wu_ku_0099D_20306.pdf
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- Embargoed until 2176-05-31
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Keywords
Contracting Out, Environmental Planning, Hazard Mitigation, Hazard Risk Reduction, Hollow State, Planning Capacity